When I was a boy, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Halloween was a rather skimpily observed festival. On our housing estate in York, you might see a few people flitting about in home-made demonic garb, and the occasional, lonely pumpkin lantern propped on a window ledge. It was a frustrating event in that I could never seem to prise any sort of present out of it, and if Halloween coincided with something decent on television or a glut of homework, then I might not notice it at all.

Today, things are very different, and we are all braced for “trick or treat” with our various survival strategies. (When the bucket-load of bite-sized treats has been exhausted, the best thing to do, I find, is to turn off all the lights in the house and pretend to be dead.)