Trick or treat, sick or sweet - for Fawkes sake bring back Bonfire Night!

I BLAME it on the Americans. In fact, I blame everything on the Americans - they are big enough to take it. Even the ones who weigh less than 20 stone.

I’m talking about the over-the-top Halloween hoo-ha that has whooped its way into Britain...and all but killed off one of the nation’s most treasured occasions.

When I was a child, Guy Fawkes Night was one of the biggest days of the year. A tradition marking the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, it commemorated a failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of provincial English Catholics. The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament - something I doubt many British 10-year-olds these days know anything about.

They are more concerned with Halloween, where they are free to frighten the lives out of  old ladies by donning ­horrific masks and demanding sweets with menaces.

I wonder what you get if you ask for a ‘trick’ rather than a ‘treat’? Does one of the little demons remove his mask and turn out to be Paul Daniels?

To me, the Guy Fawkes culture of my youth was so much more embracing.

For days, even weeks before the event, we’d go from door to door with makeshift effigies of Fawkes and implore householders to give us ‘a penny for the Guy’.

Then, as darkness fell on November 5, the neighbourhood would gather for a fireworks spectacular in which Guys galore would go up in smoke on top of a massive communal bonfire.

How that delightful tradition came to be usurped by the hideous ‘trick or treat’ culture, I do not know.

I believe Halloween has Celtic origins and was originally a pagan holiday in honour of the dead. But I honestly cannot remember anyone celebrating it when I was young.

We may have started it - but as with everything else, the world has pinged it back in our faces with interest.

But I yearn for my grandchildren to enjoy the atmosphere of Guy Fawkes Night as I did half a century ago.
November 5 has a special place in my heart.

And nobody will convince me that the Halloween takeover was not a devious plot by those over-the-top, razzamatazz Americans.

Finders keepers: Can any of us say we are truly honest?

I’ve always believed that honesty is the best policy.

Indeed, statistics suggest that for most of us, it’s the ONLY policy.

But just how honest are we really? If you found a purse containing £60 cash in the street, but with no way of identifying the owner, would you hand it in to the police?

I know I would… because I did. Find £60 and take it to the cop-shop, that is...

I remember reading somewhere that something like 85 per cent of people are honest, in that they would never dream of taking other people’s property. That’s an encouraging statistic amid all the horror tales involving burglars, thieves, handbag snatchers and pickpockets.

And I believe that figure is not far off the mark.

The vast majority of us have no truck with the scum who believe that taking other people’s property is a much better option than working.

And I like to think most people would do what I did when I found that purse near a cinema in the centre of Manchester late one Friday evening.

It was a pretty little purse, probably belonging to a teenager – and inside was a wad of notes amounting to around £60. It didn’t even cross my mind to pocket the money…my only concern was for that poor young girl whose week’s wages had been in that purse.

So I took it to Bootle Street police station, where I was told that if it wasn’t claimed within a certain number of weeks, the money would be mine.

‘’And I can tell you that 80 per cent of cash we get handed in is never claimed,’’ the desk officer told me.

Predictably, I got a phone call some weeks later telling me that, in keeping with the statistics, nobody had claimed the purse and its contents. So would I come and collect it..

But the money was demonstrably NOT mine - it belonged to the person who had dropped the purse. There was no way my  conscience would allow me to have it…so I told the police to give it to one of their charities.

To this day, I don’t know where the money ended up. I also continue to wonder how much pain the loss caused to the purse’s owner…and why she did not go to the police station to see if it had been handed in.

My friends have similar tales to tell. My neighbour June, for example, recalls picking up what seemed to be a five pound note outside her doctor’s surgery in South Wales as she got into her car one day.

When she got home, she discovered it was actually a wad of fivers. She took it back to the surgery, where she discovered that a young man had lost the money – which in fact belonged to his boss.

June’s reward was the knowledge that she reunited the fivers with their rightful owner – while I never did get closure on my .not-so-little find.

So much for our honesty when it comes to the property of other people….but how many of us have never tried to cheat the taxman?

Like giving a plumber the nod when he tells you his repair work will cost £70 plus VAT but he’ll do it for £60 cash?

Let’s be honest, virtually all of us have done it. Yes, all those scrupulously honest people like myself who would not dream of pocketing other people’s property.


In the eyes of the law, wheeler-dealing with the plumber to avoid VAT is far worse than pocketing that tenner you find in the street. Yet we do it despite the fact that deliberately avoiding the payment of tax is not only dishonest, but a serious criminal offence.

Double standards? I prefer to look at it as an honest way of getting my own back on the legalised extortionists who tax me on what I earn, then tax me again when I spend my taxed earnings, and do it a third time when I die.

In other words, they celebrate my demise by completing a hat-trick of robberies and fleecing my children and grandchildren in the process.

.So what would I do if I found a purse containing £60 with a note saying it belonged to a tax inspector?
Easy. I’d use it to pay the plumber

Published in The Courier (www.thecourier.es) 28/11/2011
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They pink it's all over - but I'm not too old for joke birthday cards

IT was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and no, I’m not telling you how old I am.

But judging by the sort of birthday cards I received, my friends (the few I have left after all my moaning) clearly believe I have reached my dotage.

Apparently I am no longer a suitable target for those corny joke cards the ‘younger’ community bounce off each other.

I didnt even get a card making fun of my being old. You know, the sort that make you seem glam until you get the punchline inside.

A year older...and no sign of any joke cards

On the front, it will say something like ‘’What Do You Like To Get Up To In Bed, Sexy Lady?’ Then, when you turn inside, there’s an old dear in a flannelette nightie sitting on the loo saying ‘I Like To Get Up To Wee.’

That one’s dreadful because I made it up. But you know what I mean.

Anyway, virtually every card I received was one of those schmaltzy affairs you send to great-grandma on her 97th birthday.

I’m talking about the pink ones covered with pretty flowers and the message To a Dear Friend.

Admittedly, I automatically orientate to this type of card for my 83-year-old  stepmother - but with good reason. She gets the pink schmaltz treatment because she has no sense of humour – or sense of anything, for that matter.

Anyway, this plethora of pinko cards all but convinced me that my friends had made a pact to tell me subtly that, in their eyes, I am now officially OLD. The fact is I love funny cards…and always have done. Providing they are not too crude, that is.

I might be a boring old drone to some, but no one can say I don’t have a sense of humour. So I assume the reason no one sent me a card I could laugh at is that the entire planet now sees me as a coffin dodger.

I scoured the cards for even the slightest hint of humour and the nearest I could get to a giggle was one bearing the message ‘Especially For You…’’. Well, Who else would it be for, tonto?

That’s me off everyone’s Christmas card list. Now where did I put my Zimmer  frame?

Taff at the top - but England's rugby losers still get all the headlines

SORRY, folks, but I can’t resist it. I’ve got to have a quiet gloat at England being Frog-marched out of the Rugby World Cup – and the emergence of my beloved Wales as contenders to become world champions.

Every self-respecting Taff – male and female – is a rugby union fan. And to see our boys (and most of them are little more than boys) playing so brilliantly over in New Zealand makes me immensely proud.

Even if Wales lose to France in this weekend’s semi final, the team have done the nation proud. I mean, there are only three million of us – or one Dragon for every 17 St Georges or 21 Joan of Arcs.

As a little Principality attached to and overshadowed by England, we don’t have a lot to shout about. So you can’t blame us for making a song and dance when we show the English up. Even if it’s only at tiddlywinks.

Since everyone associates Wales with rugby, male-voice choirs and sheep, we should at least be half-decent at scrummaging and singing (I’ll pass on the sheep bit).

So it was sad that on one of the rare occasions we excel ourselves in a major sporting arena, the UK media chose to relegate the achievement to also-ran ­status.

Monday’s Daily Mail devoted the back SIX pages of a 72-page paper to England’s losers. Sports fans had to turn to Pages 66 and 67 for the first mention of Wales.
The Sun’s website the same day featured FOUR separate stories about England and nothing topical on Wales.

It was the same on TV, where most of Sunday’s news bulletins focused on England’s thumping and only mentioned the far superior Wales-Ireland contest as an afterthought.
By this weekend, the English media will of course have jumped on the bandwagon and be screaming about Sam Warburton’s brilliant BRITS flattening the Frogs.

It’s just like the Andy Murray scenario. The media suck up to the Dunblane racketeer before tournaments as ‘’OUR Andy, Britain’s best’’. This, despite the fact he is on record as saying he’d support ANY team playing England.

Then, when edgy Andy makes his customary semi-final exit from Wimbledon and other major tournaments, he reverts in Fleet Street’s eyes to the status of ‘sweaty sock’ (that’s Jock in Cockney rhyming slang).
That’s one of the reasons why most Celts have a ‘We love it when England lose’ mentality, whatever the sport.

I don’t go with that. If Wales can’t win, then ­another British team has to be the best alternative.
But I totally understand the thinking of people like Welshman’s son Gareth Evans, a Scot spending his first holiday in this region.

‘’I wasn’t even born in 1966, but I’m fed up hearing about what England did,’’ he says. ’’I hope Wales win the World Cup if only to shut the English up.’’

I somehow think that if the Scots had become World Champions in 1966, Bannockburn would be a distant second to the Mighty Macs for the next 10,000 years.
I was lucky enough to have personal friends among the great Welsh rugby team of the ’70s (which is still revered as one of the finest the game has known).

Sadly, those guys never won the World Cup…primarily because it didn’t exist until 1987.
That Golden Era team was brilliant because virtually a whole team of world-class players all arrived on the scene at the same time.

A quarter of a century later, history seems to be  repeating itself. And Wales skipper Sam Warburton and his fearless youngsters are ready, willing and able to paint the Rugby World Cup red.

PESSIMISM NOTE: Please be gentle on me if France win!