Paris Pumpkins: a Halloween affair… myth, mischief, and magic in Paris and in Halloween pumpkins and pastries ...
Pumpkins are everywhere in Paris: not only the rustic kind, but also their chic cousins in all sorts of shapes and colours. Once a symbol of harvest and hearth, they’ve become the international ambassadors of Halloween — and the faces of myth, mischief, and magic. The pumpkin story begins, curiously enough, not with pumpkins at all, but with turnips. Long before American settlers discovered the New World squash, the Irish carved lanterns from turnips to ward off wandering spirits, especially one known as Stingy Jack who tricked the Devil and roamed the earth with only a coal in his hollowed turnip. When Irish immigrants brought this tale to America, they found pumpkins larger, easier to carve, and far more photogenic, and so the Jack-o’-Lantern was born. In Paris, pumpkins have become sculptural, painted on macarons or transformed into confections like the ones I spotted yesterday: a skull-topped chocolate cake, a chocolate ghost, a powdered ghoul, and a pumpkin pastry so bright it could light the way through a Montmartre mist. Halloween itself is a curious transplant here. France, with its Catholic traditions and Toussaint (All Saints’ Day), didn’t always embrace the costume-and-candy craze. Times have changed. Boulangeries (bakeries) in Paris sell wonderfully elaborate crafted edible skeletons, ghosts, and pumpkin faced pastries. I’m celebrating Paris pumpkins for Halloween and the cross-cultural alchemy of myth, mischief, and magic, and the delightful absurdity of ghosts in Paris pastry shops.
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Friday, 31 October 2025
Paris Pumpkins: a Halloween affair
Tuesday, 28 October 2025
Wild Love – Two Women of Authenticity
 I write today with gratefulness for two women of courage, curiosity, and steadfast authenticity, whose lives spoke eloquently to so many of us who share their generation, their sensibilities, their love of life. In celebrating Jane Goodall and Diane Keaton, I reflect on their individual light and on what I have learned from two women of authenticity. Dame Jane Goodall (1934-2025), British primatologist and activist was a moral compass. She died on 1 October at the age of 91. From a childhood of asking questions to decades in the forests of Tanzania studying chimpanzees, Goodall’s journey was anything but predetermined. She said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” She also said, “Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.” Goodall’s life of constant curiosity led to empathy, and empathy led to action. Her sacrifice was real; years away from home in England, attention to her craft, and perseverance in the face of apathy: “You can bombard people with statistics, but unless you touch their hearts, they won’t act.” She demonstrated that greatness was not about the promotion of self, but about kindness and humility. For her, kindness was not weakness. Diane Keaton (1946-2025), American actress and icon was a self-reliant spirit. She died on 11 October at the age of 79. From the moment she stepped into the quirky role of Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie of the same name, and onward through decades of work, Keaton carved out a path that was uniquely hers. She said, “I never understood the idea that you’re supposed to mellow as you get older … To continue to express myself, particularly. To feel the world. To explore. To be with people. To take things far. To risk. To love.” Keaton’s life story demonstrates that time need not diminish ambitions or the need for avoice. She never waited for permission; nor did she didn’t allow age or convention to define her. In her memoir Then Again (2011), she wrote that her personal and professionalchoices were about authenticity and self‐respect, not conformity. They moved in different spheres. Goodall’s was science, nature, activism, and global conscience influencing the fields of ecology, ethics, human responsibility, and conservation. Keaton’s was culture, performance, the arts, and self‐expression influencing how women thought of themselves and their personal style, relationships,and aging. In these differences are two complementary models of living fully: both necessary, both powerful. Both women had a sense of authenticity and self-determination, courage in the face of change, a focus beyond themselves, and a lifelong commitment to a cause. Goodall dedicated her life to primates and Keaton to simply living honestly expanding ideas of what women of her era could be and do. They kept evolving, showing that age, fame, or setback wouldn’t define their role in life. Both women refused to play by someone else’s script: Goodall in choosing a non-traditional path, naming individual chimpanzees rather than numbering them, declaring their personalities in an era of rigid science, and Keaton in her personal life and career. They embraced impermanence: Goodall stated that “The greatest danger to our future is apathy” while Keaton said, “Nothing is ever the same. Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be trusted to be there.” I have learned much from them both: maintaining curiosity, defining my own life path, acting through empathy, facing conventions, doubts, and stereotypes, aging with freedom, and transforming gracefully. As Goodall said, “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.” And Keaton said, “I know what I am by now. I know how old I am. I know what my limitations are and what I can and can’t do. So, if something appeals to me, I’m definitely going to go for it.” Both Jane Goodall and Diane Keaton lived luminous, uncompromising lives that blendedgrace, curiosity, independence, and quiet defiance that said “look at this” and not “look at me.” Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Diane. I’m closing with my poem that reflects what both women embodied for me. Two Women of Authenticity (for Jane Goodall and Diane Keaton) They walked different paths, one beneath cinema’s shifting suns, one beneath the endless trees. Yet both heard the same call — a life beneath the noise, a voice saying: Be true, even when unseen. Jane listened to the planet of the apes. In the rustle of leaves, she found language older than words — the gaze of another being, the slow forgiveness of the earth. She taught us that wisdom begins when we stop naming everything ours. Diane wore contradiction like a coat — tailored, wide-brimmed, unafraid — living between irony and tenderness, aging not into stillness, but into freedom. She taught us that style was another form of soul, and that laughter could be both kept and shared. Two women, unmeasured by time, who turned solitude into sanctuary, and work into witness. Neither asked to be adored — they only asked to keep discovering, to keep loving what is wild, what is real, what endures. And I, their quiet student, stand here in the afterglow — grateful that they showed how a life can be both fierce and gentle, how a woman can belong wholly to herself, and still give the world her light.
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