So. Halloween. Time to resurrect the annual hunt for tinned pumpkin. As context, I’ve been looking for somewhere that sells tinned pumpkin for about five years now. It’s a constant search. I mean, I really ramp it up in October, obviously, but I’m never completely off duty. Every supermarket trip all year round involves a quick search, just in case. But, to date, all searches have proved fruitless. Or vegetableless… but more of that later.

This year I’ve made a number of half-arsed attempts, but I’ve been pretty much resigned from the start to having to order online and then spend the next few weeks waiting in for hours on end, only to find a missed delivery card on the doormat after a 5 minute dash to the shop. I eventually had to call the search to a halt, for my own sanity. I’ll relay the inner dialogue that led me to this decision… at least, I hope it was an inner dialogue – there may have been some muttering in the aisles of Sainsbury’s…

Picture the scene: I’m rushing into Sainsbury’s, pretty much resigned to failure, but at the same time brimming with barely contained excitement at the vague possibility of finally procuring a tin of pumpkin. I can almost taste the sweet spiced pumpkin pie I’m planning to make…

Okay, where to start? Tinned fruit aisle, definitely.  Quick scan: rhubarb, peaches, prunes, pears, that weird fruit cocktail stuff from the 70s that basically looks like really overcooked frozen vegetables from the 70s, with the addition of some weird translucent white round thing (what even is that?)… apple pie filling, cherry pie filling, hold on, surely pumpkin would be with the pie fillings? Hmmm, if they haven’t put it here, maybe it’s not in the fruit section at all. Is a pumpkin even a fruit? Of course not – it’s a vegetable. It will probably be with the tinned vegetables. Although I can’t imagine it’s going to be with the mushy peas and button mushrooms either. I wonder if categorising food in the supermarket is a job. I reckon I’d be good at that. Obviously you’d start with the basics – is it a fruit, is it a vegetable… but you could have sub categories for common usage, you could do focus groups with people to see where they’d expect to find stuff… I bet they haven’t done that here, or I would’ve found the bloody pumpkin by now. Is a pumpkin a vegetable? Is a squash vegetable? Is a pumpkin a squash? Is it a gourd? Is there a difference between a gourd and a squash? Maybe I’ll just go back to the fresh vegetable section and look at the labels… ah, I know, it’ll be in the baking section. Yep, that’s definitely where it’ll be. Right, flan cases, meringue nests, those weird fingers that go in the bottom of a trifle… I wonder how many calories there are in a flan case. Oh, loads! Why would anyone buy those – that’s enough calories for a whole pudding before you’ve even added any filling. Might as well just go to the patisserie. Those trifle fingers are really low though. Although they also taste like babies’ rusks. Right. Focus. Pumpkin. It’s seasonal – there’s a seasonal aisle. Let’s check that. Oh God, according to the seasonal aisle, it’s already the Christmas season. How can that even be? Surely there are four seasons and we’re only just entering autumn, clearly Christmas is in the winter season. This is ridiculous. There’s probably an Easter aisle round the corner… oh! The American aisle! Well, it’s not really an aisle, it’s that ridiculously overpriced section on the end of an aisle with Lucky Charms, Reese’s peanut butter, pop tarts, and a load of other things that you can just find in the normal sections as well. But might as well give it a shot. Incidentally, why isn’t the American section in the world foods section? I mean, if they put pasta and rice there… anyway. Doesn’t make any difference, because there’s no pumpkin in either. Oh God. The supermarket’s about to shut. I haven’t found any pumpkin. I also haven’t found any of the other standard components of my weekly shop. However I have done my 10,000 steps walking up and down every aisle of the supermarket with an empty trolley.

Hence, the end of the search. I feel I may just have cut it off in time to retain a smidgen of sanity. If you’ve read this in its entirety, I’m afraid you may not be so lucky, for which I apologise. Good news though – a visit to my brother and his wife this weekend resulted in a large slice of pumpkin pie (delicious) cooked by my lovely brother, plus the generous gift of a tin of pumpkin from my sister-in-law, along with an answer to the question of why there isn’t any in the supermarkets: my sister-in-law has bought it all. Literally a whole cupboard full.

I’ve got a few stressful waits, searches and various other things to deal with over the next few weeks, so I’ll try to learn from the pumpkin experience. I guess the main things I’ve learned are that it might be worth spending a lot of time and energy looking for things, and sometimes there’s a lot of satisfaction in knowing I’ve really explored every option, but there’s still every likelihood I won’t find them, and the answer, if it exists at all, may have been somewhere unexpected all along. People have surprising talents (who knew my brother’s pumpkin pie would be so good?) and, however convenient tinned pumpkin might be, it’s a lot less enjoyable (and a lot less safe) to carve a face in the side of an aluminium can than in a pumpkin.