This year's pumpkin picking turned into a real bloodbath

It was my favourite day of the year at the weekend - pumpkin picking - and if you think my words are laced with heavy sarcasm, you'd be absolutely correct.

- Steve Canavan

Halloween without children is great. You don't really know it's happening and you sit inside and eat your tea and settle down to watch something on Netflix and it's just another normal peaceful night. Sure you might occasionally glance out of the window and see large groups of youths wandering around dressed as vampires or zombies looking as if they might be about to smash up a bus shelter or mug an elderly pensioner but other than that all is well with the world.

If you have young children, however, it's hell.

Halloween isn't just one day any more, you see, it's the entire month and more. Since the end of September - and I blame America for this - supermarket shelves have been stocked with Halloween items which means that, as a parent, you can't so much as set foot in a shop without one of your kids begging for a Frankenstein mask or some fake spider in a cobweb.

'But dad, it's only £11.99,' they'll whine and you'll reply, 'look, I'm not paying 12 quid for a plastic spider and some tatty string that looks vaguely like a web'... and that conversation is repeated for the next 30-odd days until the week before Halloween you finally break and spend an eye-watering amount of cash on several items that they'll be over the moon with excitement about and then bored of within three minutes of setting them up in the lounge.

'But dad the spider doesn't even move,' my son will say.

"I know," I'll reply, "it's why I didn't want you to get it."