There are certain lies you tell yourself before a family day out. You'll be home by lunch. The children will enjoy the free activity more than the one that costs £4.50. And a wand made from a stick and some wool will, somehow, survive the journey home intact.
Highworth Town Council has announced a full day of Halloween events for Saturday 31 October, starting with a themed market running from 8am to 2pm in the town centre. On offer across the day are a best carved pumpkin competition, a family trail, wand making, autumn collage activities and a programme of ghost tours uncovering the town's eerie local history. It is, by small town standards, a lot of events for one Saturday, which is either ambitious or a sign nobody has looked at a calendar since August.
In theory, this sounds brilliant. A pumpkin contest sounds gentle and low stakes, the sort of thing you turn up to with a vegetable and a vague sense of goodwill. In reality, I have stood next to a man carving a pumpkin into a scale model of Highworth church with what I can only describe as surgical tools, while my own effort looked like it had lost a fight. There is no event in this country more quietly competitive than a village pumpkin contest, and nobody warns you until you're already holding a disappointing gourd.
Wand making presents its own problems. Give a six year old a stick, some wool and forty minutes, and you will not get a wand. You will get a weapon, a splinter, and a tearful negotiation about whose wand is more powerful than whose, conducted at volume in front of the autumn collage table. The collage table, for the record, is where the calm children end up, quietly gluing leaves while chaos unfolds six feet away over magical hierarchy.
Then there are the ghost tours, which promise to uncover Highworth's eerie past, a past which, based on most market towns, mainly involves a coaching inn, a disputed boundary wall and someone who definitely saw something once by the church in 1987. Nobody actually wants to be frightened. They want a nice walk, a spooky anecdote, and to be back in time for the pumpkin judging.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she remembered when a pumpkin was simply something you avoided buying because nobody in 1974 knew what to do with it. "Wand making," she said, shaking her head slightly. "In my day a stick was a stick. You didn't need a competition for imagination, you just had some."
By 2pm, the market will have packed up, the family trail will have been abandoned halfway round by at least one exhausted five year old, and somewhere in Highworth a wand will already be broken. Would I take mine again? Probably. Would I enter the pumpkin contest? Absolutely not, not after last year.
The pumpkin, when last seen, declined to comment, mainly because it had been carved into something resembling a disappointed face, which, by that point in the afternoon, felt about right.