Southern trains are just as scary as Halloween

The pavements are littered with dropped sweets from trick or treating, ghostly gourds are rotting on front doorsteps and children are still high on sugar.

 I’m still recovering from my trip to Tulley’s Farm Screamfest. It was all pretty terrifying but I think The Colony haunt was the worst (or should that be best?). 

I think it was the man in a pig mask, running straight at me, welding a chainsaw, after 10 minutes of being chased by hideously realistic zombies, then stumbling through an assault course in the pitch dark that did it.

I screamed so much I could not talk the next day.

It was almost as scary as the fact that 15 million pumpkins got thrown in the bin unused, enough for a bowl of soup for everyone in Britain.

I raise my hand in shame. I did not cook our pumpkin’s flesh. I used it to make it look as though the pumpkin was vomiting.

I know, I know. I am the sick one. I shall never buy a pumpkin unless I plan to eat it again.

And now the shelves are being stacked with wrapping paper, decorations for the tree and sickly Christmas cookie scented candles.

My Facebook feed is full of posts from people asking “Can I put my tree up now?”. It reminds me of that Tommy Cooper joke: A man rings up his local council and says “I’d like a skip outside my house please” and the man from the local council says “well I’m not stopping you, you can skip wherever you like mate”.

If people want to put up their Christmas trees now, it’s up to them. I’m all for doing whatever I like in my own home, as many of my neighbours will know, because I’ve still not put up any curtains.

 It’s just a shame that my house is on the route to school. Mums look in my window as they walk past, with their shiny hair and shiny children skipping to school and see me in my off-white pants and non-matching bra, hollering at my kids who are in their jim-jams, wrestling with one another over a colour changing spoon from out of the cereal packet.

It does not make me popular.

I tend to be the mum alone at the back of the playground at school pick-up, holding a huge bag of dog poo. Even though I ask the dog if he needs to “get busy” 20 times on the walk to school, he always waits until we are right outside the gate before he starts turning round in circles (and us dog owners all know what that means).

I suppose it’s still preferable to being stuck on an overcrowded train platform, trying to get back home from London to Brighton.

A journey which should take one hour, is presently taking more than four. 

Bradley Rees, a 42-year-old IT worker from Worthing, was one of the unfortunate commuters “There wasn’t sufficient space on the platform for the number of people there were. How no one was injured I don’t know – the crowding on the platform was beyond dangerous.” Silly really, me paying all that money to feel claustrophobic and scared at Tulley’s Farm. I could have just gone on a Southern Fail train.

It doesn’t seem to be any safer on Brighton’s roads.

Thursday’s news stories included a woman dying in a head-on car crash in Ditchling Road and a 23-year-old homeless man dying when he fell in the path of a Tesco lorry. As I write this the A27 is closed due to a crash involving two cars.

I wonder how many of these accidents were caused by people looking at their mobile phones while driving.

I say this after watching a video made by Thames Valley Police which has gone viral. For those who have not seen it (you should), it shows footage of Tomasz Kroker’s lorry ploughing into a queue of cars on the A34 while he was changing the music on his phone.

 The crash killed mother Tracy Houghton, her sons Ethan, 13, and Josh, 11, and her partner’s daughter Aimee Goldsmith, 11, after their Vauxhall Corsa was forced underneath a lorry in front and crushed to a third of its size.

Kroker has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Before we judge him too harshly, how many of us have done the same? My phone now stays in my handbag while I am behind the wheel.

I’ve dug some old CDs out to listen to instead.  My children may drive me mad but the thought of life without them or robbing another mother of life with her children is enough to put me off checking my phone when driving for ever.