On stuffing chestnuts.

So you are trotting through Hyde Park and you look down and realise you can settle another long running argu… discussion with your husband.

‘Those are the chestnuts you can eat. See, look, not conkers.’ Of which you just happen to have a few in your pocket. The Star likes conkers.

And when the flush of triumph fades away you realise that there are, in fact, quite a few of the nuts lying around. So you stuff a few into your pockets and look up to see where your family has got to. At which point you realise you are going to need something more spacious to store your find, because the trees extend as far as the eye can see, and the only thing stopping you being set for chestnuts from now until Christmas are the other slightly bemused Londoners who have just noticed the same thing you have and are busy filling their own handbags, hats and doggy poo baggies with the free food.

This satisfies some deep-seated instinct in you which in the countryside you assuage by going blackberrying. It’s not that there aren’t blackberries near you, but you would probably have to set up a little camp in amongst the buses to be first on the spot when picking season comes, and besides, it seems entirely wrong to be eating fruit from a plant which grows right alongside an exceptionally busy road. You caught yourself eyeing up the fence to the railway tracks the other week and wondering if you could persuade B to try to boost himself over it, before you decided that no matter how offended you are by the idea of buying blackberries in exceptionally small punnets in the supermarkets, this probably wasn’t the solution.

In Russia you went mushroom picking, an activity which has all the popularity that binge drinking does over here. ‘What,’ you would ask your students of a Friday, ‘are you doing at the weekend?’ And, assuming Moscow wasn’t buried under three feet of snow which sometimes, of course, it was, someone would inevitably answer, ‘Going mushroom picking.’ Or rather ‘Will pick up mushrooms.’ Have phrasal verb, will use it regardless. And future forms are complicated.

You even once nearly became thoroughly lost in the trackless infinite expanse that is a Russian forest because of your enthusiasm for the sport. For which you blame B. His datcha, his woods, his responsibility. When he said, after confidently bounding through the trees for fifteen minutes that he didn’t know how to get back, you though he was joking. Luckily, after only another hour of stumbling around and trying to decide if you’d seen that clump of bushes before, you heard music coming from that direction and headed towards it, bursting out into the sunlight only five miles and a long walk back from where you started.

You felt better when you discovered that one of your neighbours had been gone for three days before he found his way out. I dunno. Townies. At least you made it back with the mushrooms. Just as you brought back the fruit when you got lost blackberrying in Wales too. Hmmm. Clearly you have been an urbanite too long.

The chestnuts, the many many chestnuts, made it home without incident. And you finally cooked them last weekend.

At which point you remembered why you only buy fresh chestnuts for Christmas. Because, much as you love them, spending a very fiddly hour and a half prizing open the shells with an oversized knife and laboriously extracting the crumbly meat inside is not destined to improve you temper.

Although it was a good excuse to eat sprouts.