It’s Halloween this week, but who needs ghost stories when they have children?

Whatever the picture painted by Mary Poppins, sharing a house with minors is like a horror film: lights come on in empty rooms, locked doors swing wide open, and there are unexplained bumps in the night. And nothing is ever where I left it.

I don’t know what people who live in bungalows do with their time.

Seventy per cent of my waking hours revolve around the stairs, a repository for things going up and things going down. At any one time most of the house’s contents are jumbled in the middle as if the house was a giant sand-timer.

Kermit’s nephew Robin may have delighted children and adults alike with his charming song about halfway up the stairs, but he would be taking his life in his hands, loitering there in our house. It seems, however, this elephant trap is invisible to the children who glide past oblivious.

Isaac Newton’s second law of thermodynamics dictates that order naturally degenerates to chaos with the certainty of a hypno trance beat. Newton was a bachelor, pondering scientific theories at length, and anyone with a family could have saved him a lot of thinking time on that hypothesis.Even the insides of cupboards aren’t sacrosanct: opening a kitchen cupboard door, I recently discovered the true meaning of 'tuppaware party’. The plastic boxes had clearly had a debauched overnight rave, their tops off, bottoms spilling out.

And there’ll be similar bottoms-up impertinence at Halloween as we chase doughnuts on strings and kneel for the time-honoured tradition of apple bobbing in a plastic bowl, like witches at a ducking.The inevitable banshee shrieking will be a far cry from the peace Newton allegedly enjoyed under the oak tree from which his apple fell with infamous gravity.

And I may not have the insight to revolutionise physics as Newton did, but I am planning ahead to finish off the evening’s excitement, complete with glow-in-the-dark skeleton pyjamas and jack’o lanterns with a trick of my own – a cauldron of sticky treacle toffee.

That should keep the little horrors quiet until morning.