P.S…….Sunday 2nd October

Friday morning we walked down to explore the medieval town of St Valery which had some beautiful buildings and statues, found a restaurant overlooking the estuary and commandeered a table outside as it was a glorious day.  Richard and Nick enjoyed moules frites whilst the rest of us ate normal, non-squidgy stuff before heading back up the hill to the campsite for a nap!

We had a Conker tournament on Friday evening which took us all back to our childhood. Nick announced that he had a game for us all to play….which had us all worried as to what it might be, Firstly, we had to ‘choose strings’. It was a case of picking an end of string from a selection Nick was holding and then pulling. But you didn’t know how long your piece of string would be…….some were about 500mm long, while others more like 250mm. Hmmm, string?  The anxiety levels were rising.  So it was quite a relief when, string selection completed, he then tipped a whole stash of pre-drilled conkers out of the lumpy black bag he produced!

We picked 5 shiny conkers each and then set about threading one of them onto our string, ready for battle.  (After about half an hour of playing, we were all still on our first conkers….so we decided that we probably wouldn’t get around to using the remaining 4 each 😂😂) .

To start off with, we played our partners, then the winners from those rounds played each other until a conkering hero emerged…..I’m sure you get the picture!  Well, that was the plan, however after about half an hour of cracked knuckles, knees, elbows and one on occasion a head, accompanied by shouts of pain and much giggling, (those of us with longer bits of string fared much better, pain-wise than those with short ones), Nick managed to smash Maggie’s conker off her string.  It’s surprisingly difficult to hit a conker with another conker, especially if the holder of the target conker is either shaking with fear or laughter.  It was at this point that Lynn and I declared ourselves out due to bruised fingers.  

Nick then played John for about another 15 minutes, Nick chipping away at John’s conker bit by bit. John was still determined to play on even though he only had the shell left on his bit of string (see pic), but Nick soon annihilated that too.  

Then Nick’s last challenger was Richard, who had been limbering up in the background (aka having a rest and a beer).  Richard now seemed to have his technique sorted and soon the two were smashing away at each other’s conkers; it may be that Nicks conker was a little more battle scarred, or that Richard’s conker was the more robust - I really wouldn’t like to guess, suffice to say Richard’s conker inflicted mortal damage to Nick’s, which gradually fell apart. Hoorah! We had a winner.  How grown up are we! 😂🤣

During all of this, we had puzzled glances from our camping neighbours, which made it all seem funnier….  John told us that the French don’t seem to know about conkering (well not the vegetation kind anyway 😂) and he had had to teach the people in his village all about the sport when they had moved there!

Another evening filled with tears of laughter and memories of childhood. We did wonder if we were supposed to be wearing high-vis jackets, safety goggles, hard hats and chainmail gloves (although those might have been a good idea to be fair), but then we decided that we were in France and not the UK, so the Health & Safety regs didn’t apply.

Vive la France!