I APPROACHED the village shop on a lightly chilled morning of rustic colours, as children crunched the curled leaves that had flopped, sighing, to the ground – passing on their way the dew- jewelled webs spun by spiders into the cities of the night.

And the keen-eyed observer would have deduced from my ponderous advance that I was still nursing the bruises along with my feelings, first suffered the previous evening, when I had retired hurt from an epic conker contest with our 13-year-old son, because of the extensive swelling to my right wrist.

This was the result of vicious flick-backs from my own granite-shelled conker – a veteran of many campaigns that, I fervently believed, should have shattered his more freshly- podded challenger, which now shines rather too perkily on the end of a string, nonchalantly looped to a peg over the trophy cabinet in his bedroom.

“Oh, the humiliation,” I whispered to myself, as I confronted the parade of apples outside the shop.

“What’s that you say?” asked a lady in a brilliant woollen bonnet, which had doubled as a tea cosy on those momentous afternoons when she entertained members of the parish’s social committee.

“I have just come second in a conker match for two,” I explained.

“Well, you’ll have to do better in future,” she said, dismissively, as her gaze left the fruit for a moment to examine me in the manner of a magistrate appraising the possibilities for improvement in a juvenile delinquent.

“Podgy,” she added, lowering her head again. “Me?” I said, with a hint of indignation in my tone.