Conkering kings at their height before technology reigned

THIS week I found a conker in the street and bent down to pick it up.

- Peter Mortimer

The joy of finding a double conker inside its prickly casing

‘You should have let me do that’ said this woman who was passing.

‘And why should I have done that? I enquired.

‘It would have given you a joke for your column!

‘A joke?’

‘She stoops to conker!’

Much of the above I made up, though finding the conker was true enough. I turned it over in my hand, realising how it took me back years.

In my youth, there was a whole culture around conkers. Maybe it still happens, though I see little evidence. I found myself thinking back to those autumn times when me and my young son Dylan would visit my parents in Nottingham.

An obligatory ritual was to call at the giant horse chestnut tree in Woodthorpe Park.

‘The tree was home to thousands of conkers and Dylan would disappear up into its tall branches, from where he would shake those same branches vigorously. The shaking produced small cascades of falling conkers which we would gather up to transport back to Tyneside.