Ten easy steps to demon-repelling success.
1. Stop in at the greengrocer's on your way home from work. Look about you in awe and wonder at this curious shop where people pick up fruit and vegetables like they actually know what they are and what's more, plan to eat them. Feel comforted by the thought of the food colouring and artificial preservatives in the special Halloween snacks you bought from Sainsbury's during your lunch hour to sustain you through the arduous carving process.
2. Head blindly towards the first patch of orange you see. Realise it's carrots. Consider the merits of pointing out to the shop owner the considerable advantages in displaying vegetables by order of size, or at least being accommodating enough to indicate approximate location of pumpkins by giant plastic bat display like local supermarket. After some confusion with a pyramid of melons find pumpkins and select brightest and most buxomly of all pumpkins in the shop and carry it to the cash till with pride at the thought of the fabulous lantern that must inevitably result from such a magnificent squash.
3. Pride evaporates ten seconds out of the shop when handle of carrier bag breaks and pumpkin bounces down the street and perilously close to the wheels of the number 73 bus. Carry pumpkin rest of the way home on shoulder, muttering.
4. Get home. Unpack bright orange Halloween cupcakes and spooky green crisps made from 'pea flour'. Pea flour? Get distracted by the thought of dark satanic pea mills, grinding away day and night and choking the residents of Lancashire (or somewhere else suitably northern) in thick clouds of bright green pea dust. Consider the possibility that you may have accidentally discovered the true etymology of the phrase 'pea-soup fog'.
5. Neatly lay out all the tools you will need for the job, to include wooden skewers, a biro, a gigantic spoon, a curly pink straw with Eeyore on, plastic goggles, some superglue a tea cup, an electric whisk, plasters, potato peeler, a set of six glass ramekins, two toilet rolls and every single knife in the house, especially the huge machete type one that you never use but which makes you strangely excited to look at.
6. Start to consider design. Wish pumpkin to reflect modern trend in realistic carving design whilst maintaining an amusingly ironic air and simultaneously letting local children know there's no point stopping here for a fun size Mars Bar as they've already long been eaten. The suggestion of ARSE in 100pt Garamond is considered but quickly dismissed. Have cupcake.
7. After much internal debate, settle on the face of George Alagiah. Due to unfortunate artistic inability however, he will be depicted with traditional jaggedy mouth and triangle eyes. Sit on living room floor and, grasping pumpkin firmly between the thighs, start to scoop out pumpkin guts first making absolutely sure that the curtains are closed and all furniture in the room and those bordering it are covered in thick plastic sheets.
8. Pick up smallest knife and attempt to insert it into pumpkin. Recieve first of approximately eleven flesh wounds. Have cupcake.
9. The actual carving stage should take roughly three to four hours, depending on arm strength and breaks for crisps and pumpkin bits that were accidentally cut off and needed to be glued back on. When you are finished, decide that the blood spatters add a certain level of spookiness and opt not to wipe them off.
10. Place George on street-facing windowsill with lighted tea light inside and celebrate a job well done with the last cupcake and rest of pea crisps, deliberately ignoring the all-pervasive smell of chargrilled vegetables that will linger in your flat for a week. Promptly forget all about him for next month until he is traced as the source of the mysterious orange liquid seeping down your wall.