It may be a pagan festival but thank God for Halloween and all its joys: the child’s delight at being dressed up and out after dark, our thrill at pretending to be frightened, the faint sense that for one night, the ordinary world has slipped its moorings.

On Halloween, the country briefly remembers how to laugh at fear, instead of scrolling through it. This crown jewel of autumn strikes me as one of those events that manages to be both utterly absurd and, in its way, rather necessary. Like the Eurovision song contest, or marriage.

Everyone from kids in Poundland skeleton suits to adults with too much eyeliner join this grand communal theatre of the macabre. It’s democracy with fake blood and carnivalesque chaos powered by Haribo. Americans do Halloween like Broadway; we do it like an am

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