A Band of Peg-Toothed Squashes

Crunchy nut cornflakes.

Sometimes it is quite necessary for a group of adults to get together and carve pumpkins. Pumpkins are a good deal easier to carve than turnips. Not of course that there can be much debate on the matter.

Like any good Scot, the humble turnip was the chosen Jack O'Lantern vegetable in my guising days. One spent hours hollowing out the damn things, risking loss of digits as one did so, before even getting down to the business of carving a likeness. Once satisfied with your gnarly creation, you would thread it with string and tote it about, followed everywhere by the stench of turnip.

The merry band of pumpkin friends we carved out today are a good deal less pungent, and rather splendid (though we do says so ourselves).

Not Really All that Pinterested

Pumpkin pie again! Happy Day!

I have a Pinterest account (I joined it in fulfilment of bridesmaiding duties), but I can't work it, and I don't know how to leave it. I've only recently learned to stop calling it pin-ter-rest. Occasionally I even feel slightly guilty about my neglect of this sphere of the internet. From time to time, I get messages notifying me that someone has pinned something on a board that I am unable to find, and I feel a sort of pang. I suppose I oughtn't to worry. I'm sure it feels no obligation to me.

Moomins on the Mind

Pumpkin pie -- oh yes!
(Sunday's breakfast was a pork taco, which I gobbled so fast I failed to photograph)

One of the stranger episodes in a life punctuated by oddities, was the bleary-eyed, jet-lagged fuzzy afternoon (morning? evening? it's hard to say) I spent at Helsinki airport: a place that was teaming with Moomins. It was five-hour layover between Delhi and London.

It's my only brush with Finland; and I remember being hungry, and tired and beset by Moomins at every turn: creatures that I have always found just the tiniest bit -- whisper it -- sinister. (This is to say nothing of Little My, who is profoundly unsettling.)

I do not recommend that a person short on sleep, and rich in overactive imaginings spend any time surrounded my Moomin figures of every size and form -- soft, hard, edible, two-dimensional, three-dimensional. It is the sort of experience that lodges itself, indelibly in the mind, and creeps unbound into one's consciousness from time to time, a half-remembered waking nightmare of blank expressioned, moon-faced beings lunging at you out of nowhere, their round, eyes unblinking and emotionless. Like right now, in fact: my mind is awhirl with Moomins.

Breakfasts Two-Hundred-and-Sixty-Three-to-Nine

No. 263: Blueberry wheats and raspberries; No. 264 Extremely decadent muesli &raspberries;
No. 265: Croissant and jam; No. 266: Tracker Bars.

No. 267: Blueberry wheats; No. 268: Blueberry wheats again; No 269: Pumkin Pie.

Oh dear. Too many late nights have made a terrible daily blogger out of me. (They are also to blame for Breakfast no 266 -- I got home late Sunday and woke-up to off milk, not before dowsing a bowl of cereal with it though...)

I had a splendid weekend feting a friend's 30th and goCarSharing my way there with Miss M-L who, it turns out, shares my fondness for singing along to Bond theme tunes in the car.

We shared the driving, and she mocked me relentlessly for my inability to join a motorway, or go around a roundabout without first turning the music down.

Breakfasts Two-Hundred-and-Fifty-Six-and-Seven

No 256: Pumkin pie and a pear.

No. 157: Courgette quiche/tart.

Still no rolling pin, but today I made a courgette quiche/tarty thing with Parmesan pastry -- which as you can see, I ate for breakfast/lunch. I'm getting good use out of that old Cote du Rhone bottle.

Other than that I have mostly consumed an eye-popping quantity of cinnamon oaties. And watched the creatures on Sesame Street spoofing glee.

One of the favourite things I learned in the course of my old job (pre Satan -- oh how I miss it!) is that the BBC declined to buy the rights to Sesame Street in 1971 because of its 'authoritarian aims'.

Breakfast the Two-Hundred-and-Fifty-Fourth

Blueberry wheats and a pear.

Tonight was my third night under house arrest (necessitated by illness) and I must say it's getting old.  I cheered myself up by cooking a pumpkin pie -- the only thing I felt like eating. I shan't include a photograph now as there's every chance that I'll eat some for breakfast tomorrow morning. And now, I must off to bed, before I turn into a pumpkin.