Please get the evening done quickly

We amuse ourselves in our anti-social, marginalised, home-educating hovel in the dark hours of All Hallows Eve - this glorious multi-million dollar festival - by doing the opposite of the rest of you in merry consumer England. That is, shunning the get-up in a bedsheet, avoiding all trick-or-treating, not answering the door, hiding in the kitchen with a couple of carved out melons, and spurning all Haribo, symbol of the festival and the devil's work. Yes, I know, Agent orange, chemical biohazard, and cow hoof has to go somewhere. But it doesn't mean we have to go face down on it in a plastic bucket.

And of course you will have spotted the concessions to the wicked joy that is Hallowe'en thanks to my melons.

I would really, really, really like to say I made Squirrel and Tiger carve out Honeydew melons in my miserly spirit of teaching not-Hallowe'en, but I did not. Tesco ran out of pumpkins. Anyway, melons work just as well, if not better. We can eat the insides of a melon without being guiltily pressed into pumpkin soup, which means we also avoid messing about in the dark with a saucepan and a hand-held blender, and no mass clear-up of pumpkin guts from the kitchen walls when I get the angle of the blender wrong.

Now hope all the Saints rise again when you look upon something truly horrible.

It is a wooden cat. Dig brought it home from Mexico a few years ago when pressing urgencies drove him to take a small holiday looking at temples. It scares me witless. I have nightmares it will come alive and chew my living corpse. Yes, I know, also irrational, given that it has never yet shown signs of animation and a mouse has nibbled one of its ears, but still, look at the dreadful growl on that grim mouth. The cat is evil, I tell you, evil.

If I do not rise tomorrow, then know that no saint protected me, Hallowe'en is all true, the cat got me in the night, and we should have eaten the Haribo.