Five facts you never knew about pumpkins

The humble pumpkin’s Latin name, Cucurbita pepo means ‘Squash the Devil’, which incantation is still used in the climactic dance display that closes the Corsican Pumpkin Festival. A cowering figure in red robes plays the Prince of Darkness who is finally flattened by a giant pumpkin, especially cultivated and blessed for the occasion. In recent years, Lucifers – drawn by lots from a list of nervous public officials – have suffered various broken bones and on one occasion a complete nervous breakdown.

Vegans can’t eat commercially grown pumpkins. Although from a vine whose family includes courgettes, marrows, gourds and various squashes the International Vegan Council have declared the pumpkin verboten on the grounds that pumpkin growers traditionally use manure which has passed though the gut of animals. Other foods banned by vegans include eggplant, durian fruit, penguin biscuits, lion bars, sea cucumber and leather fruit.

Some cultures use the pumpkin in traditional medicine, the various parts having different medicinal applications. The ground-up seeds contain high levels of protein which are used to nurture cells in stem cell research in the high Andes Mountains. In Liberia, small pumpkins grown in laboratory conditions are used as temporary replacements in kidney transplant surgery. And throughout the west, practitioners of eastern holistic cures use hot pumpkins placed on the spine to relieve stress, although admittedly this is due to a mistranslation of an ancient Chinese text.

Whereas in Europe and North America the term ‘couch potato’ is used to describe somebody of a lazy disposition, sitting around all day and rarely moving, other places, notably South America, turn to the pumpkin for inspiration. To call somebody ‘my little pumpkin’ is an endearment, referring mainly to their shape and possibly to their Donald Trump style facial colouring. But for a shaming reference they use the more descriptive, “Hey, get off your arse you lazy, fat, fucking pumpkin!” It does the trick. Pumpkin has also become identifiable with white privilege in recent years.

Pumpkins – apart from the seeds, of course - have no calories, which means that you could eat as much as you like without putting on any weight. In fact it takes more calories to physically eat and to digest pumpkin flesh so that it actually has the effect of making you lose weight. In ancient times, whole villages were lost to starvation, having grown only pumpkins for survival over winter until this phenomenon was realised. This is why pumpkin pie, for purely nutritional purposes, is stuffed with fat and sugar. Eat up; it may very well save your life.

Hip to be fooled

Meet Rastus. Rastus thinks of himself as a bit of a hipster. A few years ago Rastus would have been called a trustafarian. Rastus doesn’t know this because he is too young to know anything very much. What Rastus does know is that it is wrong for him to enjoy white privilege, just because he was randomly born white instead of a more noble pigmentation. Rastus hates his parents for not being mixed race. Rastus would be very embarrassed if he was old enough to know that Rastus was a name often used in the past by racist comedians to ridicule black men. So, because we know better than Rastus, we’ll call him Mike... which is what his parents christened him.

Mike rejects Christianity because it is the religion of hate and division. He embraces muslims because they need his support. They are misunderstood and so Mike occasionally stands with his friends and cheers on other white people holding placards saying nice things about muslims. The muslims suspect Mike and his hipster mates of being homosexual and would throw them from tall buildings, given half the chance. Mike thinks it is important to embrace other cultures. Other cultures think it is more important that they throw Mike and his friends from tall buildings.

Diversity is the most important thing of all and in order to make diversity work you have to enforce it. Because, as everybody over the age of fifty knows, with the possible exception of people like Jon Snow, diversity creates division. Which is odd, when you think about it because the people who love diversity the most also seem to hate it when politics is said to be divisive. If only others could be like Mike and educate themselves to not only not see this, but to see the inability of others to hold two opposing concepts as simultaneously true, as backward and deserving of change through re-education.

But help is at hand. Academia – the world of much cleverer people than you or me – is doing its utmost to invent, study and legitimise the assault on base ignorance. When their project is complete, white males without dreadlocks or veganism will be required to demonstrate their adherence to the multiple faiths of the inclusion industry, preferably by throwing themselves off a cliff and saving others from taking the trouble. And woe betide those that scoff at the new orthodoxy.

If you haven’t noticed the rise and rise of hateful hypocrisy on the left then you must be on that side of the fence because from the viewpoint of the average man it is staggering. Labour ministers who can denounce private or other selective education while expensively schooling their own. Commentators who eulogise about the multicultural Babel they have made of London, while tweeting from their cosy Cotswold enclaves. And everywhere the relentless assault on the perfectly reasonable desires of ordinary people not to be made refugees in their own country.

It's diversity if we say it is...

Say a word and it’s a hate crime. Observe the world as it is and not how they tell you it is and it’s a hate crime. Even overtly trying to do or say the right things when they can look into your very soul and declare you are faking it will soon be a hate crime. Just keeping up with what is now verboten can induce anxiety and mental strain and this may be your only way out of a hate charge. “Yes, your honour, I cannot bear the burden of my privilege and it has driven me mad. I plead insanity... and may god have mercy on my soul.”