Big bottling bash and Enid

My neighbour's free gift of plums transformed into pretty food for winter.

The challenge: to fill all of this recycled glassware with fruit, jam or sauce

As you can see, the big bottle-up has started for this year. I've done a fruit medley of peaches, nectarines and plums, and three large jars of plums. I've still got to do pears, red plums and more nectarines when they ripen. Plus plum sauce, pear ginger and fennel-seed and pear chutney. Phew!
    Also watched a movie about Enid Blyton starring Helena Bonham-Carter as Enid. I hope she wasn't quite as horrible in real life as she was portrayed in the movie, but... One daughter thought she was a good mother and the other loathed her, so I guess the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Enid Blyton is probably the most unsympathetic character that Bonham-Carter has ever played; even Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd has a kind of insane charm compared to this portrayal of Blyton. 
     I can honestly say that I never liked her books when I was a child. In fact, I remember kicking a whole set of Noddy books around the living-room when I was about 4 years old, partly because thought Noddy was a nasty, silly little twerp and partly because I wanted to see what happened when you kicked a lot of books across a living-room. (The spines break). Surprisingly, Mum wasn't as angry as I thought she'd be; perhaps she also thought Noddy was a nasty little twerp and was sick of reading to me about him. 
  And the Famous Five? I was always skeptical about how many summer holidays they seemed to have, (they were always on holiday) and why they always had adventures that no other child ever had on holiday, with secret agents and spies, etc, etc. It's a bit like that with Miss Marple too - wherever she goes, someone always turns up conveniently dead. Probably best never to agree to go on holiday with a literary detective or the Famous Five!