Scrumping conkers

Here’s a new vocabulary word:

scrumping (verb)

• Harvesting something from someone else’s property, e.g. picking apples from a tree next to the road.

We’ve been scrumping a number of times now, mostly for blackberries which grow wild along the hedgerows. But we were also introduced to conkers, which must be a close relative of chestnuts because they look basically the same to my naive eye.

Anyway, apparently there’s a game that you can play with conkers where you poke a hole in the nut and tie a string to the nut. Then someone else takes their nut and tries to bash your nut into litle pieces and the nut the lasts the longest is the winner. I’m sure its a bit more subtle than that, but I think that’s the gist of it.

I feel really native when I say “We’re just come round from scrumping some conkers.”