SILLY SATURDAY - A CONKERING WE WILL GO...

Hello Lovely Blippers,

Well, we thought when we heard Mrs. HCB talking to Mr. HCB last night about going out to find conkers this morning that we would be going on an outing with her, but by the time we had got up and had our showers, she had gone!  Can you believe it?  She went without us - how sad is that?

She wasn’t gone for very long and when she came back she said she had decided to go early and hadn’t wanted to wake us up - well surely she knows by now that wherever she goes, we are “up for it” and don’t even mind missing our beauty sleep.

Anyway, we decided to forgive her and were delighted when she got all these wonderful goodies out of her bag and she actually let us sit on their new bistro table in the garden.  Goodness knows what all the drivers going past thought of seeing an old lady with a bag bending down and picking things up off the ground.  I don’t suppose many of them even knew that the trees were horse chestnuts!

Mrs. HCB did say that there weren’t as many conkers this year, probably due to the horse chestnut leaf-miner, which is a small moth with caterpillars that feed inside horse chestnut leaves, causing the brown or white blotches.  She said she couldn’t even see as many conkers on the tree, so I guess we were lucky to get a few - and you can see that many of them are still in their little cases.  She even pulled up a little conker tree, which you can see at the very front, with lots of roots and said she thought it could be planted in their garden - but as soon as Mr. HCB saw it he said, ‘NO, NO AND NO AGAIN!”  He said it in such a loud voice so I think Mrs. HCB knew not to labour the point and gave up gracefully (not something she is noted for, we must admit!)  This was a very silly thing to suggest, but we think that Admirer would have been on our side because she loved trees and anything to do with nature!

Now we have to find a skewer and some string and then we can all have a game of Conkers - we know that Mr. HCB used to play this game when he was a little boy, so he knows the rules and he says he will show us how to play.  We hear that children at school aren’t allowed to play this game because of the Elf & Safety Rules - what tosh!  Mr. HCB told us that when he used to play, if your knuckles got hit by someone else’s conker, you just tried harder to hit their knuckles when you played your next shot - not that it was a cruel game, but that’s how they played years ago - none of this staying indoors like wimps playing on their iPads and TVs because they didn’t want to go out into the garden.  What is the world coming to?

It’s now very drizzly so we won’t be playing outside today, but Mrs. HCB says we can play in the conservatory, so that’s what we will do - and I’m sure we will soon perfect our conkering skills with expert tuition from Mr. HCB.

Have a great weekend, folks;  you might like to go out conkering - and if you need any help on the rules, just get in touch with Mr. HCB.

Love from

JH Ted, Tiny, Snowy, Penny Penguin and Hoggy xxxxx

P.S.  Mrs. HCB asked us to thank you all for your lovely comments, good wishes, stars and hearts for her Blip yesterday.  We were very surprised that she went out to collect conkers today because her hand is still very sore, but she said she was very careful and hopes that she will be able to get back to commenting very soon - and we made sure she dictated this!