Halloween.

 Halloween.

So here we are right at the end of October and that can only mean one thing. In case you hadn't noticed today is Halloween and tonight most of us will be celebrating that charming, religious ritual that always seems to come around at this time of the year. You know everything there is to know about Halloween. It's been around for long enough. It normally precedes the equally as agreeable Guy Fawkes Night or Firework night when families and children across the land will gather around and the kids will be let loose on a million front doors of homes across the country. 

Door bells will be rung almost ad infinitum until an expectant public twitch their curtains, resign themselves to another visit from both toddlers and young schoolchildren and just giggle quite discreetly. This has now become the standard reaction to youngsters who simply want to Trick or Treat and then politely ask for a couple of pennies in the new currency rather than the tanners and sixpences of old. 

For most of us Halloween has always been regarded as something of a quirky addition to the calendar, that night of the year when the kids have a good time and the loving parents button up their thick coats, telling them implicitly not to bother the elderly folk for money or anybody for that matter. Then the said children run up the roads of a multitude of neighbourhoods, shout out Trick or Treat as they push the gates of the house back and then gleefully look at their bounty for the evening. 

We all know that Halloween is all about orange pumpkins, ghosts, mysterious things that go bump in the night and pumpkins with hollowed out gargoyle like faces. It's about those cackling witches that fly over whole communities roofs with familiar broomsticks. For centuries now Halloween has become enshrined in the cultural history of our lives, a good excuse for kids to frighten the lives out of adults in a very jokey, humorous fashion. 

Last year Halloween was postponed since Covid 19 had spoilt everybody's party. There was no tricking or treating, nor pumpkin soup or sinister looking witches dressed up in rags. Instead we drank several urns of tea and coffee, gobbled down a biscuit or two and pretended that Halloween was alive and well in our hearts. But now we have permission to go out into the darkness of night and try to imagine what it was like in medieval times when the whole festival probably meant something entirely different. 

But now Halloween joins forces with a news agenda equally as mystical and unfathomable. In Scotland the eminent ministers and politicians of the world are trying to make sense of a severely damaged environment. Insulate Britain, a vocally active protest group, are doing a wonderful impersonation of stubborn defiance, angry militancy and red blooded fury. They're blocking motorways, shouting the odds and generally behaving like stroppy nursery schoolchildren who won't stop moaning. 

Back in London the protestors, the eco warriors and the energy-cum- electricity campaigners and crusaders are on the warpath. They sit in front of whole stretches of traffic lights, crossing their legs, folding their arms and making their feelings abundantly clear. In front of them large contingents of police officers stand over them, quietly reprimanding them but achieving nothing into the bargain. They leave them warnings, kindly asking them to move on, threatening them with arrests and a draughty police cell. Occasionally they seem to get a constructive response but then it all fizzles out.

They reluctantly shuffle into the back of a van, cuffs stifling their wrists but nonetheless aware that they're just making confounded fools of themselves. They profess to care passionately about their children's future but fail to realise that a nation of motorists going nowhere are just cluttering up the roads of Britain. So we sigh with exasperation and curse Insulate Britain because they're just sanctimonious do- gooders who just want their families to grow up in a clean, healthy country where the roses can be smelt in summer and there are no ghastly chimneys coughing up all manner of poison and smoke. 

And so it is that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will leave his holiday painting well alone and get down to some serious business. Johnson's spokesman of course is the admirable Sir David Attenborough who tells us with a huge intellectual mind that always seems to know everything there is to know that the world is going to hell and a handcart if we don't clean up the planet now rather than later. Attenborough has been among most gorillas in jungles to know that we have to act now because if we don't, the human race may be for the compost heap. Humans though just want to live their everyday lives and be together without worrying about lethal chemicals in the air. 

Still it's Halloween so you can be sure that Johnson may be obliged to carry out a spot of trickery himself. Covid 19 has led him through so many confusing mazes that the least Britain can do is to cut him some slack and give him credit where it's due. Johnson's ghosts from the past may still be stalking him at times and the skeletons in the cupboard have been rattling away for some time. 

However, Halloween is about to get all spooky, weird and wonderful. The world may be wrestling with any number of problems at the moment but for tonight we can allow our children to be children because that should never be stopped. Anybody for pumpkin soup or one of those Shakespearean witches from days of yore when Banquo was a lad in shorts and Macbeth was and will remain a literary legend.