Forget Halloween. If you want to see the English in costume, head to Rugby Sevens.

I've come a long way since attending and writing here about my first rugby match eight years ago. I've developed a working understanding of the game and been to a range of international matches. I've travelled to see England play in foreign territory, become an Army-Navy rugby regular and can comfortably consider Twickenham home turf. While nothing will ever displace baseball as my top sport, rugby is now solidly in second place.

This is partly because it's a great game: fast-paced, dramatic, easy enough to follow without much understanding, but complicated enough on the next level to offer a lifetime of further study. Partly because my husband loves it. And partly because every rugby player I've ever met is a gracious, gregarious, charming gentleman. But it may be mostly because of rugby fans. They love their sport, they're gracious to the opposition, and they consider every game to be an excuse for an enormous party.

Which takes me right back to London Rugby Sevens, where I started my journey. A faster game. A bigger party.

The organisers have expanded the celebratory atmosphere this year by adding a festival of food, with more than 40 food trucks in the car parks and fields west of the stadium. We never got there. Between our usual champagne breakfast to gather our troops in Clapham, and a thrilling series of matches that saw both the Americans and the English doing well, what time we had in Twickenham was spent beside the pitch. (Or waiting in very, very long queues for drinks.) But we got the definite impression that you could now enjoy the party without tickets, watching the action on giant screens as you meandered around the festival outside. We may try that some year.

As they added the food festival, they removed a theme. This was a shocking turn of events. Rugby ... and particularly Sevens ... has always had a fancy dress element. Word on the street was that organisers had eliminated the theme to cut down on rowdiness. Fat chance. First, the rowdiest rugby fan is generally a model of slightly drunken courtesy, nothing close to the legendary disruption of the football fan. Second, the best way to ensure that the English do something is to encourage them not to.

I can't remember seeing this level of costuming at previous events. Lacking a theme, fans drew from the whole spectrum of fancy dress. The ancient world was magnificently represented, with Romans, Greeks and Egyptians en masse. There were computer game heroes, dinosaurs, animals and enough pirates to staff a decent-sized navy. Musketeers cut a dash, while the Vikings ... both male and female ... looked best prepared for the day's crazy fluctuations in weather. Many fans of team USA, unsurprisingly, went down the cowboy route, with at least one Uncle Sam and a Statue of Liberty popping up.

It is one of the enduring mysteries of the English that they do Halloween so badly, and rugby fancy dress so well. On October 31st I will open my door to a procession of children wearing a narrow range of commercially available costumes. For the vast majority, it will appear that their parents have put no effort at all into the holiday beyond driving to the grocery store and grabbing whatever fits out of the seasonal aisle. The hand-crafted outfits, nods to current events and clever group costumes so common in the States are extremely rare here.

And yet that's exactly what you see when the grown-ups head to Rugby Sevens. Four girls behind us came as the central quartet from the Wizard of Oz, complete with an impressive home-made tin man costume and Toto on Dorothy's Radley handbag. I spent a genial time waiting for beer with Ares, the god of war. His friends had coordinated carefully so that each came as a Greek or Roman deity, taking such care that they had both Dionysus and Bacchus in their host so that both guys who wanted to could come as the god of wine. Evidently their dates came as
maenads. A sphinx cleverly constructed from boxes accompanied a togate crew. I suspect the most photographed group of the day, however, was Donald Trump and his suited security agents, all in character as the president spouted trademark lines and the agents cleared a path through the crowd.

And us? I am ashamed to confess that we were so busy, we didn't get around to coordinating anything. We wore ... rugby shirts. Note for next year. Must do better.