‘Your mum made all these?’ I ask, impressed with the many uses Glenna can find for a pumpkin and how delicious everything looks. I had no idea pumpkins were so versatile.

‘Yep.’ He retrieves a large sandwich board from the truck, sets it down in front of the stall and crouches in front of it. He pulls a pack of chalk from his pocket and starts sketching on it. When he stands up, it’s got orange pumpkins and green vines decorating the edges and in the middle, in neater handwriting than I’ve got on lined paper in biro, is written ‘Pumpkins: 75p each or two for £1’ in swirly, fancy white writing, complete with green leaves sprawling from each letter. It’s a work of art and it’s only taken him three minutes.

‘Two for a pound?’ I say in surprise. ‘They’re, like, three quid each in the supermarket.’

‘Exactly. If a busy mum with a family of four goes to the supermarket, that’s quite an outlay – she’s probably only going to buy one pumpkin for all the family – but if she comes past here, at fifty pence each, it’s easier and cheaper to say, ‘oh, you can all have one’. I sell more pumpkins, her family gets to enjoy themselves for minimal cost. It might seem counterproductive to someone who’s used to paying over the odds for everything in the city, but here we sell cheap and we sell more.’ He lays out a handful of Roscoe Farm branded carving kits beside the pumpkins. ‘Remember that.’

I clearly have a lot to learn about the pricing of Christmas trees.

‘Oh, look, there’s Fergus and Iain now.’ His hands touch my back and push me across the aisle to where a car has pulled up next to a little wooden stall covered by red and white striped awning. ‘This is Leah. She’s just bought Peppermint Branches,’ he shouts across as a white-haired man leaning on a walking stick gets out of the passenger door and a man in his fifties emerges from the driver’s side.

‘Could you shout a bit louder?’ I turn back to hiss at him. ‘I think there’s a deaf chap in Cornwall who didn’t quite hear.’

‘I was telling her you used to work there, Iain …’ he calls over as I shake both their hands.