Zombies walk in Kingsford - & elsewhere

From time to time I remark that my daughters keep me in touch with the broader (and younger) world.

A week back, I drove youngest into Sydney city for the zombie walk. For some obscure reason she didn't want to go in by bus. The photo may suggest whyI

I had never heard of the zombie walk, but it is an excuse to get made up and raise money for charity.

In Sydney, the zombies gathered in Hyde Park and then walked to the park near Central Station. The Brisbane event is bigger and was described in some detail by fellow blogger Chris. 

I do wonder about the attraction of the living dead, not to mention vampires and were wolves. It seems to me that as the world becomes more known, as controls increase, as the unknown diminishes, the desire for difference becomes more pronounced.

I do know that horror was popular when I was a kid, as were superheros.  Many of the comics now being republished  were published then. Count Dracula stalked the hills, while Hammer Films had entered their horror phase. And yet, it wasn't quite the same.

Thinking about it, I am just old enough to have been born into a world when it was still possible to think that some lost world or tribe might be discovered. This was also a world where children actually expected humans to have settled Mars within their lifetime, where science fiction had not yet been overrun by fantasy.

As the unknown world has shrunk, so the human imagination has moved to the creation of new worlds disconnected from normal reality in a way that makes them incapable of disproof. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines is still in print because it is a good yarn, but nobody believes in a world of Google maps and GPS that the locale might actually exist.

The term sword and sorcery was apparently coined in 1961. Since then, it has grown into a total fantasy genre. When linked to the human world as we know it, it is either set in the past (King Arthur is an example) or exists in parallel within our world such as the Twilight series.

In all this, the desire of the young to dress up, to be different, remains strong. Imagination takes new forms.

On Friday night, youngest had a party at our place. We went out for dinner and then went to bed when we came back to avoid interfering, although the noise kept us awake for a while. This house is not as well designed for parties as our previous ones!

Clare's guests came in various forms of fancy dress, some quite complex linked to various characters and genres.

Clare's friendship group is a little a-typical. Not everyone goes round dressed like a zombie or some other character! Still, it's interesting.

As I stumbled out in the early morning, the back room was full of sleeping bodies. I left them to sleep and, musing on the world, sat down at the computer to write.