Autumn has arrived with a bumper crop of conkers

Entreaties by work colleagues to put the heating on have been rebuffed. Our heating is governed by the calendar, not the temperature. It will be switched on on October 1. Until then, we can resort to jumpers, thermal underwear and bonfires made from copious notices explaining that the heating won’t be switched on until October 1.

The trees are changing. Driving out of Salisbury along any of the valleys reveals an ever-changing vista of green transforming into a myriad of yellow, red, brown and gold. Victoria plums have been and gone; Discovery Apples are giving way to Cox’s Orange Pippins, relegating any imported apples firmly into last place, and conkers are falling from the trees.

In my day (as always, far more distant than I am ever prepared to admit) young boys would be seen gathering these up to do battle on the playground. Much too valuable to be left lying on the ground, they were baked, pickled or simply skewered and threaded on to string or boot laces ready for ensuing competitions. As a child, each season I would plant a succession of conkers in the garden hoping to ensure a steady supply of ammunition when I was older. Sadly, it is the way of the world that children grow more rapidly than horse chestnuts and I left home for university as my one successful arboreal progeny was on the cusp of bearing fruit.

I fear that conker competitions are a thing of the past, all but relegated to a footnote in future anthropological tomes of lost childhood pastimes. Soon, I’m sure, to be followed by bootlaces – I’m not sure that a conker on a piece of Velcro would have quite the same aesthetic feel or combative potential.

The oft repeated myth that health and safety sealed the demise of the conker is probably less true than reality. For children who have been raised on the sophistication of the PS4, Wii, X-box and Steam, who daily rescue the universe from marauding zombies, purple slime and otherwise invincible aliens, live battles of nature’s harvest tied on to bits of string simply don’t hold the same pulling power.

This morning an item on the news highlighted the plight of the rhino; now poached to the edge of extinction. The game of conkers, free to collect and a social leveller, has also been squeezed to extinction by business poachers who have seduced our children with the illusion that happiness is to be found in purchased on-screen battles and competitions. The world will indeed be a poorer place without the rhino; it is also impoverished as free play and outdoor leisure become replaced by conspicuous childhood consumption.