We are dressed to kill this Halloween

WHAT are you dressing up as for Halloween? Our extended household is using it as an opportunity for catharsis, a high colonic for the head, for flushing out all the hideousness that’s been flowing in front of our weary eyes so far this year (not that this year is near over, but we’ve had ten months of crap), writes Suzanne Harrington.

Dressing up as your worst nightmare is cheaper than therapy, providing you do it with like-minded people, thus avoiding the accidental triggering of PTSD in the faint-hearted or well-mannered. Like when a friend dressed up as Jimmy Savile, at the height of the Jimmy Savile horror story revelations, and was unable to escort his kids trick or treating, in case someone murdered him; see, also, Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi.

This year, to avoid such misunderstandings, my bad-taste friends and I (and our more resilient children, the ones unlikely to need too much trauma counselling in years to come) are repairing to a haunted, 13th century farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. A place where things really do go bump in the night. Surrounded by deep forest. Bwah ha ha haaaaaaa.