In which I question the motives of someone who gives me two free bars of chocolate on Halloween

Some days, it rains and you leave your gloves on the train. But others days, someone gives you some free chocolate. This morning, as I was leaving London Bridge Station, some out-of-work drama graduate pushed two Cadbury's Creme Egg Twisted bars into my frozen corned-beef-mottled hands. A Twisted bar – for the confectionary-shy – is essentially six small, conjoined Creme Eggs, mutated and moulded into a kind of Cadbury's Caramel formation. And I was given two! For free! Imagine! I don't have to! IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

But wait, I thought, as I shivered my way to the office. This is Halloween. A time for spooky omens, half-hearted celebration and macabre events. Could it be that my evil nemesis (I must surely have one, otherwise I would undoubtedly be living in an airy three-storey townhouse by the seaside, with a devoted husband, several photogenic children and limitless personal wealth by now) had poured their shadowy, shifting form into a branded fleece and pressed into my hand a novelty chocolate item laced with poison. Having hired men in overcoats and sunglasses to watch my behaviour for months through magic binoculars, they knew I would be drawn like a magpie to the glinting foil wrapper, and that within a few hours their malevolent cocktail of sloth, envy, insecurity and a glass and a half of full cream milk would be coursing through my delicate veins, and I would once again spend a profitless evening lying on my sofa murmuring 'the seaside... the children, must do something, have to achieve stuff... ooh! Top Model's on.'

But no. Back on the street, I chastised myself for being so pessimistic. Honestly, I'm such a Capricorn. I turned to the power of positive thought in an attempt to render my free chocolate a gesture motivated by goodness.

Eating any kind of Creme Egg product presents a challenge to one's inhibitions. Like the modern-day equivalent of the ladies of Cranford and their oranges, eating a Creme Egg generally requires you to desert any sense of decorum. Your options are equally suggestive. Do you penetrate the furthest reaches of the shell's interior with a probing tongue, or do you take a short series of hungry bites and risk a chin dripping with fondant? It's a dilemma that the coy may rather resolve in private. This morning, I decided to believe that kindly old Mr Cadbury had rained Twisted bars onto the commuters of south London in an attempt to provoke an orgy of sensuous and delighted chocolate consumption, knowing it would ripple (not a Ripple, that's different) outward until passengers felt their inner passions stirred to such a degree that they began embracing not their chocolate egg products, but each other. Commuters who had sat in rigid, tortured silence, desperate for a small measure of human contact, preferably with that anonymous but adored person they sat opposite every day, felt liberated  enough to draw a stranger into a spontaneous yet not unwelcome embrace.

If you watch the deleted scenes from Amelie, this actually happens.