So if I screw up my job today, will I be sacked AND paid £2m?

If not I obviously need a career change and will take up football management.

Ah. I’ve just realised the date so I must make sure I get the mantrap out of the garage tonight and lay it down on the path to stop those Halloween oiks from frightening the life out of an old man.

Scooter has already been traumatised this week by idiots tossing fireworks about in the street causing her to lose that ‘brave cat’ stance she adopts when perched on the roof of next door’s shed.

Of course it is the beginning of the season of youthful extortion when failure to surrender will result in your front door being pelted with eggs.

So we have Halloween, then it’ll be a Penny for the Guy followed by muttering carol singers. There was a day when these things use to be fun, but unfortunately the financial needs of kids these days – to pay their mobile phone bills, buy the latest hoodie tops and the costs of other dubious habits – has given these events a rather hard edge.

The trouble is the soft-centre of my soul will still see me havinge a bag of sweets parked on the hall table for callers. Though in truth it may be more out a desire of not wanting to scrub the front door clean.

I hear there is a shortage of Brussels sprouts this year. I will not be at the front of the queue of people weeping and wailing over the demise of this vegetable.

Of course I accept that some misguided individuals actually like the sprout, though for the life of me I can’t see why.

It’s possible, of course, that any chance of my being one of those was ruined at an early age. I remember them as being a rather soggy unpalatable mess floating in a greyish liquid.

I was encouraged to eat them by being told they were ‘fairy cabbages’ – but I didn’t like cabbage either.

In this day of lightly cooked vegetables I’ve tried the ‘modern crunchy sprout’ , but it still tasted like a cross between a piece of cardboard and the moss you find growing on the roofs of houses. And don’t talk to me about the smell!

The British Sprout Growers’ Association says the Christmas sprout is under threat because of water-logged fields and high winds damaging the plants.

I just hope the parsnip has survived all this pounding. Now THERE’S a proper Christmas vegetable.

I travelled up the M40 on Saturday and came across the usual collection of idiotic motorists trundling up this strip of tarmac.

The behaviour included my two pet hates. There are those who sit in the middle lane at around 50mph with the inside lane completely empty. I can only conclude that these drivers have left their thinking matter on the hall table when going out of the house.

Thanks to their thoughtlessness they effectively turn the M40 into a dual carriageway.

Then there are others who sit so close behind you when you’re overtaking that you can see the spinach left in their teeth from last night's meal as they grin manically through the windscreen.

It’s at that point that I wish my car had Tornado fighter jet afterburners so I could flame-grill their tyres.

Of course the problem on the M40 around here is that you never see any police patrols. Never. If they were around to pull up these hapless motorists and slap tickets on the pedal-to-the-metal merchants we might have fewer accidents.

It was interesting to note that when the M40 decanted into Warwickshire on Saturday there was very obvious police presence up towards Birmingham – and some motorists had been stopped.

Frankly it seems a simple but obvious recipe to cure some of the M40 ills hereabouts

Tis the season to start tidying up bits and pieces around the garden and batten down the hatches before the onslaught of mild winter weather.

The wooden patio table and chair set is to be cleaned and put in the garage, the lawns given their final trim and the fighting remnants of summer weeds given the coup de gras.

This means of course that the green wheelie bin will then go into semi-retirement with just a couple of full kitchen small pedal bin bags left to languish in its depths for each fortnightly collection.

Perhaps if I had wheels on the pedal bin I could roll that one out to the front each Monday instead. Remember you heard it here first!

Anyway during this autumn-clean I was briefly puzzled by an object in one corner of the garden hiding under a black cover. Upon investigation I discovered a …. barbecue!

Quite forgotten I’d had it. This summer has been so rotten that the contraption hasn’t had a look in. Still if the weathermen are to be believed we’re heading for a roasting at the weekend.

Now that could be a first. Having your mates round for a barbie and few 'tinnies' deep into October.

You have to admire someone with a name like Ed Balls rising to the giddy heights of a high profile Government role. If he doesn’t shoot a credible line he’s going to be accused of talking ... tosh. Not an easy thing to do in that arena much of the time, I venture to suggest.

Mr Balls is the Schools Secretary and yesterday he announced plans to scrap the current way of overseeing the exams system and set up an independent body.

This comes in the wake of continued criticism of exam results. Every year seems to be a record one for A-levels and GCSEs and they are then roundly derided afterwards with claims of ‘dumbing down’ to achieve these results.

Mr Balls says he wants to end this ‘sterile debate’. “To me it is very important that parents, employers, that young people themselves, are confident that we are maintaining standards.”

This has been a long time coming. School exams have been blighted by this debate for far too long and I always feel sorry for the kids celebrating their results. Such criticisms can leave them feeling failures in the wake of success.

What has been a failure though is the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority which was set up in 1997. Quite why it’s taken the Government ten years to reach this conclusion is beyond me. But now it has.

Mr Balls certainly wasn’t talking complete tosh when he said: “We’ve made real progress over the last ten years. We are now above average but we are not world class.”

Hopefully by kicking the QCA into touch and establishing a new independent body our kids can get on and pass their exams without questions marks hanging over the quality of their results.