Alfie's pockets rattled all the way back up the M1. He had conkers in both coat pockets, conkers in the hood, conkers in the sandwich bag that had held his cheese sandwich and, as I found out at the Leeds end of the motorway, conkers in his socks. Rob had said ten in the car. By the time we gave up counting he was on forty-seven, and that was before anyone emptied the hood.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park was the Tuesday of October half-term, 28 October, and it was the best day we've had since Filey. I'd taken the day as annual leave, because Tuesday is an office day, and Rob had his rota day off for once, which meant all four of us in the Skoda at 9:15 with a flask of hot chocolate, a bag of cheese sandwiches and the wellies in the boot.
Free entry, £12 parking
Entry to the park is free, which is the main reason it's on our list. The car park is the bit you pay for, and it was £12 for the day. That, plus about £9 of petrol and the sandwiches and flask from our own cupboards, was the whole cost of the day. If we'd gone inside the galleries or bought food from the café, the day would have cost more, but the point was to be outside in the mud.
It was a cold, bright morning, about 9 degrees when we arrived. At lunchtime a short shower came through, so we ate the cheese sandwiches in the car with the engine off and the windows steaming up. By two o'clock it had cleared and the whole hillside was shining.
Giant things in a field
The sculptures are huge, and they are just there, on a hillside, in the grass, with sheep. A lot of the big bronze pieces are smooth, rounded figures that look like something between a person and a boulder, and Alfie decided early on that one of them was the back of a stegosaurus. He couldn't be argued out of this. "It's got a spine," he said. "Look. You can see the spine." Rob said he could see the spine, and I did what I do at moments like this, which is nod.
Isla took a different view. She stood in front of an enormous piece with a hole through the middle of it, read the sign, walked all the way round it and announced, "It's just a hole with metal round it." Then she stood still for a long time looking through the hole at the lake and said nothing else, and I'm fairly sure she was having a thought she wasn't going to share.
The sheep are real, and they don't move for anybody. One stood between us and the path for several minutes, chewing, with the air of a security guard. Alfie said hello to it. It did not reply.
The conker haul
There is a row of horse chestnut trees near the car park, and they had been shedding for a week. Alfie took the whole thing seriously, with a method: pick up, check for a shine, discard the dull ones, keep the glossy ones, repeat. The best conker of the day was the size of a small egg and the colour of a polished saddle, and he would not let anyone else hold it. By the end he had fifty-three, counting the six from the hood, which is a personal record by some distance. Isla found three she described as "acceptable".
We walked for about three hours in all. Alfie did it on his own legs, apart from the last uphill bit back to the car, which Rob did with Alfie on his shoulders and a conker in each of Alfie's hands. Isla and I took the flask to a bench and drank hot chocolate out of the lid and the cup, in that order, while she told me the plot of her new book.
At home, the conkers went in a row on the kitchen windowsill, next to the in-home display. Jean next door swears by them for keeping spiders out, so we took her six of the fifty-three, and she said she'd put them on the stairs. I don't believe in the spider thing, but there's no harm in it.
It rained properly on the Wednesday, and the wellies went back to the mat by the front door. The conkers stayed on the sill, shrinking a little each day, the way they do.
