31 Days and Nights of Halloween!

Royal Mail has revealed a new stamp celebrating Londonderry's annual Halloween festival.

Eight colourful stamps have been released to capture the spirit of well known events and festivals that take place across the UK.

Tens of thousands of people line the streets of Derry every year for the Halloween parade and fireworks display.

The 2018 Return of the Ancients festival had a budget of almost £400,000.

The city's famous walls came alive with skeletons, nuns, witches, fire and music.

"There's no limitation in terms of painting pumpkins, you've just got to get stuck in," says a Norfolk artist who has got involved in this year's Halloween trend of decorating rather than carving spooky creations.

The UK is set to spend more than £29m on pumpkins this Halloween with an estimated 10 million grown specifically for 31 October.

Painted and decorated pumpkins are "very trendy" and a perfect alternative for children that avoids the need to use knives, says artist and mum Kate Elgood.

"A painted pumpkin not only lasts longer than one you've cut into... and people talk about throwaway fashion, so this is actually a really good way to use a pair of stockings."

A Tim Burton-inspired mosaic made with more than 10,000 pumpkins and squashes has set a new Guinness World Record.

The display at Sunnyfields Farm was created to mark animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas's 30th anniversary and depicts Jack Skellington's famous moonlight stance

The Southampton farm has entered the record books for the largest mosaic created from squashes.

To achieve the feat, the mosaic had to be over 100 square metres.

The farm's finished patchwork of pumpkins and squashes ended up just under 200 square metres.

It required meticulous planning and took about five hours for staff at the farm to create the giant spooky display.

The farm hosts a giant pumpkin weigh-off annually where world records are often set.

Farmer Ian Nelson, 59 said: "We always see people get world records, but we didn't think we would get one ourselves.

"We weren't intentionally doing it to get the record as each year we build a big display, but we realised it would qualify and went for it."

The official title for their new record given by Guinness is the largest Cucurbita mosaic - the genre for varieties of pumpkins and squashes.

Adam Milward, managing editor of Guinness World Records, said: "This is always a busy time of year for fruit and veg records at Guinness World Records... just last week we had the privilege of recognising a new heaviest pumpkin.

"It can sometimes be easy to get wrapped up entirely in the biggest produce, but what Sunnyfields Farm has proven in their Halloween-themed gourd display is that when horticultural prowess is combined with a little creative flair, it's possible to reap some truly spook-tacular results"