Halloween Made Scarily Simple

"So you are just going as a ghost?" I was about nine and standing in the bathroom with my mother as she reached into the depths of the linen cupboard, perched high on a stepladder. I had a reputation for doing things very elaborately. Everything was researched, rehearsed and eventually executed with the maximum of attention to detail and the minimum regard for my parent’s belongings. When I wanted to find out how the TV worked; I took it apart. My mother would sigh as she dialled the TV repairman but she seemed largely resolved to her fate.

“Yes” I said taking a perfectly ok sheet from my mother ‘but I will need to cut some holes in it”.

I was indeed going to the church youth club fancy dress competition as a ghost, but not your common or graveyard ghost! I was going as Jack O’Lantern, the fabled Irish ghoul.

The whole outfit pivoted on me being able to create a pumpkin head with exactly the same red glowering eyes as the light cast by sister’s bike’s rear lamp. Having experimented with transistors and resistors, I concluded that my sister had to sacrifice her safety. The light was removed and rewired into the base of my mother’s orange washing up bowl out of which I had cut two eyeholes.

On all Hallow Eves my sister and I turned up early at St John’s Church Yard. Mounted on a footstool by the entrance to the church garden, the inverted bowl, now moulded with papier-mâché, on my head and shrouded in a now brown sheet, I cut a terrifying 7-foot silhouette. The effect was rendered even more startling by the red eyes and the unintentional aural backlight cast by my sister’s headlamp. I had bound her head in crêpe bandages but then got bored so she pedalled furiously, a mummy from the neck up, in her anorak behind me, her bike mounted on blocks.

Needless to say I won, which was really the point, although the church may have lost a few parishioners that night.

These days I do things much more simply.

A wreath of dried leaves on your door is a really welcoming way to greet your guests. I have just discovered a very quick way to dry your own foliage. Simply take a leaf, place it on a sheet of kitchen towel and microwave it for a couple of seconds at a time on a very low setting. You will have to experiment as some will scorch. Spray them with acrylic vanish and wire them into a floristry oasis wreath cast. The wreath will look great up until Christmas when you could ‘season’ it with a red bow or frosted glitter.

For a kiddie wreath; thread plastic baubles onto several strands of twisted picture wire and fashion into a circle around the kitchen bin and Boris is your uncle!

Pumpkin carving is my Halloween nightmare so I devised a way to avoid endless scooping and carving. Leave the pumpkin intact and simply paint on the features using glow-in-the-dark-paint, £3.65, from the Art Stationers, 31 Dulwich Village.

Another fiendishly timesaving trick is to hollow out the pumpkin, cut out the eyeholes and a round hole in the middle through which you can poke a carrot. There is no need to bother with cutting a mouth, when you have made such a monstrous nose!

For snacks we serve toasted pumpkin seeds and roasted garlic. Roast whole bulbs in the oven in foil, for a delicious purée you can spread on toast with Very Bloody Marys, a Roullier White Haunted House Specialty, follow the usual recipe but add lots of fresh horseradish and a shot of sherry!