My Obsession With Conker Collecting Is Out of Control

Why, oh why do I pick up All The Conkers and take them home Every. Single. Autumn?

You know the feeling I mean.

The feeling of a lovely fresh-out-of-its-case conker with its smooth, waxy shell is nothing short of perfection.

The expelled brown balls of horse chestnut trees that scream “It’s autumn!” wait patiently to be picked up and popped into a jacket pocket or dog-walker’s bag. Is it just me, or is it wonderfully satisfying to stick your hand into a pocket full of fresh conkers? To delight in their shiny surfaces and smoosh them around so they clatter gleefully against each other?

As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, I cannot resist a glossy new conker. Or fifty.

(This year… make that a couple of hundred, maybe more. I am not kidding.)

Autumn 2023 has turned out to be a bumper season for conker crops, and my obsession with conker collecting has, quite simply, got out of hand.

There’s no doubt I need to conquer my conker collecting craze (pun and acronym both entirely intended).

However, aside from the need not to have piles of conkers lying around the house in pots and dishes and pockets and bags and on the bottom step of the stairs and in an Amazon box under the dining table, I thought I’d justify my out-of-control gathering by using them as “autumnal decorations”. I finally found a suitable receptacle that makes them look… intentional. Which is another way of skirting round the whole “We must haves it, my preciousssssss…!” thing I got going on.

It was the only way I could see myself keeping all of them in the vain hope that this year they WILL stay shiny and round. They will NOT go dull and shrivel into disappointing, sad little pellets. I’ll keep them all glossy and smooth and plump and…

Oh, who am I kidding.

How and when my conker obsession started

Sometime back in the late Seventies when I was at primary school, I realised that there was a large horse chestnut tree on my way to school. Unfortunately, all the other kids at school knew about it too.

Now to those of a certain age: do you discuss “stuff that existed in the Seventies that doesn’t exist now” with friends or family? I don’t mean actual decade-specific products or 1970s technology (“1970s” and “technology” in the same sentence just made me laugh out loud), I mean everyday things that were prevalent back then but have since just… disappeared. Died out. Aren’t seen anymore.

Things that were around in the 1970s that just sort of “went away”:

• Chicken in a basket

• Wasps

• White dog poo

• Tinned mandarins and lychees

• Red setters

• Woodlice that curled into a ball

• Vesta ready meals

• Absolutely no good conkers anywhere because the boys from school always got there first and had the pick of the biggest, roundest ones

(I must just say that wasps came back about five or six years ago. Maybe they went to be expats in France or Spain or something because we did not see any for YEARS… decades even. Then one day they showed up, bold as brass. My husband and I were like, “What? Wasps?! Have we gone back in time to 1979? Or have the wasps travelled into the future?”. The tiny terrorists have been invading our open plan downstairs ever since.)

Anyway - conkers. Playing conkers was a massive thing during my primary school years (1977-1983). I can clearly remember classmates Stewart Drury and Jonathan Griffiths* turning up with the biggest conkers I’d ever seen in my life, each having a long piece of white string pierced through the middle and knotted underneath to make The Conker To End All Conkers.

*names have been changed to protect the innocent. Not innocent of conker monopolisation, though. They’re definitely guilty of that.

This has also now made me think of the ordeal we faced as young Gen Xers trying to pierce a conker in order to thread a piece of string through it with the intention of winning conkers [the game]. Metal skewers slipped. Hands got stabbed. Sore fingers tried to achieve the impossible task of pushing string through an inadequate hole. How did we stop the conkers from slipping and skewering our hands/bodies/inquisitive cat? We didn’t. (Though my by-then elderly family cat did have a disdain for me that was unrivalled in the world of feline antipathy so she kept well away from the small human grappling with the pointy metal objects.)

Fun times.

All that hard work just to be able to have a conker-on-a-string that would hopefully smash the bejesus out of Gary Sanderson’s* winning effort.

*another name that’s been changed. I’m enjoying mashing up all the names of boys from school to create new characters for dramatic purposes.

Did it work? Did it hell. I never even got close to having a conker big enough to smash anyone’s champion conker because I COULDN’T GET TO THE CONKER TREE FAST ENOUGH TO PICK THE BEST ONES.

It was always a bit disappointing going to the tree, hoping to see a freshly fallen bounty, only to be met by the empty, spiky husks of those potential champions long since pilfered by Stewart, Gary and Co.

But now… oh, what a difference 45 years make. (I didn’t need to work out that exact figure, but knowing that primary school was that long ago is scary.)

Now, as a (very) grown adult, I have the pick of All The Conkers. No one seems to want them anymore, so they’re taken by just me and one other dog-walking local who swears they keep her house spiders at bay. I’m not so sure about the spiders thing and I’ve read it’s a myth, but when those critters invade your home come September and they’re the size of freekin’ DINNER PLATES then I’m willing to give it a go.

There are more than enough for Monty’s mum and me (I don’t know her name, she’s “Monty’s mum”, as I’m sure I’m “Suki’s mum” to her. Dog owners are reading this and nodding in agreement because they know what I mean).

My six-year-old self would be overjoyed to know I can now collect as many conkers as my heart desires. The thrill of seeing a shiny, newly-revealed conker that no one else has yet picked up is palpable. I love finding a double one or an ermahgerd-it’s-mahoosive one because that never happened to me as a kid.

The “autumnal decorations” I referred to is a bowl of conkers in a hand-carved wooden bowl that sits proudly on my sideboard (a 1970s teak special, how’s that for a nice way to bring the theme back round to itself):

In the first couple of weeks of October, while there’s still just enough light in the evenings to walk Suki to her favourite field, we walk past (and under) the best horse chestnut tree in the area. It has born “fruit” of the most glorious kind this year. An abundance of large, shiny, ughh-they’re-so-tactile conkers that I can’t just leave on the ground to be crushed by cars (much to my husband’s amusement, or should that be bemusement).

I can’t resist collecting unopened conker cases and arranging them on the path ready to be squished open gently with my boot.

If you told me that you don’t find the pop of a fresh-out-its-spiky-case conker completely and utterly satisfying, then I don’t think we could be friends. Isn’t it a bit like… squeezing a spot? Sorry for the TMI, but you have to admit: it’s rather enjoyable seeing a big brown shiny one shoot out. And another. And another.

And yes, I’m talking about the conkers. Moving on…

One evening last week I tried to resist collecting any at all; I literally had to look away when walking under the tree because I thought enough was enough - I had all the conkers I could ever want (not need - want. No one “needs” that many conkers). I turned my head to the sky because I knew if I saw just ONE looking up at me forlornly I’d stop and pick it up, along with all its shiny friends. But then my, er, helpful husband picked one up and said “Look, here’s a nice one…” - that was it, I was a goner. I came home with another 18 in my pocket. FFS.

What IS it about their waxy gorgeousness that I can’t resist? They feel so nice to the touch. Saying that, something changes when they’re not so new anymore.

I do feel bad that once they shrivel and lose that captivating sheen I fall out of love with them, and then they become a nuisance. It’s a case of trying to work out what to do with the dull, no-longer-delicious wrinkled balls that I lovingly picked up off the ground only a few days prior.

But why am I so reluctant to get rid of them? This plethora of conkers that you’ll find in odd places all over my house aren’t exactly doing anything (except taking up space). They’re definitely not scaring away the arachnid arseholes, for one thing.

I’m not sure I can justify the obsessive gathering, nor am I sure I can ever stop it.

For that reason, I wish to make a statement: My name is Catherine, and I am bonkers about conkers.

Thank you, husband, for that superb pun (which I can’t believe I didn’t think of myself). Now stop waving shiny brown balls in my face and let me walk past the tree untempted, face to the sky. I need to conker this addiction once and for all.