It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark ...

Wednesday, October 31st, 2013 - All Hallow's Eve!

Hallowe'en (for that is the correct spelling) has always been a special day in my household. We always settle down to watch spooky programmes and films, and sometimes we even turn Hallowe'en into Hallowe'ek, and watch scary stuff all week.
But one thing I've never done is carve my own pumpkin - until this year! We bought two for £3 in Asda and decided upon a traditionally toothless grimace design for beginners. How people manage all those extravagant and intricate designs is beyond me.
Pumpkins are messy veggies - stringyness and seeds and gloop. But, as simple as it is, I'm really pleased with Mr Pumpkinhead, so the trouble was all worth it (and the pumpkin and chestnut soup will make it even more worthwhile, I'm sure!).

I'll swap you Frank Arnesen for Paolo Rossi...

Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

I've been sorting through some old books that have been in storage for ages. Most of them were books I had as a child which my mum and dad have passed on to me, but at the very bottom of the box was this beauty - my Mexico 86 Panini sticker album!
I was 10 when the World Cup stickers came out and every boy I knew was collecting them. I can't remember how much a pack was back then (10p? 20p?), but I remember the excitement and trepidation of ripping the pack open to find out who was inside. I remember seeming to get Italia's Salvatore Bagni quite a lot, and swapping stickers with friends in the playground. Them were the days!
Flicking through the album's pages as an adult is quite a different experience to what it was aged 10. Back then I was just eager to complete the album. Almost three decades later I find myself assessing he handsomeness of the players. So shallow. But seriously, hello Bruno Bellone of France!
Cheers, Pique!

Moving day

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

Today we went to see our goddaughters Sophie and Hannah, along with their new baby brother Ben (and of course their mum Sarah!). Hannah seemed a little under the weather but Sophie was her usual busy self.
Today was a particularly busy day because her family of wooden people were moving house, so I helped to load all of their furniture into their various modes of transport (Minnie Mouse's sports car, a people carrier and Peppa Pig's runaround).
At one stage (pictured) it looked like there had been some kind of terrible massacre of the wooden people when everything was suddenly dropped because Sophie had had a new idea - why waste time loading all of the furniture into cars when she could just put everything into a big plastic bag and carry it to the new house for them? I love children's logic!
The house move went well in the end, although Sophie didn't really finish moving the wooden people into their new home as Hotel Transylvania came on the TV and that proved much more interesting instead.

Going underground

Monday, October 28th, 2013

This arrived today - a London Underground duvet set. It has an entire map of the Tube system on the main cover, and Underground logos on the pillows. I can see that you are jealous already.

An apple a day...

Sunday, October 27th, 2013

My mum and dad's friends have apple trees in their garden, which bore fruit to rather too many apples for them to cope with, so they "donated" bags of the things to mum and dad. Their kitchen was brimming with apples, and a lot of today was spent trying to think of ever more imaginative ways of using them. Apple sauce, stewed apples, apple pie, apple crumble, even toffee apples were considered... And still there were bags left over!
They weren't the most attractive of apples, but what they lacked in aesthetic appeal, they made up for in character. They had blemishes and little holes where they'd been attacked by nature's citizens, but they were still edible and juicy - and prolific.
We had a family session of peeling, coring and chopping up as many apples as my mum could cook/ bake/ freeze, and naturally when Gareth and I left mum and dad's to come home, we too were laden with apples and various apple-based foodstuffs. It was nice doing something so simple as a family unit.