Each year when I see the first conker of the autumn I think: fire up the ancestral ovens! This incendiary thought comes from the Ronald Searle cartoon in Nigel Molesworth’s How to be Topp of a sooty retainer sliding a tray of the young master’s conkers into a brick oven. School cads, Molesworth tells us, ‘are inclined to cheat at conkers having baked them for 300 years in the ancestral ovens. These conkers belong to the National Trust they are so tough and if you strike one your new conker fly into 100000000000 bits.’ What do prep school boys do with their conkers today? Bake them in the ancestral Aga?
Autumn: season of mists and mellow pumpkin soups. Of new leather boots and sausages with red onion chutney, of sheepskin slippers and mushrooms mushrooming through the mulch.
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