‘The sport of kings should be open to everyone,’ said the club’s president, Jonathan Stares-Hune. ‘From my understanding, while poor people may not always have horses, they do sometimes have as many as two friends who could dress up as a horse and be ridden around a field. Obviously we wouldn’t want their relatives coming to watch them – it would lower the tone – but they could probably watch the highlights on Sky. All council houses come with satellite dishes, don’t they?’

The club believes that with pantomime season over it should be relatively straightforward for would-be players to get their hands on a horse costume, suddenly making the sport of polo accessible to the man in the street. However, at a trial last week a team of four players from a local council estate were soundly beaten as they struggled to come to terms with the game and their low-spec steeds.

‘I quite enjoyed it, but there were definitely some problems,’ said Gary, whose Sunday League ban for attempting to strangle an opponent has given him time to try new hobbies. ‘Having the front and back halves of a pantomime horse attempt to walk in opposite directions might be amusing on stage, but when you’re sat on top of it and there’s a bloke galloping towards you on a horse and swinging a mallet it suddenly doesn’t seem so funny. Plus every time the ball went past me and Baz and Dave tried to turn themselves round, some posh twat would shout ‘It’s behind you!”

Unfortunately the game ended in tragedy when a fat lad from Coal Lane tripped and tore a hole in his horse costume just below the knee, and had to be destroyed by a vet.

Vertically Challenged Giant (hat-tip to waylandsmithy)

‘The pressure to concoct a realistic costume that is also witty and clever in its interpretation is immense’ stated the report, and quoted one couple who had recently attended a Star Wars themed party. ‘It was terrible’ they moaned. ‘There was a full length Wookie costume, a brightly burnished C3P0 and some guy done up like Darth Maul, spikes and all. And then there was us: ‘Han Solo’ in a work shirt, trousers and a black leather Quo waistcoat and a brown ‘Jedi’ dressing gown!’

To combat this problem, the Equality and Human Rights Commission will be distributing fancy dress information packs to assist budding but inept costume creators. The precise contents of this pack will be unveiled next month at the EHRC’s annual summer ball – theme: the Baroque Court of The Sun King, Louis XIV.

‘When Jamie arrived at school, I assumed the large cardboard box that had once contained a washing machine was being used to carry an elaborate costume’, explained Winnie Forbes, Jamie’s teacher, ‘but he then pointed to the large spooky face drawn in biro on the machine door and told me the box WAS the costume and he’d come as a haunted washer-dryer’.

The staff room fiercely debated the unusual fancy-dress with the ‘couldn’t be arsed’ camp noting that the machine featured on the packaging was a top of the range Miele, which would have set the parents back quite a bit, while the poverty group highlighted the fact that boxes from a nearby Curry’s are often dumped at the back of the local Lidl for people to use that can’t afford recyclable carrier bags, and this could have been the source of the outfit.

However the lazy camp countered by insisting that there’s plenty of poor kids that have better costumes, with their leading spokesman, Deputy Head Jane Thomas noting that the parents could have shoplifted a Transformers outfit like many other of the school’s disadvantaged parents had obviously done, and that the merely poor ‘would at least have bothered to cut out eyeholes so the wee lad could see where he was going’.

To finally settle the argument Jamie’s teacher, Miss Forbes, called his parents under the pretext of needing permission for him to bob for apples. The findings of the call left both sides claiming victory, however. According to a ‘mortified’ Mrs Whittam, Jamie’s Romanian nanny Jana had been specifically told to pick up an official Harry Potter wizard’s outfit, to be paid for out of the ‘ample’ £40 weekly allowance she was paid on top of her free accommodation. Mrs Whittam then promised to speak to Jana about appropriate childcare at their monthly meeting, before arranging to have Jamie collected from the teacher’s car park, and promising a donation to the school’s computers fund in recognition of their discretion in the matter.

Elderly residents of Manchester are reporting that they found it much easier to walk the streets yesterday evening, since the trick-or-treaters were in fact far less frightening than the same youngsters in their normal clothes.

‘It was such a relief’ reported Edna Jeffries, 76, of Whitefield. ‘I can cope with skeleton masks, devil outfits and ghost costumes. It’s the rest of the year when they lurk around with their hoods up that terrifies me.’ Other pensioners were reported to be delighted that just a handful of stale chocolate buttons seemed enough to make the muggers disperse. ‘Normally they take my purse and my keys, and then come back to the house to get the television and the bottle of sherry.’

Local residents were reportedly using this brief period of calm to stock up on supplies and shopping so as to avoid having to venture outside in the run-up to Bonfire Night, when the youngsters will be armed with projectile explosives.

In other parts of the country, police were called out to a cul de sac in Norwich where youngsters had been left confused and disorientated when a householder responded to their rhetorical question ‘Trick or Treat’ with the cryptic reply ‘Trick!’ Eleven year old Darren Hayes later told reporters: ‘I didn’t know what to say – in all my four years of trick or treating I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally people just hand over the goodies without a fuss.’ His friend, 10, agreed, adding: ‘this came completely out of left-field – we were quite simply lost for words.’

Meanwhile, parents groups took the opportunity of Halloween to reiterate their assurance to children that there were no such thing as ghosts or monsters, and that their children should not take sweets from strangers. They then dressed them up as ghosts and monsters and sent them out to knock on strangers’ doors to ask for sweets. ‘You think that’s weird’ said one Thames Valley policeman. ‘We’ve had a report come in of a Bracknell family, actually eating the flesh of a pumpkin!’

andrewtaylor, Peter74940, Quaz and The Big Yin

The decision of the Lord Chief Justice to abandon traditional judge’s wigs dating back 300 years is facing opposition from within the legal profession, it has been revealed. ‘First of all, we are very upset that the Lord Chief Justice told everyone it was a wig,’ said one judge. ‘If we felt self-conscious about losing our hair and chose to go into a profession in which wigs came with the job, we don’t necessarily want the boss letting everyone in on the trade secret!’

But many other lawyers are sad about the proposed break with the past and feel that the reforms are an opportunity to remember periods other than the 1700s, and so have taken to wearing headgear from other periods of England’s colourful history.

‘I sent a burglar to prison this morning wearing a horned Viking helmet’ said Judge Charles Farquahson ‘It felt really great, like I was Kirk Douglas or something. Yesterday, I presided over a complex fraud case with my hair spiked up and dyed red in the manner of the punk rock craze of the mid-1970s.’

Other judges have been appearing in court wearing Puritan hats from the late Tudor period or the cumbersome metal helmet complete with visor from a medieval suit of armour. At the Old Bailey yesterday, the courtroom all rose for the judge, only to see him enter wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap on the wrong way round.

However the Lord Chancellor has ruled against traditional horsehair wigs being replaced by the modern toupees associated with the likes of Terry Wogan or Paul Daniels. ‘No that’s getting too ridiculous’ he said ‘We don’t want the judges being laughed out of court.’

There was a disappointment in Guildford, Surrey last night when a much anticipated Halloween fancy dress party failed miserably to be either scary or amusing. Party-goer Steve Wellington had spent the week before carefully pre-paring his ‘serial killer’ costume and looking forward to what he hoped would be a spooky night of drunken entertainment. ‘I had this image in my mind of everyone in outlandish, creative costumes but most people just turned up in their normal clothes with like, a pirate hat or something which they took off anyway.’

Wellington; one of three hockey-masked attendees was also disappointed to discover a dearth of ‘sexy costumes’ such as slinky vampires or hot witches in fishnet stockings. ‘One woman came in a nurse’s costume, but she was actually a paediatric nurse who had just finished her shift.’

Mark Spelling who came as ‘someone from the 80s’ bemoaned a combination of poor music and a lack of new people as the main contributing factor for the boredom. ‘No one was in charge of the music. Once we got to the end of a CD there was a period of silence while whoever was sitting next to the stereo chose what to put on next. Apparently the host had done a special Halloween-themed play list with songs like ‘Thriller’ and ‘Monster Mash’, but it finished before everyone arrived. Without loud music I was forced to talk to the other guests, most of whom I had seen at work that same day and didn’t really have anything to say to.’

Host Mandy Jones was unsure of the problem; ‘I don’t understand. I thought if everyone was in funny costumes we would have much more fun. All the food had a horror theme, like red jelly with gummy snakes in it. I had fake cobwebs everywhere and a cardboard skeleton on the front door. How could you fail to have a blast? Maybe next time I just won’t build it up in my mind beforehand. Anyway this year’s New Years Party is going to be awesome!’

Phil Smith