If cricketers’ leather on willow is the most English of sounds, there was a time in school playgrounds when conker smacking against conker came close. On October 12th some 250 competitors gathered in a field behind a pub in the Northamptonshire village of Southwick for the 58th annual World Conker Championships. The game involves one person dangling a conker, a golf-ball-sized seed of the horse chestnut tree, from a shoelace, while a rival attempts to break it by swinging a second laced conker.