Have a Nice Rest of Your Day

A nice day

(seen from inside the Courtauld Gallery)

Have you noticed it, too? How "Have a nice day!" has mutated into "Have a nice rest of your [insert time period]!", e.g. "Have a nice rest of your evening!"? I'm hearing it all the time now. The first few times I thought, that's a bit weird, maybe he / she has jumbled up a couple of idioms? (my partner does this all the time), but it has clearly become a thing in its own right, with a more acceptable variant (grammatically, anyway), "Enjoy the rest of your [time period]!".

I do seem to recall that "Have a nice rest of your life..." pre-existed this as a sarcastic brush-off – that odd grammatical wobble between "have a nice" and "rest of" gave it a certain rhetorical force – but this is different; clearly a new, faux-friendly formula: counter staff and checkout operators, for the use of. Perhaps it is mandated by management? It wouldn't surprise me. I even heard it used the other day as a sign-off by a BBC Radio 4 news presenter, who may well have unconsciously borrowed it off the nice young man who sold her a latte that morning. That's the virus-like way these thing spread.

For some reason I find this awkward formula even more annoying than I found "Have a nice day!". I have yet to come up with a snappy rejoinder, situated somewhere on the spectrum between "You, too, babe!" and "Fuck off, you twerp...", but I will, Oscar, I will. Although I suppose an uninflected "Thanks..." might be enough. After all, retail assistants shouldn't be on the receiving end of constant "micro-aggressions" from elderly pedants as they enjoy the rest of a dull spell at the till.

It is possible that this is yet another Americanism imported by the younger generations, along with "can I get" (what, no "please" or "could I have"?) and "Gen Zee" (not "Zed"). Seen from over here, American speech-ways have always had an attractive vivacity to the young, no matter how conventional (or deprecated) they might be back home in the States. Talking of which, I'm currently intrigued by the way Americans say "it's not that big of a [thing e.g. problem]", not (as a Brit would), "it's not that big a [thing e.g. problem]", or perhaps more likely, "It's not such a big [thing e.g. problem]".

So far I have yet to hear or read anyone saying, "It's not that rusty of a car", but I did see today "It's not that scary of a situation", so I wonder if it might have something to do with "expressions of magnitude when relating to abstract nouns"? Would any of you, my esteemed American readers, ever say, for example, "It's not that scary of a dog"? By the same token, would a Brit ever say "It's not that scary a dog?" Probably not? More likely, "It's not such a scary dog"? It may also have something to do with the similar, but subtly different formula "it's not that much of a problem", which we would also say, not to mention "it's one hell of a problem", ditto. The "of" is clearly doing two different sorts of work here, one of which seems oddly superfluous to a British English speaker. Who knows? Someone probably does. Call a linguist!

Anyway, doubtless sooner or later some of us here will start saying it, and insisting that they always have, and that it is correct. See also "bored of" vs. "bored with". Nobody was ever bored of anything when I was a kid, although it's true you might get bored with boring stuff like homework, eventually. I'm not generally a language peever-pedant, though: language is as language does. Or rather, language is as people do it. It's just that some people do it so annoyingly.

What intrigues me is how quickly these speech trends find their way into general usage. Now, for example, nearly everyone interviewed on the radio kicks off by saying, in reply to the first question, "Thank you for having me on the programme!". Which is bizarre, isn't it?, as if BBC Radio 4's Today programme were a children's birthday party. It's not as if they haven't been held on the line or in a side-room, kept warm by some editorial assistant (no, not like that), with plenty of time to have expressed their gratitude for two minutes of fame. Perhaps – here's a thought, BBC – that assistant should warn them, "Please, do not on any account waste valuable airtime by thanking your interviewer, asking after their health, or using any other fashionable throat-clearing phatic noise you may have heard others use!". "Good afternoon, Sarah!" is another one; essentially an implied rebuke to the interviewer's lack of manners, for not having wished them the same (especially if their name is not Sarah). More recently I'm also hearing the deeply patronising reflex response, "That's a great question!", as if a professional radio presenter was just some idiot sitting in the audience who'd unexpectedly put their finger on something important. Well done, you!

Some of these fashionable adoptions enter the language permanently – "gotten" seems to be sneaking back into British English – while others have a very short life. It seems like only yesterday that someone, somewhere came up with "good boy" as a cute synonym for "dog", for example; now it's everywhere. A recent article heading in PetaPixel, for example: "Good Boys and Girls Star in the Dog Photography Awards 2025". But hasn't this already started to seem like a tired cliché? I'm reminded of the rise and fall of "wally" in Britain: I wrote about this way back in 2009, and I see no point in repeating it here. But if you have ever wondered where expressions like "he's a bit of a wally" came from (ah, but which bit?) , then follow the link. All will be revealed.

The rise and fall of such linguistic items reflects the endless churn of the 10,000 things, obviously. Not heard of Dubai chocolate yet? Neither had I. When I did, I thought it was a joke, perhaps some sort of euphemism ("Dammit, I've just stepped in some Dubai chocolate!") or shorthand for a figure of speech ("It melted away like a bar of chocolate in Dubai"). But then neither you nor I are much influenced by influencers, if at all, are we? So let's not even get started on the idiotic "six seven" thing, as I expect that will already be over by the time I get to the end of this sentence, with any luck. Kids, eh?

Then there's talking too much, and much, much too fast in an inaudible croak or mutter... But that's a different post. File under "I'm a tolerant man, but..."

That'll do. So have a nice rest of your web-surfing! Or maybe just have a nice rest. But don't forget to take your good boy out for a walk, you wally. Six-seven!

Walkies! (It's not that scary of a dog...)

Rockers and Poets

Searching...

I was idly scrolling through the streaming services looking for something to watch, when up popped a video of a Bruce Springsteen concert, Live in New York City. So I thought, Why not? I used to enjoy the early Springsteen albums, but never did see him live, and those concerts are legendary. Although "epic" might be a better description: it turned out to be a non-stop three hour and ten minute Boss-athon from 2001, no doubt with some of the more tedious bits edited out. It was exhausting just to watch, even broken over three nights. I mean, crikey, what is that man on? Perhaps they'll tell us in the biopic that's just coming out.

Anyway, Bruce Springsteen... He's everywhere at the moment, presumably because of that forthcoming film. Some love him as a blue-collar, truth-telling rock 'n' roller, others loathe him as a bombastic poseur: in his own words, he has become "a rich man in a poor man's shirt", who has never done a proper day's work in his life. I have to say I was pleased to have confirmed recently what I had always suspected (in a Q&A with Todd Rungren): that the risible "Bat Out Of Hell" by Meat Loaf (actually written by Jim Steinman) was conceived of as an affectionate parody of the early Springsteen's grandiloquent crescendos, histrionic story-telling, and dramatic changes of mood and tempo. This, Springsteen's signature style, is what we in Britain refer to as a "Marmite taste": people who are passionate about their music tend to love it or hate it with equal intensity.

There's more to Springsteen than those famously theatrical rock-outs, of course. Myself, I always admired Nebraska, his solo, Americana-flavoured acoustic album, and also the spikier of the releases of the early 90s, Lucky Town. But it is those first three albums, and in particular The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, that I know in that intimate, deeply personal way that you absorb and embody the music of your youth. I happen to like Marmite, I suppose.

One of my college playmates, Gerry, occupied a commodious room which tended to function as our recreational space. He had a good stereo, and wide musical tastes. I was passionate about music myself in those days, but I was chauvinistically narrow in my repertoire: if it wasn't British, and ideally released on Island Records, then it was probably just foreign rubbish. It was Gerry who introduced me to the likes of Steely Dan, Little Feat, Can, and Weather Report, and who attempted but failed to turn me on to Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill. Also lurking in his box of LPs was an album with a silly title by some American bloke with a weird name which, for some reason, I always refused to give a hearing. Perhaps it was a case of once bitten, twice shy after the ear-bashing of Escalator. So one evening – this was probably winter 1974 – when we were all lounging around, suitably sedated, he slipped it onto the turntable. I was electrified. I may even have got up and danced, but I may be making that up. Wow! Amazing! Who is this?

Ah, youth...

Music may have been all-important to me then but today, partly due to hearing loss and tinnitus (I suppose I have to blame that early love of loud, live gigs) but also due to a general disengagement, I only very occasionally listen to music. What was an essential part of my younger life – along with thrill-seeking (by any means necessary), protesting (what have you got?), or writing essays and taking exams (my superpower) – has simply not followed me into my later decades. I still like most of the music I loved then, but have not "kept up", either with the later output of my favoured artists, or with whatever the young folk are listening to today. I have never, for example, listened to a single Rolling Stones album since the disappointment of Goats Head Soup in 1973, even though Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers are permanently engraved, note for note, word for word, somewhere on my synapses.

Of course, for anyone born in or around the 1950s (in my case '54, the year the first Fender Stratocaster guitars went on sale) proper rock 'n' roll – think Little Richard, think Chuck Berry, think Jerry Lee Lewis – occupies a level even deeper than those synapses, infused into whatever it is that constitutes a person's soul. For us, all subsequent "popular" music is an edifice built on that solid foundation, itself laid down upon the bedrock of rhythm and blues. As it turned out – and it's a curious connection to make, perhaps – those early Springsteen albums sat very comfortably on what was then a more recent archaeological layer of "my" music, the verbose lyrics and the stop-start, quiet-loud dynamics of Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull.

Yes, reader, I was a teenage Jethro Tull fan, and not ashamed to admit it. If you've never leapt around your bedroom to classic Tull workouts like "My God" or "Locomotive Breath", then you won't really know what I'm talking about. As with the Stones, though, I abandoned Jethro Tull with the release of those tedious, pretentious, prog-style "concept albums" of 1972/3, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play. I tried to like them, but the tricksy musical formulas had grown stale, the punning wordplay seemed juvenile, and Anderson's trademark modulation from sarcasm to sincerity and back again had passed its use-by date. Above all, as with so many musicians around that time, even the sainted Joni Mitchell, it had all gone rather too "meta", as we would say now; that is, mainly concerned with the travails of success and failure within the music business, and the burdens of fame. I mean, frankly, who cares? I certainly didn't. So Springsteen arrived at just the right time to fill that musical void quite nicely.

I'm not going to write some sort of critique of The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, other than to say it's one of the most perfect albums I've ever heard. If your idea of Springsteen is dominated by the overheated bluster of "Born to Run", then give "Wild Billy's Circus Story" a listen. If nothing else, it's proof that school dropouts can write poetry. I suppose "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" is the standout track for me, and not just because it arrived in my life when a girl called Sandie had put my emotional life through the wringer.

Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of them cheap little seaside bars, and I saw her parked with lover boy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life is through, babe
You ought to quit this scene too...
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

A deeper dive...

I was reading Seamus Perry's review in the TLS of some recent books on Sylvia Plath ("Lioness of God", TLS 6389, October 3 2025). In it, he discusses the challenge of "imaginative overload" in some of Plath's poems in Ariel such as "Daddy" –  in other words, the disproportion between the nut of the subject matter and the sledgehammer poetical means deployed to open it – and he mentions Coleridge's criticism of some of Wordsworth's more overblown poems:

Such characteristic imaginative overload vividly exemplifies, in its own way, the phenomenon that Coleridge observed disapprovingly in some of the poems of Wordsworth. He referred to those passages in which Wordsworth deployed “thoughts and images too great for the subject” as “mental bombast”. It is a complaint about getting things out of proportion, not seeing things in their own right, and the moral edge to the criticism is a charge of self- absorption.

At first this struck me as a very apposite criticism of so much rock song-writing: so many power chords, so much screaming, so little to say. But then it occurred to me that you might equally well say that, unlike Sylvia Plath or Wordsworth, the more earnest rock writers are trying to crack some enormous nuts with a very small hammer. They want to tackle the Big Issues – religion, politics, the meanin' of life, an' that – but are imprisoned in a mode of expression best suited to the concerns of adolescence; excess energy, sex, lack of sex, cars, clothes, and oedipal rage, essentially. It's a stance and a style which can only be looked back on with nostalgia, if and when you have outgrown it – we were all wearing L-plates at the time, after all, just "Learning the Game" – but also with a certain bemusement. I hear the opening bars of "Gimme Shelter" or "Brown Sugar" now and a thrill runs down my ageing spine; but then I hear the lyrics, and I think, Really? Rape, murder, slave markets? What were we thinking? (They still make me want to get up and jump about, though...).

John Keats is perhaps the exemplar of adolescent poetic romanticism: what more sexy teen-dream poem is there than "The Eve of St. Agnes"? But had he lived to, say, my age – he would have been 71 in 1866 – what might he have been writing then, in the year of the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable? Those years were something of a turning point in Eng Lit, when morally-serious works like George Eliot's sturdy literary keystone Middlemarch were still being set into the fabric of the Victorian Cathedral of Art, [1] but that edifice was under threat of subsidence by a recent turn to "aestheticism", epitomised by the rather more naughty and indeed Keatsian Poems and Ballads (also of 1866) by the Isle of Wight's prodigal son, Algernon Swinburne. Times had changed since the Regency, and were changing again.

So perhaps Keats would have been the eternal adolescent, a Mick Jagger for his times, an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" living legend, swinging in and out of fashion with the passing years? Or maybe a Springsteen, maturing his work to match his age and the zeitgeist, but still happily confined within the limits of his chosen toolbox? Or  – just imagine – might he have produced a late style to compare with Goethe, Turner, or even Shakespeare?

We'll never know, of course. He was just 25 when he died: like Shelley, dead at 29, nearly but not quite a founder member of the 27 Club. But we do have the example of so many poets and rockers who also arrived like blazing youthful comets but then, having failed to die young, went on to leave behind them a long, dusty tail of mediocrity. So perhaps Keats was prescient: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter..."

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
from his Ode on a Grecian Urn

A bit sappy, perhaps, but not bad for a kid, really. Rock on, John.

Canned Keats

1. Or indeed Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer. I know, who?, but apparently she sold one and a half million copies of this evangelical tosh... 

Resilience

I've never been one of those extroverted types who feel the need for a whole galaxy of friends, spread across a wide spectrum from soul-mate to nodding acquaintance. My Christmas card and calendar lists are fairly short – exclusive, even, you might say – and my birthday card list is even shorter, pretty much restricted to family and a handful of my closest friends. Add to those my email "address book" – not a lot bigger – and I'm pretty much in touch with everybody I want to be in touch with, from my oldest friends, dating back to my school and university years, to a few ex-colleagues and those I have met – whether IRL ("in real life") or electronically – through my blogging and creative endeavours.

That "pretty much" is definitely a grey area, however. It's small, and populated by a handful of off-grid, uncontactable people – possibly still out there, possibly not – that I once knew and am still curious about. I think of them as interrupted, unfinished conversations that could still be worth having, if the opportunity were to arise. Some have gone silent in recent years, some I have not heard from or even about for four, five decades. They may be dead, on the run from the law, or just assiduously minding their own business.

From time to time something will arouse my curiosity about one of them, and in an idle minute at the keyboard I might feel like searching them out on the Web. However, this always feels a little bit creepy to me – after all, if they had wanted to get back in touch I'm not exactly hard to find – so I generally resist the urge and, on those occasions when I have succumbed, have never yet actually attempted to contact anyone I did manage to find. Although, in fact, it's surprising how few of them have left any trace at all on the internet, which takes quite some effort these days. Besides, at our age – early 70s and older – you really don't know who or what you might find. Which, when I think about it, is probably the reason why they may never have got back in touch with me, either. Time takes its toll, and some things are best left in the past where they belong.

After my old schoolfriend Tony Collman died in February last year, I passed on the news to the very few people who might care one way or the other (Tony had done his best to alienate everyone he had ever known). One of these was another old classmate, Ian Cropton, who, like Tony, had returned to our home town of Stevenage in his latter years; in Ian's case to care for his ageing father. I was disappointed but not entirely surprised not to get a reply to my email: I knew that the two of them had "fallen out", as we say. It was inevitable: Tony's talent for destroying friendships was truly world class. I also knew that Ian was suffering ill health himself, and had since retreated into a fragile, monk-like existence in Colchester.

After I'd heard nothing at all from him for eighteen months, it seemed that Ian might have moved into that grey area of lapsed contacts, so in the summer I thought I'd better look him up, only to discover that he had died in April 2025. Again, I was saddened but not entirely surprised. Sometimes it can feel that the swish of the Reaper's scythe is getting uncomfortably close. But, as I say, at our age...

Ian came to mind again recently when I read an ex-colleague's blog post about a road accident he had witnessed as a child, in which another child had been hit by a car when walking to school. It reminded me that, after he had got back in touch a few years ago and we were sporadically emailing each other, Ian had told me a very similar story about his walk to school in 1963, with the difference that the child seen lying dead beneath the car was his own younger brother, Malcolm, just seven years old. He was understandably haunted by this tragedy for the rest of his life, although it was something he had never mentioned – not even indirectly – in all the years I had known him at secondary school. How far a person is formed by such an extreme early trauma it is impossible to say – the lad I knew was a gentle soul with a lugubrious personality and a slightly pessimistic outlook, who later went by the self-deprecating internet tag of "Eeyorn" – but as a foundational story it did seem to make sense of a lot of things about Ian and his stop-start life.

It goes without saying that too many young lives in places like Gaza and Sudan are being impacted and quite likely distorted into unpredictable shapes every day by events like this, in tragically large numbers, and for unacceptable reasons. Nobody, and certainly no child, can witness the loss of brothers, sisters and parents in the bewildering chaos of bombardment and military invasion and come away unchanged. But people are resilient. Human history is a history of ineradicable, cockroach-like persistence through untold plagues, wars, and famines: we are all the descendants of survivors. The fragile triumph of "western" civilisation is that we are less likely to be subjected to these things than at any other time in the history of our species. So much so, that it can seem that we now experience a perverse, atavistic hunger for life-haunting memories, preferably of rather less traumatic intensity, and ideally experienced vicariously. Which is where art and entertainment step in.

Horror films and violent thrillers are the obvious examples. The body count in a two-hour cinematic diversion can be off the scale: see my (light-hearted) post A New Union calling for the typically nameless victims of movie massacres to organise as the Amalgamated Representatives of Guards and Henchfolk (a.k.a. ARGH). But dramatised dread will seek you out, uninvited and unasked, whatever your age. I was terrified by the volcano-dwelling "goons" in the Popeye cartoons, and the dreams of a lot of children of my age were disturbed by watching the early years of the TV series Doctor Who, and in particular by those relentlessly psychotic aliens, the Daleks: Destro-oy! Exte-ermina-ate! In fact, those tea-time episodes of the mid-1960s, best experienced by peeping from behind the impenetrable safety-barrier of the sofa, had an unsettling family resemblance to that pioneering BBC sci-fi horror of the 1950s, Quatermass, which my parents would watch after my sister and I were safely asleep in bed.

And yet somehow something of the essence of Quatermass still seeped into my subconscious mind: I suppose horrified shouts and screams on the TV have a way of making their way upstairs and penetrating the sleeping brain, like some marauding extraterrestrial creature. I'm sure I can't have been the only one to have watched the film Alien twenty years later with a mounting sense of a familiar dread: no, not you again... An ersatz, self-imposed, first-world terror, no doubt, but no less real for that. Then, the very next year, as a Jack Nicholson fan and against my better judgement, I saw The Shining, which scared me into white-knuckle rigidity, I have to confess: I vowed "no more horror films for me" after that.

Not least because I had seen it at an afternoon screening before, as a junior assistant at Bristol University Library, doing a solo evening duty at the Law Library situated within the university's imposing Wills Memorial Building. This was a mistake. At the end of that winter's evening session my job was to close up the library, nerves still thoroughly jangled, by turning out all the lights one by one in each room until it was perfectly dark, then lock up the door behind me, still inside a gothic cathedral of a building that would make a perfect setting for a Hammer Horror vampire movie. I pretty much ran out of there.

So that was at least one promise to myself I have kept: I haven't watched another self-declared horror film in the subsequent forty-five years. And yet, as if to illustrate something about our incremental generational resilience – might there be some sort of inherited inoculation against bad experiences? – horror films are my film-buff daughter's favourite genre, the grislier the better. Go figure, as they say.

But, perhaps there is hope that one day there will be a world in which future generations everywhere can enjoy the thrill of scaring themselves silly with fake horrors that sublimate things their ancestors had to suffer in real life. It could happen, and – please, you princes, potentates, presidents, and prime ministers – make it be soon. Sadly, a sofa offers no protection at all against bombs, bullets, or soldiers bent on mayhem.

A linocut I made in 1980...

Wildlife Documentary

We were at our Bristol flat over the weekend, which has a rather spectacular view from the main kitchen window across the Avon Gorge to Leigh Woods, as seen above. As you can imagine, it's very easy to spend a long time gazing out at it, taking the occasional photograph as the elements of the scene compose and recompose themselves, and the sun makes its way from left to right. You'd have to walk a long way to come across such a viewpoint, and at inconvenient hours, so to be able to stumble out of the bedroom to make a pot of tea, in nothing more outdoorsy than a pair of slippers, in order to witness the dawn mists clearing as the sun rises is a real privilege. Sometimes I get a satisfying shot, sometimes I don't. Like any landscape, its attraction depends on the light, the time of day, and the weather. Photographically, it also depends on feeling inclined to open the window: those reflections (not to mention the slightly grubby double glazing) can be a nuisance.

However, our kitchen has two windows. The other is smaller, and faces west, past some neighbouring blocks of flats. This view is rather less spectacular, but comes into its own when – as often seems to happen – there is some eye-catchingly luminous sunset going on outside, as in the picture below.

I grabbed this shot with my phone whilst cooking: it's not a great picture, but I liked the way the light was catching on the balconies of the next block. I had to turn off the kitchen lights to avoid internal reflections and to get the exposure balance right. With a bit more work it could be improved, especially as the kitchen clutter and angled window frame help to defuse the conventional prettiness of the sunset somewhat. But I have included this picture here not so much for any picturesque qualities as for documentary evidence. I simply want you to ignore the aerial fireworks and get an impression of the building opposite.

Why? Because the very next morning my eye was caught by some movement on that same wall, between the third and second storey windows. Incredibly, a squirrel was climbing down the vertical brickwork, thirty feet above the ground, with nothing more to hold onto beyond the texture of the bricks and the mortared pointing in between. I snatched up my camera, put on a long zoom, and took some pictures through the window. Again, this is a case of the documentary function of photography winning out over any aesthetic value: I just wanted to share what that crazy squirrel was doing.

It was clearly intent on getting its face right into the recess above the window, and was gradually working its way across from left to right. Again, why? Was it casing the joint for a break-in?

Well, the main reason I hadn't been opening the window this weekend was that we were being swarmed by a cloud of some kind of fruit fly outside. I'd never seen anything like it before. It's likely, I suppose, that this unwelcome over-abundance is a by-product of the "mast year" we've been having. That, or some one has left a bag of melons to decay into deliquescence out on their balcony. [1] Whatever the reason, dozens of these tiny flies were constantly landing on our windows, and nearly all of them would then steadily crawl upwards, presumably to find shelter beneath the brick overhang. So I can only imagine that squirrels have a liking for them – perhaps they taste of fruit, or even fruit fermented into alcohol? I wasn't prepared to find out for myself – such that it was worth the risk of free-climbing a high brick wall to get at them. Certainly, a couple of wasps were also having a great time repeatedly landing on our window and grabbing up a mouthful.

Meanwhile, down at ground level autumn begins to work its seasonal magic. Yes, yes, autumn leaves... But a certain amount of conventional prettiness is always acceptable, I think. No defusing necessary. Not until it becomes as overwhelmingly kitsch as a gaudy sunset, anyway.

1. A good opportunity to remind you of the words of that great philosopher, Marx: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana..."

A Mast Year

Until someone mentioned it on the radio recently, I had never come across the expression "a mast year" before. I doubt many people had. I knew the word "mast", but only in the context of "beech mast", which I had understood to mean the crap littered on the ground beneath beech trees, which is usually just a lot of of empty seed cases plus a few of the nuts, which are tiny, undernourished-looking things and incredibly bitter, although if you were desperate they could probably be cooked up into something marginally edible. Squirrels and birds seem to like them, though, and they're welcome.

But a mast year is apparently one in which the yield of all wild fruits and nuts is unusually abundant, and this has certainly been the case in Britain. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing anything quite like it before. Every tree and bush is exploding with whatever berries, seeds, or nuts it would normally put forth in autumn in far more modest quantities. Oak trees in particular are carpeting our pavements and roadsides with drifts of acorns that get ground into a mix of shell fragments and acorn flour as they are trodden underfoot and crushed by parking cars. Inexplicably, we haven't allowed pigs to roam free in our streets for several hundred years – and what a good solution to speeding traffic that could be – so, apart from the ones that get carted off by squirrels, they go uneaten.

We were walking in Spearywell Wood (near Mottisfont, near Romsey, near Southampton...), crunching our way through the carpet of acorns, when we came to a large sweet chestnut tree (Castanea sativa [1]) beside the path. The ground beneath it was strewn with its seed cases, densely covered in long needle-sharp spines, but all bursting open to reveal a cluster of fat and glossy-brown chestnuts. Now, it bears repeating that the nuts of the sweet chestnut – edible and delicious – are a very different proposition to those of the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) whose similar looking nuts, a.k.a. conkers in Britain, are toxic. These, too, are lying around everywhere, something that in my childhood would have been inconceivable: conkers were gathered up as soon as they began to fall by children, in order to play the game of the same name, something now relegated to folklore by electronic devices and health and safety concerns, along with the likes of chain-he in the school playground [2], hopscotch, skipping-rope games, and all the other entertainments and pastimes of my youth.

Why, kids under 18 today can't even buy fireworks, let alone pop a few bangers inside a neighbour's dustbin to watch the lid blow off, as bangers themselves (firecrackers) are now illegal in the UK, and setting off any fireworks in the street is against the law. As that rascal Raoul Vaneigem almost said, "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not blow a few fingers off has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom".

Anyway, stumbling across this natural bounty brought out our hunter-gatherer instincts. I always keep a plastic carrier-bag folded away within my canvas shoulder-bag – you never know when one might come in handy – so we were able to scoop up a large quantity of them. We could easily have filled the bag, but this would have been impractically heavy and, besides, you can only eat so many chestnuts. As we gathered them from underneath the tree, more were falling around us with a solid thud. Luckily we didn't get hit, which would have been like being struck with a mace by some invisible fairy knight, or perhaps by a freefalling hedgehog whose parachute had failed to open.

Handling chestnuts reminds me that when I was a child in Stevenage we always used to spend Boxing Day (December 26th) at the house of my godparents, "auntie" Win and "uncle" Les, who lived nearby and were classic new-towners: East Enders who had left war-ravaged London for a better life in north Hertfordshire. We were close – they had lived in the flat below the one I was born in – but it's hard to exaggerate the utter tedium back then of being on your Sunday-best behaviour – seen but not heard – on days when everything was shut and the weather was too bad to play outside. Worse, if there were no children around close to your own age – Win and Les's daughter was the same age as my sister, eight years older than me – you had to sit quietly somewhere entertaining yourself as best you could, exiled from your new toys back at home. However, there was always a good supply of nuts on hand at their house, so I'd while away the hours with a nutcracker, investigating and improving my technique opening hazel nuts, brazil nuts, almonds, walnuts, and – something we never had at home – sweet chestnuts.

In those years following the end of post-war rationing pretty much everything was seasonal: even oranges only appeared in the shops in winter. Similarly, chestnuts were imported from France and Italy for a brief period around Christmas, and were something of a luxury. These imported chestnuts were sweet, even uncooked, and it was an interesting challenge to open the flexible shell and then remove the unpleasant inner husk without breaking the tasty kernel into tiny pieces. Perhaps not as engaging as Super Mario on a Game Boy but, as we old Boxing Day survivors always like to say, you made your own entertainment in those days. The sweet chewiness of the raw chestnut was the reward for much squeezing, peeling, and flaking away. A slight stomach ache from too much tannin was the price you paid.

So the first thing I did with our haul from Spearywell Wood was to cut one nut in half, extract a small piece, and taste it. To my amazement it was utterly revolting; so tongue-shrivellingly bitter I had to spit it out and rinse my mouth with water. This was true durian territory. Which was a bit of an unexpected blow, obviously. But a little web-surfing convinced me it would still be worth roasting them, so I took a few and did as instructed: I cut an incised cross into the rounded side, soaked them in water for an hour or two, then gave them 20-30 minutes in the oven. They turned out fine: all bitterness had gone, and they were perfectly edible.

Talking of seasonal vegetables and chestnuts, here's a recipe you might like to try which transforms brussels sprouts from a chore – eat your greens or there's no pudding for you! – into something that even those who claim to hate the things might enjoy.

You will need:

Brussels (about six per person)
Pack of pre-cooked whole chestnuts, available all year round (if you don't have any I've also used unsalted cashews, walnuts, or almonds)
Lardons (pancetta or bacon)
Butter or margarine
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Trim the outer leaves from the brussels, so that you have a tight, fresh-looking core. With a sharp knife cut each in half lengthways, then cut each half again lengthways: you should have something resembling the segments of an orange. I actually tend to get fancy with the knifework and cut each half into three segments. The less they look like brussels the better.

Take the chestnuts – about half the number of brussels – and either slice them or dice them into small pieces. If using other nuts you'll need quite a few more, obviously, and these are best roughly chopped. Attempting to slice cashews, in particular, is a quick route to despair, as bits will ping all over the kitchen.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, and melt in some butter or marge.

Add some lardons to the pan – not too many, just enough to flavour the mix – and fry until they start to colour up, then add the brussels and the nuts, plus salt and pepper "to taste", as the recipe books always say. Stir fry the whole lot over a moderate heat until cooked: the brussels will have started to brown.

If the end result is a bit too oily, tip them out onto a double sheet of kitchen towel on a plate before serving. They go well with any roast, whether a Christmas goose or a joint of meat at the weekend, or even just a couple of sausages and a baked potato. Hmm, suddenly I'm feeling very hungry.

The phases of the sprout...

1. Readers of a certain inclination may be struck by the rather familiar second (species) part of that binomial scientific name. In fact, "sativa" is quite common (rice, for example, is Oryza sativa): it simply means "cultivated", an adjective derived from "sat-", being the passive perfect participle stem of the verb serō, “I sow or plant”. But you knew that.

2. An accident-prone variant of the game we knew as "he" or "it", but more widely known as "tag". I doubt very much that schoolchildren are allowed to play it at all, now, much less parade around the playground chanting "Olly, olly in, fer chainy!" (translation: I say, fellows, who wants to play chain-he?"). Ip dip, sky blue, who's It? Not you!