Following on from yesterday’s blog about Halloween preparations, here’s how the flayed face came out – not too bad. The blue dye from the M&Ms ran a bit unfortunately. Olives work best as eyes but we didn’t have any in. However, despite appearances it tasted wonderful.

Caiti was a very cool zombie at our little party. Rors couldn’t be persuaded to have his face painted. He hung some binoculars round his neck and came as a grue (crane) spotter!

Her book is a French one about how to survive a zombie invasion!

Here’s a close-up of the scab on her face. Pretty gruesome and very well done I think!

We had our traditional Halloween shoot-out. This year the broken microwave was the receiving end of the bullets.

Before the shooting ...

 

During ...

 

... and after!

We finished our evening with some fireworks as usual. All in all a rather good Halloween.

So now we’re into November. Yesterday’s warm sunshine is long gone. The cycling season is coming to a close. We had our first winter walk. OK, it’s still actually autumn, but in my opinion Creuse winters start on the first of November. The trees are still colourful, although photos never seem to do them justice.

The stream that runs into the big lake has almost disappeared under leaves.

And finally the toadstools are springing up everywhere. They’re very late this year since it’s been so dry. Here are some interesting ones we spotted on the way.

I’m not even going to try to identify them in case I get it wrong and lead you to believe that a highly toxic one is actually bon comestible i.e. nice to eat.

We have an illustrated book about champignons but the only thing we’ve learned from it is that it’s way too dicey to try and work out which ones are edible!

Get your mushrooms from the supermarket – that’s my advice.

We’ve spent the rest of the day tackling Ruadhri’s room. It’s now neat and tidy again. It’s nearly killed us getting it to that state, but the time had come for drastic action. Now I just have the rest of the house to organise…