Pumpkin

It's that time of year again. Not my favourite, perhaps. I'm fond of autumn in general, though sometimes you feel they ought to make more of an effort to tidy the leaves away, but Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night always leave me with mixed emotions. Perhaps it's something to do with been dragged by my children out of doors on cold wet evenings and being made to do things I would rather avoid. For example, ferrying them around the neighbours' houses, begging for sweets. Or watching the local scouts' somewhat haphazard firework display. These things don't happen quite so often now that the children are grown up, but they have marked me deeply over the years, and some wounds take time to heal.

In particular I have bitter memories of pumpkins. They look pretty enough in their own way: cheerily stout, and bright orange; though as they get larger they tend to become more disturbing, even before they have had a creepy face carved into them. But it's the scooping out of the pumpkin which saps my soul: they contain such a quantity of unpleasant orange slime, with a characteristically unedifying aroma, which works itself up your sleeve as you try to scrape it all out. And it's not as if you can do anything with the slime once you have extracted it. Yes, I know there is such a thing as pumpkin pie; and pumpkin soup; and doubtless pumpkin rissoles and crumble and trifle and so on; but over the years I've tried all of these, and have suffered as a consequence. They are not meant to be eaten. So I have stopped buying them now. And if not quite deliriously happy, I'm getting close.