“In Between Days” by The Cure… “And I know I was wrong when I said it was true, that it couldn’t be me and be her in between without you…”

Happiness is a Starbucks’ grande gingerbread latte in my warm car with my favourite Cure song playing whilst cold winds bite at the faces of pedestrians not attempting to jaywalk under the light of my headlights. The shops were positively overrun and served as a firm reminder as to why I stopped going out shopping on Saturdays. The busy shopping experience can be good sometimes, but it’s not so great with all those red nosed shoppers racing around like particles of food colouring in a dish of water. Although I love that it ups the spirits of people in general, you can sometimes clearly see the masks on the faces of shop assistants everywhere. Their smiles hide the faces that know they are going to have to put up with this flurry for a few more weeks for the same pay.

Christmas might be about stuffed turkeys and egg nog, but for me it’s about roasted chestnuts. I don’t believe I eat roasted chestnuts at any other time other than Christmas, which is surprising because I do find them pretty darn tasty. My mum never tires of telling me the story of when her and my dad first came to the country and went out collecting chestnuts. It was only when they roasted them and presented it to a friend that they were told that they were not chestnuts at all, but conkers (A.K.A. the Horse Chestnut)! One good way to tell the difference between a conker and a chestnut is the taste. Roasted conkers can taste really bitter. This might be due to the fact that they’re slightly poisonous, so I wouldn’t attempt to do any large scale eating research unless you are a nihilist shopping for a dialysis machine. I’ve tasted some bitter chestnuts in my time too, so I wonder what sort of con some of the supermarkets and market vendors are pulling. I never did trust those street vendors with their beady eyes and hands shaped like pound coin holders, hawking deceptively cheap conkers disguised as chestnuts.

Speaking of conkers, I remember all the playground conker matches us schoolboys used to have in primary and secondary school (conkers was acknowledged as a boy’s game whilst the girls jumped rope). I remember boys would walk around in loose shoes just so that their conkers could hang from a tough piece of string. And let’s face it, back then shoelaces served a more useful and satisfying purpose of ridiculing your friends, as opposed to ensuring your shoes don’t fly off when you try to score a winning goal. I’m not sure if the names have been preserved, but back in my day there were only two types of conker. If your conker obeyed some spherical laws, it was called a “granny basher” (politically correct, I know) and if it had a distinct edge, it was a “cheese cutter.” Don’t ask about the etymology. I can only presume it was concocted by some schoolboy who disliked his grandmother and/or loved his Dairylea. There were variations in the rules of the game but essentially it was to take turns swinging at your opponent’s conker whilst it dangled at the end of a string. The winner was the one whose conker remained intact at the end.

Yep, at this point you Isaac Newton fans are right in confusingly scratching your heads and wondering what the point of the game is. You may be doing this whilst pointing at your pocket laminate of Newton’s laws, with your finger referencing his third law of motion, which states that every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Yes, striking your opponent’s conker is the same as being struck by your opponent’s conker, so it’s therefore really just a game of luck. If you had a granny basher, the winner would be the one with the toughest nut. There was an element of skill involved with cheese cutters though, where one could take the advantage by angling an attack with the conker’s sharp edge leading the way to all the damage. But we needed to remove more of the luck element, so we introduced several other rules so that the strongest aren’t necessarily always the ones that survive.

One such rule was called “Stamps,” which was practiced mainly by the hardcore conker nuts. This variant rule made acceptable the action of stamping on your opponent’s conker if it flew onto the ground. They would of course make a furious scramble to save it and the rule further stipulated that if a crowd had gathered, they too would also be allowed to participate in compromising the integrity of the fallen conker (This rule was a good way to find out who your real friends were at that age). I remember seeing quite a few fingers getting sandwiched between flat concrete and a set of size twos in the process, but oh the glee when your opponent’s prized conker shot off its string and got smashed to smithereens by the underside of your shoe (Nothing brought more joy in the playground till simple “Tag” evolved to “Kiss chase”). There was another rule called “Tangles,” where if with a miss-swing, you and your opponent’s strings became tangled, you could both tug sharply in the hope that it would dislodge your opponent’s conker from its string. This was of course, a great rule when coupled with the previously mentioned Stamps rule and ensured many pieces of conker would litter the playgrounds, much to the chagrin of Bob the caretaker.

The true value of mathematics was appreciated at that age too, when it came to adding the defeated conker’s winnings onto your own. Upon beating your challenger’s twenty-five-point conker, your newbie one-point conker would immediately be promoted to a twenty-six-point conker, automatically amassing more kudos from the adoring public. And after becoming seduced with the adulation we’d try a combination of methods to turn ordinary conkers into super conkers. Popular modifications to try to make them tougher were to soak them in vinegar, bake them in an oven or put them in the freezer. There was a seldom practiced conditioning method of coating it in your mum’s pricey clear nail-varnish, but obviously losing half a year’s worth of pocket money was a risk only taken by the brave who got by without a regular intake of candy.