Halloween and All Saints

We've had such appropriate skies - bright beautiful beginnings which have quickly become skies heavy with low, pale cloud and boiling with rooks, dancing and surfing on the winds, soaring high and spinning down landwards, as if feigning death, laughing all the while... And my mood has matched those heavy skies - grey and bleak and weighted down. But it's just one of those things... It will pass...

FB and I have both been filled with cold and not sleeping brillianly as a result (see - my low spirits arise in part from that, so of course it will pass!) and the knock-on effect of that is that FB was wholly unimpressed with pumkin carving, despite one of the most enourmous (home-grown!) pumpkins I've ever seen. In fact, he refused to join in with the carving and went on to refuse to be in the same room as the pumpkin if the lights were off and the candle lit... Never mind, we found other things instead - he collected a big paper bag full of fallen leaves to dry and make a picture with, and spent ages carefully threading stones and shells onto garden twine for his granny to hang in her garden this afternoon.

I watched a greater spotted woodpecker in the crab apple tree in my neighbour's garden this morning - that certainly lifted my day - I don't think I've ever been to close to one before! I wish I had my wits about me better to have tried to take a photo, but I didn't. But perhaps sometimes these things are meant only to exist in one's own head - 'preserved in their excellence' as a friend once said to me.

Tonight I have farmer's market comfort food (pork and cabbage) and my mother's chocolate pudding. Soundtrack for today has been Anouar Brahem - Astrakhan Cafe - lovely soaring clarinet, gentle oud... Tomorrow, I hope, the grump will be gone!