Last week, as summer gave way to pumpkin season, I found myself contemplating the final squash. Like the horror movie trope of the final girl staggering out of the woods after the massacre, this squash is the sole survivor. All her sister squashes had either been cooked and eaten or left to rot. Now, my killing days were almost over. There would be no sequel.

Or, to put it less dramatically: after six years, we have quit the local organic veg bag collective, which delivered to a nearby pickup point a bag of organic, local seasonal veg once a week. And as a result the mental load and emotional labour of having to contemplate and devise a use for various esoteric kinds of veg is finally, mercifully, over.

I approached the final squash the way I had many, many of her contemporaries. First, I tried to identify her so I could work out how to cook it and whether the skin was edible or not. “Medium-sized frilly orange pumpkin type” I wrote into Google. No match was forthcoming. Then I took a picture of it and did an image search. Still no match. For all its supposed miraculous capabilities, during my own experiments AI has never successfully identified a single pumpkin.

Usually, this is the point where my cortisol........

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