Pumpkin

 We bought a big pumpkin a while back for sticking out front to show we're Halloween-compliant. Afterwards we'll use it in cooking,

Pumpkin, considered as a foodstuff, is bland but versatile. We experimented with one earlier this month. It went into stews and curries and muffins. The seeds, roasted with salt, are quite a delicacy- but you have to eat them hot. Leave them to get cold and it's like eating wood-shavings...

Talking About Blackbeard

 The most iconic of pirates was neither the most successful nor the most fearsome. He didn't grow fabulously rich and he died with his boots on. His reputation- with posterity at any rate- is down to his mastery of theatrics- the braided beard, the lit fuses sticking out from under his hat, the pistols slung in a bandolier across his chest. He looked demonic but there's no record of him killing anyone except in fair fight, nor of him seriously maltreating anyone. He talked big- threatening massacre and decapitation- but never carried through. Looking the way he did, he probably didn't have to,

He is described as a tall spare man with a big black beard. We don't know his given name- not for sure. Edward Teach is what he usually went by, but the name appears in various versions- including Thatch- and may anyway have been a pseudonym.  We know a bit about his career, but nothing of his origins. He took to piracy, he went straight, he took to piracy again, he was hunted down. He made a grand ending, outnumbered and fighting to the last. When the body was examined it had five bullet holes in it and carried something like twenty wounds from bladed weapons. 

He was around 40 when he died.

His killers cut his head off and took it home with them so they could claim the bounty. It was then mounted on a pole at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay as a dreadful warning to others. According to legend, the skull was still knocking around and being used as a drinking vessel as late as the 1930s...

Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, was originally a French slaver called La Concorde, sailing out of Nantes. It's wreck was located in 1996- on a sandbar off the coast of North Carolina- and its investigation is an ongoing project.