What to do with your old Hallowe’en pumpkin. A bit of motor car nostalgia. Who can you meet outdoors?

Well, that’s Hallowe’en out of the way. What’s next? Strictly speaking it should be Bonfire Night on November 5th but this year we’re starting a new lockdown instead. Besides, even before the pandemic, I had the impression that Hallowe’en had superseded Bonfire Night anyway. Trick-or-treat candy trumps treacle toffee!

All around the village this morning, where once again I managed to run without getting rained on (the weather gods must favour me for some reason), there are soggy-looking remains of pumpkins, their leery smiles askew! 

On Saturday morning our granddaughter and her housemate had a minor panic because they had no pumpkin. The housemate took herself off on a rather long stomp to their nearest co-op store - larger by far than the small one in our village but less conveniently placed - but all to no avail. This year they have not been stocking pumpkins. Nor have they been stocking packs of trick-or-treat candy. They offered her a turnip but it’s not quite the same. Although my granddaughter, who is a surprising mine of useless information, assures me that people used to make turnip lanterns to ward off evil spirits. (Who knew? Well, our granddaughter, obviously.) This was before we became Americanised and pumpkinised!

In the end, our daughter came to the rescue and gave them a spare pumpkin that she had. Why would anyone have a “spare” pumpkin? Good grief! She had to ask permission from the four-year-old to pass the pumpkin on instead of having yet another pumpkin-carving session in their house. As the pumpkin was going to her beloved big sister the small girl agreed. And so the pumpkin was handed over, on condition that the inner flesh was returned to the donor who planned to make pumpkin soup, and was duly carved.

Yesterday, during our “let’s ignore the weather” adventure, our granddaughter told us that she and her housemate plan to take a walk into the small wooded area near their house to leave the carved pumpkin shell in a tree for the squirrels to eat. Her mother insisted that she should be careful to put it well out of the reach of hedgehogs. Last year, it seems, people were encouraged to leave their discarded  pumpkin carvings out for hedgehogs to eat but the latest findings are that pumpkins give hedgehogs the runs. They then become dehydrated and die. And hedgehogs have enough problems as it is, what with unwittingly hibernating in bonfires and discovering that curling up into a ball is no protection from lorries hurtling at you as you try to cross the road. 

 

All of this how-to-dispose-of-your-hallowe’en-pumpkin stuff is all new to me. But then, I have never made a pumpkin lantern in my life.

Running round the village this morning, I came upon a very tatty old Citroen 2CV parked on one of the back lanes. What a surprise! Oh, the nostalgia! Of course, this one was black so the nostalgia was not quite so great as it could have been. Our very first car, whose registration number we both still remember, was a bright red 2CV, brand new, bought, taxed and insured for under £2,000, back in the mid seventies. Red was clearly the best colour! Such fun we had driving it around the country roads of Brittany in the summer - the roof rolled back and the wind in our hair and serious sunburn on my forearms! We practically moved house in that car. When our son was born there were no baby seats but the removable top of his pram wedged nicely and safely onto the back seat. How sad we were when the Little Wonder finally gave up the ghost. We replaced her with a red Renault 4L. Almost as good and we had that fitted with rudimentary harnesses for the by then two children we were ferrying around. 

Okay! Enough nostalgia!

New rulings on the lockdown say that children under school age do not count when deciding who can meet outdoors. So now our daughter and the “littles”, as she calls them, can meet her eldest daughter, or me, or Phil, but not all of us together. She can meet a friend - just one - with similar “littles”. She can go and teach a whole class full of eight-year-olds but that’s a different matter. 

Similarly our son, or his wife, can go for a walk with just one friend, but they can’t go together. Neither can they take their six-year-old along if they plan to meet a friend, as she is of school age. And the friend cannot bring a school age child along either. But the children will be able to sit in the same classroom and probably play together in the school playground. I don’t think sleep-overs will be on the cards.

It’s a topsy-turvy time.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!