Haddenham Street Spends Energy Payment On More Lights

"If the government is sending us a hundred pounds in January to keep us warm, then morally that is already spent, because the cold bit of winter started on Sunday and I have ordered a second fog machine," said a man on Stanbridge Road who has run one from his porch since the clocks went back and who describes the effect as "Whitby, but friendlier".

John Healey's household energy payment, announced in the budget to help people through the coldest months, has arrived in Haddenham as a kind of promissory note against decorations. Up and down the village, people who had never once thought about their standing charge spent the whole of last week thinking about it hard, mainly as a way of justifying an inflatable.

Nobody on the street has received anything yet. Nobody will until January. That has not slowed anybody down.

The pumpkins came in on Saturday morning, softened, and were replaced by teatime with the first strings of the long campaign. A woman who posts laminated notes through doors has written to her neighbours explaining that the road is now operating a coordinated approach to the whole of November, with lit houses on the even side and unlit houses on the odd side, and that anyone wishing to switch sides must do so before the bonfire weekend. Three houses have switched. One house switched twice. The house at the end has taped a sign to its gate reading "no", which is itself now a stop on the route, because children find it the most frightening thing on the street.

The chancellor's wider hope, that households will borrow against their roofs and emerge warm and virtuous, has landed differently here. "A heat pump is the single best thing you can do for your bills, and I have told everyone in this room that," said a plumber from Long Crendon, standing in a kitchen on Monday evening where somebody had plugged a reindeer, a snowman and a leftover skeleton into a four-way extension lead and then draped a tea towel over it.

By last night the fog had reached the war memorial, the odd side was quietly turning its lights back on, and somebody's inflatable ghost had deflated across a parked Honda in a way that everyone agreed was the best thing it had done all autumn. Winter, as promised, is coming in line with Europe.