Trick or Treat

So Halloween has come and gone again, like the over-commercialised, Americanised excuse to dress up like a whore and eat enough sweets to give diabetes to an elephant that it is.

When I was younger, Trick or Treat used to be quite scary. You'd get teenagers in hooded tops banging on your door, saying: "give us some sweets or we'll break your house." Not so much trick or treating as demanding money with menaces.

But now I live in quite a posh area of North London, and it's very different. You see parents leading round small children dressed as Marie Antoinette, or The Credit Crunch. And most of them won’t accept sweets. You have to give them couscous.

I discovered recently that it didn't used to be trick or treat, but trick for a treat. That’s gone now. Presumably because of child prostitution laws.

Egging seems to be the method of choice for tricking these days. Yesterday morning I saw the remains of various yolk-based attacks littering the streets.

In fact, I heard that in some areas of the country shopkeepers are told not to sell eggs to children around this time of year. They become contraband, like cigarettes or alcohol. I love the idea of teenagers hanging around outside greengrocers, approaching adults saying: “buy us half dozen free range, mate? Go on…just half dozen! OK, three? We just really want an omelette, innit!”