AS YOU may have noticed, today is All Hallow’s Eve, or as we like to call it, Halloween.

It is the time of the year when it is socially acceptable to dress up in a disguise, and terrorise someone if they refuse to give you, a total stranger, some sweets.

Over the years I have come to appreciate that such a practice is quite odd, but as a kid, I was all for it.

The idea of ‘stranger danger’ was unknown at the time, plus, as a youngster, what is not to like about free sweets?

My idea of dressing up for the occasion was different too. Usually a bin liner and some fake blood was all I’d run to, but my mam banned me from donning the bin liner one year because someone’s makeshift cape had caught fire from their pumpkin lantern and the whole lot went up. There’s always someone who has to spoil things.

Once again, health and safety sticking its oar in where nobody wanted it.

Anyway, I say pumpkin. Ask anyone on my street to show you their pumpkin, and nine times out of ten they would have proudly produced a swede. For me, the smell of Halloween was burnt swede. Who has a pumpkin anyway? The Americans, that’s who.

And now our shops are full of them. All of them will end up as landfill or compost in a few weeks’ time. The humble swede was perfect for making a lantern. Whatever was left over could then be chucked in for the Sunday roast later in the week.

As the years went by, my costumes became less adventurous. Affected by the bin liner ban, I had little to work with. My pocket money could not stretch to an actual vampire’s cape, so I had to improvise by, on one occasion, peeling the leather from a large diary and fashioning a makeshift cape. It looked ridiculous.

In the end, it used to end up being me and my brother, knocking on strangers’ doors, in our normal clothes, asking for sweets. Surprisingly it was not a popular tactic. “Did you forget your costume?” My stock reply was that I was a werewolf, pre-transition.

As I grew beyond adolescence into young adulthood, the concept of Halloween fancy dress became funny again. It was almost ironic to turn up in the worst costume imaginable. A friend of mine arrived at a party with a load of blank disks and CDs attached to his jacket and claimed he was a pirate.

I decided to dress up as a policeman once, spending a pound on a kid’s accessory set which included a hat, plastic handcuffs and a tie. It worked a treat, but as I was on the bus home, the cheap social club alcohol which I had imbibed came back to haunt me, nature took its course and all I had to hand was my police helmet.

Unfortunately for me – and the rest of the passengers on the bus – the helmet was not entirely water-tight, so I beat a hasty retreat off the bus with my £1 police hat leaking all over the place.

I’m more mature nowadays, so I don’t go trick or treating, nor do I accept callers on Halloween night. We close the curtains and pretend to be out when the kids knock. We were caught a couple of years ago when a lone kid surprised us with an early door knock, we hit the lights and I hit the floor. Realising I hadn’t locked the door – and to prevent any mischief occurring – I shuffled on my belly like a commando, across the sitting room floor, in a bid to secure the house.

“I can see you, mate,” said the kid, now standing at my sitting room window as he watched a 30-year old man shuffling on his belly to avoid giving 20p worth of sweets to a child.