I know I predicted the fall of conkers before the end of the month but I found some beauties at the weekend. Here they are - the first conkers of the year. Well, at least my first conkers of the year. I’m sure that they’ve been collected much earlier than this by someone else, somewhere else, but am I alone in thinking them early?
I love the word conkers. It rhymes with bonkers and seems to reflect exactly what the game does – one conker conks another until only one is left. And what about those spiky green cases that they come in? They remind me of some sort of deadly bludgeoning instrument from the middle-ages or the kind of helmet a Breugel man-fish might wear.
Talking of hats, I also happened across a beech tree at the weekend and all around it on the ground were the largest beech nuts I’ve seen since childhood. I just couldn’t resist and collected a handful, using my teeth to peel back the long three-sided pod to get at the meaty nut inside. They aren’t very large but they taste like nothing else – not quite a hazel, not as firm and rubbery as a sweet chestnut – a little like a pine nut I guess.
Conkers and beech nuts - the stuff of childhood autumn afternoons and nursery book tales read to me by my Gran around a smoking coal fire. Even now I can’t look at a beech nut case without thinking of a fairy hat - every fashionable fairy should have one.
Anyway, the conkers have fallen. Long live the conkers!
Silky from the Magic Faraway Tree. She is the fairy I immediately think of. Loved those books. And the Wishing Chair. A chair that you can sit on which flies to magical lands. Seemed so cosy and adventurous at the same time. Enid Blyton provided a lot of comfort when I was a kid.
ReplyDeleteStill does for me Ian. It is what I go to sleep thinking about.
ReplyDeleteDavid Bell commented on Facebook:
ReplyDeleteThis story should be a joke, but isn't: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378251/One-schools-ban-conkers-elf-n-safety-fears--leapfrog-marbles-threat.html