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Autumn comes and leaves and nuts fall from the trees. As a man who has a nut fall from the tree I have a lot of sympathy. On my run today I ran over a carpet of acorns and wondered if the tree feels the same love for its children as I do. Does it hurt the tree to see people running over and crushing them? I know a tree can't see. But maybe it hears the crunch. The acorns were once part of the tree, so surely there is some telepathic link. Just as we are all telepathically linked to our kids, right?
The other week I saw a conker tree that had grown over a road and deposited a significant proportion of its children on to the tarmac, where passing vehicles had turned thousands of conker children into conker flour. Did their mother mourn their loss? Did she curse the fact that she had, through no fault of her own, grown in this position. A year of growing all those spiky bastards and then they just get crushed.
I suppose it's better than the old days where her children were carried away by our children and then smashed against each other in a brutal gladiatorial contest. It's amazing that there are still any conker trees left. It wasn't like the winner even got planted. It had been skewered through its heart but kept alive to carry on the battles.
A world where all acorns and conkers turned into trees wouldn't be much better though and it's very much a throwing shit-at-the-wall effort on behalf of the tree. I still felt bad about what we were doing to her children.
Until I started realising that a conker isn't a tree and that conkers and acorn are actually more akin to sperm than children. And fuck me, I've scattered so many of those things all over the world and into some places where they are extremely unlikely to gestate and I don't feel any sorrow for their loss. Quite the opposite.
Only two of mine have morphed into some other creature which leaves a good half a bath full of wasted semen. Not much of it has been stomped on by joggers or run over by vehicles (sad that I can't claim that that none of it has) but a lot of it has met an ignoble end, especially involving smearing.
I don't know if a horse chestnut gets as much pleasure popping out a conker (speaking as someone who has popped out a conker and found it quite unpleasurable), but I now don't feel so bad worrying about their feelings for their progeny. In fact I bet those pervert trees are really getting off spreading their seed all over the place and in public too. The lucky bastards.
And yet if I stood in my garden all day shooting my seed over the wall into the road I'd be arrested. Or signed up by a circus.
