I got back from Nottingham today, after chilling out and eating my family’s food for a few days. Been cooking with pumpkins a lot lately: Me and my friend Chloe made two pumpkin pies on Saturday, though weren’t sure if we’d done it right or not, since neither of us had ever tasted pumpkin pie before. They were pretty good though, in my opinion.

Today, I used another quarter of the big pumpkin we used for the pie to make soup. Again, I’ve never made soup before, and didn’t have any recipe, so I thought it worked surprisingly well with my combination of onion, pumpkin, and mooli. I’d post pictures if I’d taken any.

I guess that’s not really a lot, nor is it that interesting, but I am becoming a fan of pumpkins.

Most of my time at home was spent watching movies with, at different times, Chloe, my dad, and my grandmother, though none of which I really feel inclined to talk about. I did, however, start reading Tom’s Midnight Garden, which I haven’t read since I was a lot younger. It’s pretty good, but maybe not as classic as The Secret Garden: I’d say that would win in a contest of children’s books with ‘garden’ in the title. Reading it though, however good it is, is really quite counter-productive, since I’m currently halfway though reading An Introduction to Literary Theory and Modernism – A Short History of a Big Idea, both for my dissertation, and partly for my other uni work, and both of which I’m insisting on reading cover-to-cover, even though, especially the Literary Theory one, they are only of partial relevance. And then a new non-fiction book arrived today: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, for which I paid £14. That’s probably the second largest amount of money I’ve paid for a book, the first being about £20 for a copy of Mark Ryden’s Blood book.

Anyway, October’s been a very slow month for posts on this blog, but hopefully I’ll pick up soon, if not before, then at least by the Christmas holidays, when my first round of deadlines are over. In fact, I predict that the next two months will be the hardest and most important of my degree, after that I should be all right. I’m going to get on with some work tomorrow, and maybe the next day, and I’m working over-time most of the weekend, but I’ve got a mostly-formed plan for a short story that isn’t the longer piece I’m working on, and I should, hopefully, have written over the next week ready to post to this site, so look out for that.