A BLIPPING, CONKERING HERO ON SILLY SATURDAY

Hello Lovely Blippers,

Can you believe it’s Silly Saturday again?  I can’t either!

You can see that Mrs. HCB has been busy knitting again - makes a change from all those dishcloths she’s been making lately.  So here I am, kitted out in my new, psychedelic jumper, which I might tell you, is no ordinary jumper, but it’s a different colour on the back - and I’m sure you’ll see that some other time.  Mrs. HCB insists that was her intention to make it a “turnaround jumper” but I have my suspicions that she didn’t have enough of the brightly coloured wool, so had to finish it off with some other wool.  All I need now for the winter is a pair of trousers, and I’m sure she will be up for doing that.

Last night Mrs. HCB was furiously knitting again - all that clickety clacking with the knitting needles - and when she had finished, I could see it was a little bag, which I thought would be ideal for collecting - you guessed - conkers!  I told her that I would need some sort of hat too, just in case, when I went conkering, I got hit on the head - and you can see what she came up with.  I told her that it wasn’t a proper hat, but her excuse was that it could “double up” for a scarf in the winter, so I had to go along with that.  She also made me a little badge so that if anyone came along whilst we were out, they would know that we were on a Blip outing - what a great idea!

She wasn’t up that early this morning - in fact, Mr. HCB was already out in the garden busily doing some cementing when she got downstairs - so I reminded her that she had agreed to take me across the busy road to the horse chestnut trees - or conker trees - so that I could pick some up, ready for a game with Mr. HCB.  

When we got there, we could see hundreds of them on the ground - such a shame because Mr. HCB says that “in his day” and I think he means quite a long time ago now, all the children went out “conkering” to collect as many as they could so that they could have Conker Championships to see whose was the best.  I have it on good authority from him that some were baked in the oven and others were soaked in vinegar to make them harder, so I might need to root around in Mrs. HCB’s kitchen cupboards to find some vinegar to do just that.

You can see that I filled my bag and I even found one still in its casing, so I asked Mrs. HCB if I could hold that one when she took the photograph.  This branch was quite low down, which I was glad about, because I did have some photographs taken further up the tree and it was quite scary being up that high.  When the photography session was over, Mrs. HCB picked up quite a few more conkers, she was muttering about putting them in the corners of different rooms to keep spiders away - I think that’s probably an “old wives’ tale” but time will tell.

Time to go out into the garden and help Mr. HCB - but I think I had better put my old jumper on - don’t want to get any cement on my new gear.

Hope you all have a great weekend - keep well and stay safe.

Love to you all,

JH Ted xx