Halloween and Gardens in the Age of Inflation

Today I woke up before 10 a.m. and went to the bank and shopped at a drug store in the mall. Needless to say the shelves are overflowing with Christmas specialities: foil-wrapped chocolate balls, Printen gingerbread, marzipan, and chocolate St. Nicholases.

The drug store also sold the second battery I needed to begin taking photos with my half-digital, half-analogue camera. (We have a photography manual whose first edition was printed in 1974, appropriate for my 1980s research.)

And I stocked up on Halloween candy.

Finding Halloween candy is more challenging this year. I've been bombarding my teammates at work with updates about the 2022 Controversy of the Chocolate Bars: Bounty, Mars, Milky Way, Snickers and Twix bars are largely missing from the shelves of grocery store chains due to a pricing disagreement between the Mars company — which wanted to hike up prices — and big German retailers — which refused. (Although the Turkish supermarket down the street as well as newspaper kiosks are still selling the bars as singles, so we're not entirely deprived.)

That said, when Ge. and J. from a long walk to Tempelhofer Feld, they mounted an epic foraging spree of three grocery stores and returned with a generous Halloween candy haul in the evening, including ... 1 Bounty bar, and a pack of off-brand coconut chocolate bar minis. Their haul will be stashed in the pantry until Monday, of course.

On a less sugar-high note, I felt perturbingly feeble when setting off for the errands, though, having trouble walking normally at first and feeling short of breath. That said, it hasn't been all that long since Covid, and perhaps a lack of sleep exacerbated the symptoms. What's also funny is that I have no trouble with high-intensity exercise.

We had a breakfast of croissants and coffee after that, then T. — who was visiting us — began her epic, meticulous preparations of two lasagna casseroles: lasagne noodles, tomato sauce arrabbiata, spinach, cottage cheese, and a lighter sprinkling of grated hard cheese on top.

In the meantime I cycled off to the allotment gardens. It's verging on November, of course, so leaves are often very brown or red, most apples and quince are either gone or rotted (I was able to bring back home a little apple quince from a basket, however), and a few red apples have remained behind like raw rubies in the winter muck. While the temperatures have been balmy lately and the sun did appear later in the day, there was a cloud cover.

Many gardeners were in their plots today, gathering with friends or family, trimming away the summer growth, and even mulching branches with machines roughly the size of a high-backed chair and no noisier than a lawnmower. It had been years since I last smelled the fragrance of hot sawdust.

I did manage to nearly ding the rear spoiler of a motorcycle with my bicycle, however, by almost falling off my bike when turning into a path.

It wasn't devoid of comedy, especially when I sensationalize the anecdote into 'I got into trouble with two bikers today.' But it was dumb of me to nearly bash up someone's prized belonging.

I tried taking a few photographs of the flowers and trees. But due to the time of day and the weather, the colours were dull and lifeless in the viewfinder. Besides, the uneasy feeling lingers that it's likely there's black-and-white film in the camera (I haven't used the camera in a long while, so I've genuinely forgotten); so it's possible that all the delicate shades of colour I was trying to capture didn't make sense for the medium.

Then I went to buy ingredients for my 1701 historical meals tomorrow. We still have two bottles of beer and a bottle of cider in the pantry, but I was unable to find mead at the small organic food store. Instead I bought spinach, pears, apples, plums (from Italy), and a nice, zucchini-looking dark green spaghetti squash. We still have wheat flour at home, too, and that will likely be the base for most of the cooking and/or baking.

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On Friday, teammates and I watched the 1993 children's film Hocus Pocus as a 'team event' in advance of Hallowe'en. It felt quite wholesome, and I liked the 90s nostalgia, and was amused by some of the rudimentary acting. The special effects and staging were I think intended to feel a little fake.

But I did work overtime after the film, and didn't get enough sleep. So I've succumbed to brain fog today while typewriting and playing the piano, making lots of mistakes.

Researching the year 1982 didn't entirely go well; but I'm pretty disgusted by the Falklands War, so the half-heartedness today was partly a gesture of protest. Next week I will hopefully catch up on buying a Viennetta ice cream cake.