Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Well-Behaved Orphans at Halloween

Lord Bonkers has sometimes written about Bonfire Night at the hall, but until now I did not realise that Halloween was celebrated there too.

Wednesday

Today is Halloween, when ghosts and demons walk abroad and the streets of Oakham are thronged with the sheeted figures of defeated candidates from long-forgotten by-elections. The Revd Hughes, very wisely, takes the day off and bars the shutters at the Vicarage.

The Well-Behaved Orphans, being little horrors themselves, always demand a scary bedtime story from me on this night. I decide to call their bluff this year by reading them the most frightening thing I know: the 2017 general election results in constituencies that the Liberal Democrats won as recently as 2010.

How they squeal with frightened glee when I give the figures for Truro & Falmouth and Redcar! I am halfway through Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey when Matron hurriedly announces that it is my bedtime and sends me back to the Hall. I hope I don’t have nightmares.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.