SO, we've collected 120 shiny conkers with the kids.

We have a big bowl full on the dinner table and have played conker games with Nephew X Box.

The three-year-old squealed: "I've got more conkers than I've got pences!"

Pences is her shorthand for pennies.

Yes, it's a parental mission of mine to drag these kids back to the childhood I had - supported with input from a watchful Mother Superior who discreetly carries out an erm, full risk assessment ahead of activity.

I explain to both girls that this is the point of the wind at this time of year.

That the gales come so that the leaves fall and the soil gets fed so that in the spring the grass grows and the new leaves can grow again.

And we haven't had to throw one stick up a tree.

We used to do that, as young boys. On blowy Sunday afternoons in the late Seventies, we'd spend hours throwing sticks at huge swaying trees.

Back then we didn't realise it's not nice to throw things at trees, we just wanted the conkers.

The problem was, we were all so weedy and the sticks so heavy, that invariably we missed.

Inevitably, someone would get their head bashed by a wayward stick and would slope off home, crying like a 'big girl's blouse.'

That was an acceptable adult expression in the Seventies, but not any more.

As young boys, we all wanted to have stitches or a plaster-cast as it was a big badge of honour.

Then the hospitals started 'stapling' cuts. And our parents would say: "Billy Nicholson jumped off a roof and split his head open and has had to go to the Ospickle to have his head stapled." I still cringe when adults say 'Ospickle' or 'Chimley' for chimney.

Phill Barr was good at getting conkers down. If we were struggling, someone would go and knock for Phill Barr.

Phill was the same age us but at 11 he had full stubble and looked 16.

He lived opposite the park and was as a bit of a fighter but only if someone started on him. Never a keen student of school, Phill was mad on motorbikes, earning the nickname 'Full Bore'.

Someone reckons he once hit 100mph over a particular hill, but may be this was school-yard bravado in a time when Evel Knievel was king. It shocked me four years ago to learn that Big Phill had died at the age of 39 from an illness.

Bonfire Night was always a big time for us too or 'Bommie Night' as we called it.

We'd go 'dragging' - collecting huge branches and then dragging them across town to our 'Bommie'.

The Cairns brothers were kind of the Krays of our school year. They were virtually 'Albinos', with Boris Johnson blonde hair, hard scowls and permanently snotty noses. Originally, they were from a tough part of Manchester and were Man City supporters, so everyone feared them. Woe betide anyone who tried setting fire to the Cairnsy's bonfire.