9 - Autumn
Hello and welcome to episode nine of the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk about Autumn or Fall and some of my memories from my childhood. So as I said this season is named autumn but many countries like America might call it Fall. It’s the season when leaves change their color… trees will change to oranges and brown colors… and many of them will drop their leaves on the floor
Autumn is my favourite season, not just because my birthday is in Autumn, but because I enjoy the clean, fresh air, and the beauty of the nature, changing its colours to gold and brown and orange. I really enjoy this season. When I was a child growing up in England, I remember many afternoons of walking in the forests and the natural areas around my house and enjoying the peace and the quiet and the beauty of the natural world.
One of my most enjoyable memories of autumn from when I was younger and living in England was playing the game Conkers. Conkers is a game that uses seeds from a tree. In England there's a common tree called a horse chestnut tree and in Autumn it will drop the seeds on the floor. These seeds are in a large green pod, like a green… almost like a box. It's green and it's very spiky. But when it lands on the ground, they often break open. And inside are chestnut seeds. They are brown and hard. And normally they are about the size of a small ping pong ball, a small table tennis ball.
So they're about this big. So they're small and round and brown and very hard. And in the game that many children in the UK play, you collect these brown seeds, you take them home and you cut a hole… you make a hole in the seed from one side all the way through to the other to make a small tunnel, a hole going all the way through. Then you get a piece of string - maybe a shoelace or small piece of string, 20 or 30 centimeters, and you hang the seed, the chestnut seed on the string.
So you hang the seed, the conker on the string by tying a small knot in one end of the string and sliding the string through the hole of the seed. It's hanging down on the end of the string like a weight. Then you can play the game. In the game, it's normally with two people. Two children will have their conkers on their strings and one person will hold the end of their string so the conker is hanging down free and loose at the bottom of the string. The other person needs to use their conker to hit the other one. You want to break. The purpose of the game is to try and break your opponent's conker using yours. So you have to spin and flick your conker on your string to hit the other person's conker and you hope that they will break. If you break the other person's conker you get one point. If your conker breaks then they get one point. So you take turns hitting your conker against the other person's until one of them breaks and then the other person gets a point.
This game is very popular in the UK for young children. Um, and I think it's popular in some parts of America, but it's definitely mostly in the UK. Um, many children will be very proud of their conquers and collect them to win and collect points as you go from one game to the next, one opponent to the next opponent, you can accumulate your points. So you can show off about how your conker has won 10 games or 12 games, and you hope that it will stay invincible. You hope that it will not break for a very long time.
So playing this game, playing Conkers is a very strong, enjoyable memory for me. There would be a conker tree close to my house where I would go and look for fresh conker seeds, shiny and hard, ready to take home to my dad for him to cut a hole so that I could put them onto string and play with my friends or my brother in this game.
In America, where they call it Fall instead of Autumn, there is a special holiday on the fourth Thursday of November. This holiday is called Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in America, so many, many people celebrate it. And it's usually a holiday where family will get together and talk about what they are happy about, what they're grateful for. They eat a large meal and celebrate together. I think it's a very family-centric holiday. As a British person, I've never celebrated Thanksgiving, but maybe one day I will have an American friend and celebrate it with them. But so far, I have not.
So as autumn is approaching more and more here in Japan, I'm seeing the trees and the bushes, the plants changing color and dropping their leaves and the temperature is getting cooler. As autumn is approaching more and more, I'm feeling more nostalgic, feeling happy memories come back from my childhood. For a long time in my life, I have lived in Thailand, and in Thailand it's always hot, so I didn't really feel like an autumn season was truly there. So now that I'm living in Japan, I can experience the full four seasons again. And as we're moving into autumn, I'm really enjoying this cooler temperature and seeing the beauty of the plants and leaves changing color. I'm really enjoying it, so I wanted to talk a little bit about my feelings and about my memories of autumn.
That's all for today's episode. Thank you very much for listening to me talk about autumn. I hope you enjoyed my reminiscences, my memories. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you in the next episode. Goodbye.