Isn’t this a lovely time of year? We may have lost an hour of daylight and there’s a definite chill in the air but how beautiful the countryside looks with the leaves of Autumn showing their colours of copper, bronze, auburn and gold. There’s a mist in the morning and frost on the ground and soon it will be time for bonfires, fireworks, parkin and the celebration of Guy Fawkes. Guy who?
There’s a celebration in the air, that’s for sure but it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Guido Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot comrades, those brave, reckless young men who decided that they’d had enough and planned to burn down the Houses of Parliament back in 1605 – now there’s an idea! (memo to Thought Police – it’s a joke!). No, if you look around you, in the supermarkets, shops, hairdressers, cafes and pubs all you can see are large orange pumpkins, witches on broomsticks, skeletons in black capes and cobwebs hanging from the walls and ceilings. All that seems to matter is the great American festival of Halloween.

Halloween, another celebration of consumerism, excess and bad taste far removed from the pagan festival of All Hallows Eve established, incidentally, about two thousand years before America even existed as a nation! Still, it doesn’t matter, we’re all Americans now, totally enraptured and in love with everything they put on our television and cinema screens. Penny for the Guy? You must be joking!