Conkers!

With the strong winds and storms of the last couple of days the Horse Chestnut trees have all shed their conkers - there are a lot of trees around Waterloo and the roads are now brown where they've been crushed by traffic. I've learnt to be vary wary where I park at this time of year as our previous car ended up with dints on the bonnet and the roof!

I was parked in the local supermarket carpark this morning, and there were so many on the ground that I decided to collect a bag full to bring home to blip as I didn't have my camera with me.

There's something nice about a fresh conker just out of it's shell, they're so shiny and look like mahogany - it's a shame they dry up and don't stay that way. Anyway, I filled a nice basket, and the lighting was great with the sunshine streaming through the windows, but out of all the shots I took, even though it's slightly out of focus, I like this one of Louis watching what I was doing. It looks nice viewed large.

It's strange to us British ex-pats, as in England children love to have conker fights with the conker attached to a piece of string, but here in Belgium they're just left on the ground to rot. I was explaining this to my French teacher in my lesson this morning and she thought it was quite funny that we would play with them, and even more so because the French translation of Conker is 'Marron' and the translation of 'Funny' is 'Marrant' (pronounced pretty much the same). So it's marrant that the English play with a Marron!