Trick or Treat

Trick or treat? Not much of an option is it? When I was a kid there was no such thing. We used to make turnip lanterns for Halloween and that was about it.

Pumpkins were not something you ever saw on Dewsbury market so we had to settle for what we called turnips but that were actually swedes. I remember my cub scout pack had a turnip lantern competition. My mum didn't believe in wasting money so she got me what must have been the smallest turnip on the market, about the size of a grapefruit.

I scooped it out, made the face and she gave me a night light - not a full blooded candle, note - so that when Arkayla (the cub leader)turned off the lights there was a long row of glowing goulish, grinning faces with my tiny creation at the end, struggling to raise so much as a flicker. It wouldn't have frightened a mouse. Still I was pleased with it.

The nearest thing we had to Trick or Treat, I suppose, was Mischief Night on November Fourth. That was pure tricks. The nearest you came to a treat was a thick ear from anyone who caught you. The idea that we would have dared knock on doors demanding sweets with menaces was proposterous. We would have been skinned alive in my neighbourhood.

Now we have this US import that gained in popularity I recall after the success of Stephen Spielberg's ET. This BBC writer likens it to Japanese knotweed.

I have no issue with the little tots who dress up and come door to door with their mothers. It's when you get teenagers romping around that really annoys me. There's a group of them who sometimes come in to our neighbourhood. A few weeks ago I was asked by a frightened neighbour to go sort them out.

They weren't doing much harm apart from hanging about - somewhat in the manner of the hoodies in that film Hot Fuzz if you happen to have seen it. If you haven't seen it, I should point out that hoodies are regarded as a menace by the local community whose members, it turns out, are a far uglier bunch of characters.

I noticed a plastic bottle with a hole in it at the feet of one of them and picked it up. "Oi that's my bong," he said, snatching it from me. A bong is a device for smoking dope that works in the same way as a Turkish bubble pipe. Both he and I knew the real value of this item: evidence.

I was glad to have been with another neighbour during this confrontation. We told them to clear off. OK, they are no more than a nuisance but you can see how things might escalate, particularly if they turn up on a night like tonight. I have no wish to be fingered as the neighbourhood bouncer, either by hoodies or by my timid neighbours.

You can keep Trick or Treat. It's a pale shadow of Bonfire Night as I used to know it, when you could choose your own fireworks singly, when there were pie and peas and soups and where there was a bonfire you had built yourself after collecting all the wood in your half-term break. We called it "chumping" round our way but there were many local variations for the word.

I suggested a bonfire to my neighbours - we have plenty of communal land - but they were worried about personal injury claims and liability insurance. It's pathetic. An element of risk and danger is part and parcel of what it is to be human. We're losing the art of living.