David Currie

685I’m not sure quite what it says about my upbringing but my only previous experience with pumpkin lanterns involved lots of carefully curved pieces of cardboard, a foil lining and a flashing bulb! Consequently, this was my first attempt at carving the real thing. I enjoyed myself and Emma became interested at the point the candle was lit! We hadn’t realised that placing it outside our front door was a signal for the trick or treaters to descend though. Actually, we only had one group come round – it just happened to contain seven very greedy kids! One definite plus point for the vegetable pumpkin was that it was dismembered and disposed of the following day – the cardboard version sat on a shelf at home for over twenty years!

Out of the blue, we received a phone call from Hampshire Constabulary this morning. Well, to be fair, it wasn’t quite out of the blue. They were returning a 999 call made from my mobile. It probably doesn’t take too much imagination to work out who made the call… It goes without saying that Emma is going to have to make do with her toy phone from now on!

We bought a Lindam safety gate from Argos way back before we went to Norway. Shortly afterwards I ordered the free (except for P&P) gate extension from their website so that it would fit across our stairway. At the time though Emma was showing no sign of being a danger on the stairs and when we moved to Norway we were in an apartment.
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