CONKERS

Danes don't play conkers. When I once asked my wife what they did with all those horse chestnuts lying around in the autumn, she looked at me blankly and said "nothing".

I was amazed. As a prep school boarder from the age of 7 to 10, I spent most of my time outside of lessons climbing trees, or playing football, tag, or hot rice (a game where the catchers had to hit the others below the knee with a tennis ball). In the summer, we exchanged football for cricket, where the ultimate thrill was to hit a six into the next door ruin of Ashby Castle, thereby making it a little bit more of a ruin and scaring the tourists at the same time. And for a magical month or two in the long autumn term, 120 boys were focussed 100% on conkers. My blazer pockets bulged with 10-20 newly gathered shiny specimens, which I would then surreptitiously skewer in class, by using my dividers. You pushed the string through, tied a knot, and hey presto, you were ready for action.

The rules of conkers are simple. You have three attempts to break the opponent's conker and knock it off the string. The opponent then has three attempts, and so on, until one player wins. A new conker is called a "none'er", and the winner takes the loser's score, plus one. So the winner of a fight between two none'ers becomes a one'er; and the winner between a three'er and a five'er becomes a nine'er (note that it is the conker that's the winner, not the player). I once owned a conker that was over a hundred'er.

A conker from the previous year returning to the battlefield was called a "laggie". These were usually gnarled, wizened things, rock hard, and sometimes illegally pickled in vinegar during the winter months or baked in the oven. Though even at that young age, there was a strong moral code; 9-year old conker owners caught cheating were shunned by other 9-year olds.

Ooh, I am getting goose bumps thinking about all of this again. There are plenty of conkers around here at the moment, the only problem is that I don't have anybody to play with!

Walter Blotscher