FIREWORKS
Unless you’re that Manchester City player, Mario Balotelli, who lets fireworks off in his bathroom for a laugh, it should be illegal to light fireworks prior to November 5th. For the past two weeks there have been explosions outside my flat all evening. It sounds like I’m living in Kabul.

I don’t really get fireworks anyway. They cost too much. Do those people who light them actually realise they’re basically burning their own money? They’ll argue it’s tradition, celebration or something rubbish like that. My argument is half the neighbourhood is letting them off. You can have your own free firework display just by looking into the sky at someone else’s.

Then you get all the fuss about safety. When I was a kid, there was an advert warning against the perils of picking up old sparklers because they might still be hot. While you’re at it, be careful not to touch the oven, coffee can give you third degree burns and the hot tap in the bath gets a bit warm too. If you’re that scared about your child’s safety, don’t let them hold a thin stick of metal, spitting out flames inches away from their face in the first place!

We were also told never return to a firework once it’s been lit, even if it doesn’t go off. The fireworks we bought were rubbish and most of them didn’t work. Had we followed that rule, there would still be hundreds of old fireworks sitting in the back garden of a house in Bristol somewhere.

Finally, bonfires. If ever you had a bonfire, you had to check to make sure a hedgehog, cat or missing child wasn’t hibernating in the leaves. I grew up in the 1990s. My understanding of hedgehogs was that they were blue, collected rings and were very fast, so would probably be able to escape fire. I kicked a pile of leaves over in a park once looking for animals. An old man, who presumably had spent all afternoon raking them into a neat pile, went ballistic. I tried to explain I was trying to save Sonic, but he was having none if it.

TRICK OR TREAT
The country went absolutely crazy in August during the London riots with many people declaring that any 12-year old found guilty of looting a bag of rice should be hung, before being gutted with their entrails fed to the Queen’s corgis. Those rioters were basically chavs who had drank a bit too much Mountain Dew and went hyper. People hate chavs too – and rightly so.

Why is it then, that on the final day of October every single year, people welcome children behaving like chavs to their front doors, with the promise of sweets and chocolate? Many claim they may look cute dressed up like little vampires, zombies or Pete Burns, but those children who are given handfuls of Skittles will be back years later with a baseball bat demanding your pension book.

Everyone who has been to the seaside has seen the signs asking that visitors refrain from feeding the seagulls. This is because it encourages them to come back for more and become aggressive. The same with trick or treat. Bah humbug!