🎧Audio Quack 🎧
Can’t be bothered to read? I’ll read it for you. Skip introductions 2:00
I went to Hermione & Sam’s to carve pumpkins on Halloween. Old me would have scrolled through Pinterest for inspiration and tried to carve something ambitious – like a pumpkin with teeth. But after years of failed attempts, I have resigned to the fact I’m not one of life’s pumpkin carvers.
So, this time, I stuck to basics: circle for eyes, circle for mouth, rectangle for eyebrows.
As we were carving, Sam spoke about the kombucha he was making. It was no surprise that he was making kombucha. Sam keeps houseplants like pets and has a stack of vinyl records of bands nobody has heard of. Making kombucha seemed like a natural next step in his err…. millennialism.
Kombucha, fermented black tea, has been around for 2000 years, but it was us, the well-being Millennials, who made it mainstream. We can’t resist a drink with health benefits, and the kombucha claims to have probiotics that balance out our gut bacteria. Our gut has been unbalanced this whole time?!!
Last week, I visited Mum and spotted a bottle of kombucha in her fridge. It made me proud. I had introduced kombucha to her household after discovering it in Australia.
“They drink this magic gut juice in the land of the hopping rat,” I said, as I stepped off the wooden ship that I had sailed across the oceans of the world in. (Ok, it wasn’t quite like that.)
Along with kombucha, I have also introduced oat milk, quinoa, and Taylor Swift. Mum has welcomed these new elements into her home with open arms.
“You want me to leave the oats overnight? Ok, darling.”
Her partner, Rich, not so much. He’s a bearded artist who never strays from a black t-shirt and likes to ride a motorbike. He took great joy in telling me that the word ‘avocado’ translates into ‘testicle’.
Once, while eating my green testicle on toast, I tried to explain to Rich what a gratitude journal was.
“You have to write three things that happened in your day which you are grate…”
Before I could finish the sentence, Rich was rolling his head.
“Let me stop you there,” he said in his Mancunian accent. Like the oat milk in his fridge, he didn’t see the purpose of writing down your positive moments. I argued that it’s healthy to reflect on your day. *Clears throat.*
Monday 28th October
Three things I am grateful for….
1) A woman in Gail’s liked my red jumper and asked where I got it from. I lied and told her it was from Zara.
2) Stephen finally replied to my text.🥰 (He had another busy weekend, that’s all. What with all the football, he couldn’t squeeze in two minutes to reply. Evolution is so funny, isn’t it? 😂A man used to carve whole stories into stone, but now, even when the phone writes the words for you, the modern man struggles to find time to thank you for letting him stay over).
3) The sunset was amazing!!!!
Perhaps Mum and Rich are from a generation that is thicker-skinned, so they don’t need a gratitude diary. They have, after all, survived most of their lives without the safety blanket of a smartphone. What did they do when their date went to the bathroom? Did they just sit at the table, staring into nothing with their unbalanced guts? And at the parties, when nobody was speaking to them. They couldn’t pretend to be texting someone to show they are in demand somewhere. (When really, they’re just writing a shopping list in the notes app).
Not only this but without a smartphone, how did they take photos of their pumpkin spice lattes with autumnal backdrops? Gasp. They didn’t even have pumpkin spice lattes. A macchiato could have been a fashion brand. A flat white could have been a rock band. There were no patterns on their milk foam. There was no milk foam at all. How did they do it?
Back to Halloween 2024. My pumpkin had turned out as predicted: basic and crap. I named it Janet. Sam, Hermione and Pheobe’s pumpkins looked like adults had carved them. They had teeth, eyes, and expressions. We were keen to know the best one, so we took a photo and asked Instagram.
Sam’s pumpkin, named ‘Hot Sauce’, won. Hermione’s ‘Clara’ came a close second, and Phoebe’s ‘Sea Biscuit’ came third. Janet came last, with no votes. Thankfully, I could overcome this rejection because of my gratitude diary.
Thursday 31st October
Three things I am grateful for….
1) Hermione & Sam invited me to their house for homemade pita bread and hummus and to carve pumpkins. Janet didn’t win the contest. Not a single person voted for her, but it’s the taking part that counts. 😁😁😁
2) Hot dads in Halloween costumes were taking their kids trick-or-treating. 😍 I particularly liked the cowboy who walked past me. Who needs Stephen? Not me.
3) The sunset was amazing!!!
BLOG SOUNDTRACK
THE QUACK 