That's the most hilariously British thing I've seen in a long time. Their expert is even wearing a melon hat with a string of chestnuts to the live interview.
Played conkers as a kid around age 7-9. We had several horse chestnut trees along our road and I would search in amongst the leaves everyday on the way to and from school. Drill a hole in each and thread about 18 inches of string through the hole and tie a knot so the nut cannot fly off when you swing the nut at your opponent's conker. Challenge others in a duel to the death of one or other of the conkers. Draw lots for who gets first swing. Loser holds the conker out dangling vertically at the end of the string. Other player takes a shot by holding their conker in their fingers well above the other players and pulls down sharply on the string releasing the conker from the fingers in such a way that it hits the dangling conker hard. Assuming both conkers survive you reverse rolls and continue. Winning conkers names increment so a one-er, two-er, three-er and so on. I once had a seventeen-er but the accumulated battle damage eventually spelled disaster.
The World Championship seems very fishy to me - firstly someone involved in setting up the conkers (inflating the footballs) should not be a competitor. Second having been caught with a steel imitation conker in his pocket how can he be cleared? He can't prove he didn't use it surreptitiously and so should be disqualified.
As someone that roasts and eats chestnuts, it's kind of odd to play with them. I suppose you ate many and also played, or are they simply not eaten there?
The ones used for conkers are horse chestnuts (typically round in shape), not the same as the ones that are eaten which are spanish chestnuts and normally have flat sides.
> The World Championship seems very fishy to me - firstly someone involved in setting up the conkers (inflating the footballs) should not be a competitor.
Clearly, considering the incredible stake at play here, it’s entirely outrageous. /s
> Second having been caught with a steel imitation conker in his pocket how can he be cleared? He can't prove he didn't use it surreptitiously and so should be disqualified.
The game is recorded so you can tell which conker he did or did not use. But just in case you didn’t notice, the reason it’s a media sensation is because the whole thing is ridiculous and therefore funny. There is no point in cheating at conker.
Conkers is a traditional children's game in Great Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees—the name 'conker' is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other's conker until one breaks.
Can confirm that we had very elaborate rules for our conker championships in school in Ireland in the late 90s and early 00s.
The lore ran deep too - conkers were varnished in different ways, hardened in front of fireplaces, secret conker trees were coveted, rules were sometimes broken, airplanes were usually not allowed, disputes were not always mitigated, the occasional teacher grumbled. Fun was had.
Two lads set themselves up in the business of selling conkers one year.
Any accidentally dropped conkers were stamped on by any and all in the vicinity.
A conker that survived to the next year was considered "seasoned", although many's the wizened tippex-covered lump of questionable provenance appeared under this explanation.
We had an explicit "no stamping" rule, which could be overturned by agreement before a game.
Actually, we used to have a rhythmic string of rules which were very sayable, which I can't remember, along the lines of "no stamping no biting no _____ no _____ no ...", with a list of things, and a rhyme or two in there. I'm going to ask any old friends I run into and see if I can get the full thing back again.
I'm pretty sure the first two were no stamping and no biting though. If you'd anything like that, I'd love to hear it!
I learned about conkers when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time...
"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.
The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."
Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.
I had HGttG first read to me when I was 10. I'm 40 now. When I first saw the cheater story yesterday, I had the most awaited "ooohhh" reaction of my life.
Originally, I figured that conkers were some sort of candy bar.
For me, the whole notion of there being a professional conkers league, and its longtime judge, real old chap, using a steel replica to cheat, reads like something Douglas Adams could invent.
It would, but depending on the dictionary there might not be much, if any, context about the game.
You could get a simple “Concker(n), colloquial name for the seeds of the horse chestnut tree” or “Conckers(n), traditional game played mainly in the British Isles with seeds of the horse chestnut tree” – a concise definition of the what without any detail of the game or its cultural significance (it was a big thing for a short time each year back when I was of school age, and had been for generations).
“when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time” suggests this was quite some time ago, so further lookups might have required a physical trip to a library, rather than just clicking a link or throwing a term at an online search engine.
You'd need an encyclopedia to have any real chance of understanding what kind of game it is, a dictionary typically only gives very small amounts of context.
I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades.
I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written
So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.
But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?
To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.
It's a childhood story dressed up in sci-fi. If an American child had told it, they might have said they demanded baseball cards, and the amused captain would have given them food, booze and "lots of baseball cards, of course". Children all over the world occasionally make demands of adults and are thrilled when the adults oblige them; their bold dare paid off! Children make up games at school, so when all the chestnuts fall off the trees, children make a game from the mass availability of chestnuts.
It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.
It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]
Re your last note (which is hilarious) I was hugely amused to discover that many Americans reading in Potter about Filch "punting" the kids across the temporary swamp assumed he was kicking them over rather than using a flat bottomed boat. Understandable but much funnier than the original intended.
Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote.
It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.
Absurdist humour, Hitchhiker's is full of it, as is Discworld. Aggressive Britishisms as well (like conkers and tea references), like in the Cornetto trilogy.
It's almost like people upvoted it or it's quiet. Commenting on it won't help; downvote it if you want, upvote things you do want to see.
I for one am here for the random things that pop up on occasion. I have zero interest in LLMs and crypto-bollocks (mainly because I'm not earning money off of it)
When I was a kid (many years ago) me and a friend once went "conkering" down quite a posh road with several horse chestnut trees on it. We had collected a few good ones when a guy came out of his house and called us over. We thought "Oh dear, get off my lawn time", but no! He had big bin full of conkers that he had picked up from his garden, and invited us to choose from them.
Reminds me of trying to cheat myself in 70's by making a lead conker (painted to be right color). It got confiscated at school as being dangerous (lump of lead on a string) before I could even use it.
Conkers is half about cheating anyway - baking it to make it rock hard, or soaking in vinegar to make it rubbery and resilient.
So the bit about UK food being attrocious is unfortunately true from my limited experience but the country itself has a lot of beauty, I think, as long as you look in the roght places.
There's this quote from Andy Warhol that I think has great explanatory power:
> What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
The UK has the exact opposite of this. Everything that's for sale here is finely graded according to the buyer's budget and taste. Where someone chooses to do something as innocuous as their grocery shopping in the UK says an awful lot about them.
If you visit the UK without an awareness of all these little class indicators, you'll probably find yourself frequenting establishments that target the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, because discretion is highly valued by those at the top. There is truly excellent food to be had here - British cheeses win more international awards than French ones, for example - but if you don't know where to find the good stuff, you'll end up getting the slop the lower orders have to put up with.
> The UK has the exact opposite of this. Everything that's for sale here is finely graded according to the buyer's budget and taste. Where someone chooses to do something as innocuous as their grocery shopping in the UK says an awful lot about them.
Just sayin', I went shopping in... Denver? Let's just say that there was a mall with a bunch of shops and further down the street another bunch of shops.
The public at Nordstrom was wildly different than at the Gap which was also different than the one at Ross.
Similar story for stuff like Walmart versus Whole Foods.
The US has a lot of social stratification, too. They just like to ignore those parts, especially in their advertising.
In Watching the English, Kate Fox gives a thorough explanation of how much she can pin down someone's social class by what they buy at Marks and Spencers (which is a department store that's branched out into groceries). I forget the exact details, but I think it was that doing a full food shop there made you upper-middle class, buying some food items there made you middle-middle class, and buying food items for special occasions there made you lower-middle class. Buying clothes from M&S makes you middle-middle class, and buying homewares makes you lower-middle class. The upper class don't shop at M&S at all, and the working class only buy clothes or homewares from there if they want something special. (I think - it was a while ago that I read it.) And that's just one shop.
Everywhere does social stratification, but nowhere does it like Britain.
'Watching the English' is nearly 40 years old now and a lot of things have changed. M&S is no longer hugely more expensive than other stores, for food I think Waitrose has taken its place.
Also this article is veering into the idea that class is all about money, which may work in the US but is far from being true in the UK.
Honestly the focus on financial stratification here highlights the differences between what class means in the UK and the US.
In the US class distinction is (almost) entirely down to money. If you’re rich you can buy nicer things than someone poorer and so you can be immediately sorted into a higher social class.
In the UK just because you’re rich that doesn’t make you upper class. British society is riddled with subtle dress coding, language, and social cues designed to trip people up and differentiate the nouveau riche from the real old money aristocracy.
This is generally true but not entirely. The UK like most other countries is becoming more like the US (think tech tycoons, celebrities, 'influencers'). And the US has always had some pockets with similar (though less rigid) class distinctions (think WASPs and places like Martha's vineyard, parts of New England and 'old' New York, many parts of the South).
True, but even in the UK, I imagine that once you have the money, the next generation will be integrated, if you want to. You'll live in the right neighborhood, your kids will go to the right schools, problem solved.
It's just slower and doesn't include you directly, true.
Oh no, 'climbing the greasy pole' takes at least three generations. The 'right neighbourhood' is itself a complicated concept, because the working and middle classes in the UK live cheek-by-jowl. I live in a street of rundown Victorian working-class houses that are so close to each other and the street that everyone has net curtains in their windows to stop passers-by from seeing in, but from my bedroom window I can see into the back gardens of the comfortable 1930s middle-class houses in the next street, which have leafy front gardens to provide privacy. As for schools, much of the middle-middle class and all of the upper-middle and upper class pay fees to educate their children at private schools, some of which charge more than a software engineer's salary in annual fees.
Having money doesn’t easily buy you a hereditary lordship. You might be able to buy a load of land but probably not a prestigious ancient estate because the families that own them would usually rather let them fall into disrepair than sell them.
Money will buy your kids a place in prestigious public (read: private) school so they can rub shoulders with upper class kids and have connections when they grow up. But those upper class friends will always know that you and your kids are really just jumped up middle class since your great great great great grandfather wasn’t the Duke of Norfolk or some such.
For reference Kate Middleton’s family are wealthy multi-millionaires, and have been wealthy going back to the 19th century. When she married Prince William the press still waxed lyrical about the fact that the Prince of Wales was marrying a “commoner”.
Really the only rock solid way to wash away the middle class stink from your kids is to marry into the real top level of the upper class.
Do you know of some examples of dress, language, or social cues? Would it be possible to 'fake it' do you think?
I find it fascinating that being viewed as nuveau riche is a bad thing or 'lesser than' old money, when the money all buys the same access and privilege.
In the states we have New England waspy types that have families that go back to the mayflower or whatever. But it's pretty easy to ingrain yourself in their small society (as long as you have assloads of money), and flat out lie about your background if needed. I'm wondering if it's the same in the UK or not.
You can't fake your way into the upper class in the UK, because they all know each other already. As for behaviour, dress and speech, the standard books are:
* Noblesse Oblige[0] Mostly about vocabulary, and very outdated (1950s)
* The English Gentleman[1] Only about aristocratic men, and comedic in style
* Class: A View from Middle England (Jilly Cooper) Very 1970s
* Watching the English[2] Not specifically about social class, but class comes up a lot.
Not sure where you've been eating, but even Birmingham—my unfashionable British hometown—has nine Michelin star restaurants within a short drive.
I grew up in the UK but I've lived for 15 years all over the US, and it's always confused me that Americans are convinced that British food is bad. On a whole, British supermarkets have far better produce, in both quality and diversity. UK restaurants run the gamut from cutting edge fine dining and wonderful traditional food to home-grown variants of immigrant cuisine. It's a great place to eat.
My home town is legendary for Indian restaurants—to the extent that Birmingham-style Balti curries have made their way back to India. Before you claim that this is Indian food, not British, can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants?
Home cooking is far more popular in the UK than the US: anecdotally, most British people cook most meals at home, while few of my American friends know how to boil an egg and rely almost entirely on take-out. British celebrity chefs and cooking shows are famous worldwide. It's odd to claim that British food sucks while binge-watching our prime-time baking show!
I love America and a lot of things are better over here, but food—unfortunately for me—is not one of them.
When I read comments like yours I wonder how you define "all over the US." Obviously, that is nowhere near enough time to experience the breadth of culture that spans the US, so I'm guessing just a few specific locations. It's the only explanation I can come up with for your generalizations being completely opposed to my experience (and I've spent more like 50 years living all over the US...).
FWIW, I'd say that while Gordon Ramsey is a good cook, obviously, he's a celebrity because he's hilarious. That is definitely something I will give credit to the British for.
I think the trope is that British cuisine, that is, dishes that are uniquely British, are bad. Not that there isn’t good food there. Being a rich country, an empire, and part of Europe means you can have many, many different cuisines there though, and like you said many are very good.
Requiring something to be "uniquely British" to count as British cuisine seems like a pretty high bar. Are burgers and apple pie "uniquely American"? Not sure – and who even cares?
My Romanian grandma, born in the 1920s, that never traveled more than 100km from her birthplace and never saw even the Black Sea, would beg to differ :-p
Depends greatly on where you are. London is great for food. I can see how someone from say, France or Spain, would find the average standard of food in the UK as a whole to be pretty bad. However, when this kind of critique comes from the other side of the pond I am a bit baffled, as food quality also tends to decline precipitously outside of major cities in the US (with exceptions, obviously).
I don't agree; find better places to eat. I for one loved the steak & kidney pie with a guiness I had after hiking a mountain. Don't take sad Wetherspoons food as an indicator of British food.
This is like concluding that Japanese food is terrible because the idea of eating raw fish grosses you out. (Also, it's "steak and kidney pie" as a unit, not a steak accompanied by a "kidney pie".)
The UK never conquered Argentina or Brazil yet if you'd look at football fans in both countries you'd think Argentina or Brazil not only invented football itself, but they also built an entire cult around it :-p
I would argue that "Counquer countries 10x your size" is a misrepresentation as generally the British (and other European powers) conquered lands in which there were multiple small kingdoms or relatively sparse populations of tribes or similar. That is certainly the case in North America and Oceania and I would argue also the case in India and Africa too.
India for sure wasn't conquered that way. Yes, there was a lot of "divide et impera" going on, but just one simple example, the population of Bengal was about 40 million in 1800 while that of the UK was only around 10 million.
Britain didn't actually "overpower" India as much as gain traction by presenting themselves as a less bad alternative than some of the existing ones, for several major regions they conquered. They were even financed by major Bengali bankers for their conquest.
India was possibly the big outlier in this regard, ergo the whole "crown jewel of the empire" angle.
I'm surprised they pick their conkers out of a bag. The whole fun when I was a kid was competing for who could find the toughest conker. Common cheating methods included putting it through the tumble dryer to dry it out (Mum didn't love that) or soaking in vinegar. If you're pulling conkers out of a bag I think each match is basically a coin flip, unless there's much more technique I'm missing?
As someone that played it over 60 years ago, there is quite a bit of technique involved - for example, aiming to hit the opponent's conker accurately and hard.
Wouldn't that newton's-second-law your own conker just as hard though? As the aggressor you get to choose the points of contact, which must be where the accuracy comes in. If you can strike your opponent downwards you're more likely to knock them off the string and lead to Stamps.
Interesting. I can certainly see how brittleness is probably fatal. But a soft one won't be any help at breaking your opponent's conker, either, right? Unless speed of your conker can overcome the increased inefficiency of transmitting energy into the opponent's...
Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article? Or are you expected to have to google it?
Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.
It's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones. The boredom of the pre-smartphone era led to all kinds of ingenuity. Kids were bored so they found ways to not be bored. Nowadays everybody is addicted their phone, simple pleasures such as violently smashing two nuts together no longer have the same pull.
They are where I live, both elementary and secondary schools. The first results are promising; kids have more concentration, interact socially with each other more, etc.
I mean if it's a school where they also have to carry laptops and use digital schedules I don't think it makes a difference, but it's a good first step.
One issue was that each phone also has a camera, so people would seek out / make trouble on purpose, spy on people and post it online, etc.
I saw on the wikipedia page the following totally stupid reason for the ban in some schools:
In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]
Interesting, as conkers are seeds (not a nut) - so shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy - though no doubt some people are allergic to them.
It's not quite that simple. The line isn't quite as hard between seed and 'nut'. Namely people may commonly refer to things as a nut when it is a seed.
e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.
Very true - I'll admit that while I knew that peanuts are legumes not nuts, I didn't know that the others you mentioned were not nuts. I learn something new every day (and my son has a severe allergy to many of them - though not all - so I should know these things!).
And while I know my son can safely play with conkers, we most certainly have not tried to eat one!
Ultimately it depends on the semantic meaning when you say 'nut'. They are not 'nuts' in terms of the technical definition, but they are in terms of 'what most people think of when you say nut'.
There's also some things with nut in their name. c.f. Nutmeg, coconut.
As others have mentioned, same kind of deal with 'berry'.
And to follow up, if you're travelling abroad it's worth noting that some countries have different naming structures/separate out the families of 'nuts'. So be careful if you're asking if something has 'nuts' in, there can be a language barrier. e.g. tree nuts vs. Lupins (peanut family).
This rabbit hole goes deep. Berries are particularly poorly named - stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries but tomatoes and bananas are.
This is only a problem if you mistake words for scientific classifications, instead of ways to convey meaning between communicating humans.
Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.
I was sticking with the context of the GP though. Maybe its pedantic to point out that many berries aren't technically berries, but that's much the same as the point that many nuts are actually seeds.
> stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries
Yes they are
> tomatoes and bananas are
No they’re not.
The word “berry” is much older and more fundamental to language than the technical botanical definition that a tiny minority of people know or care about.
You clearly understand that there's a difference between the colloquial name and the scientific definition. In the context of the GP comment, the discussion was related to nuts that are poorly named (like peanuts and tree nuts that are actually seeds).
Strawberries aren't berries and tomatoes are. You can say that's wrong all you like, but in the context of how they are botanically classified rather than what we named them you're incorrect.
Imagine if someone said "this chair is an object", and you told them they were wrong, because in Object-Oriented Programming, an "object" is an abstract entity in a computer program, not a thing in the physical world.
They have never heard of object-oriented programming and yet, they're not wrong. You're the one who is wrong by assuming the terms made up by a niche field override common language used by everyone.
I'm one of that 'too young to be a millennial, too old to be a zoomer' cohort and we definitely played it in the '00s, I vaguely remember the rumours of it being banned encouraged its popularity quite a bit. They also banned British bulldog around that time so we renamed it 'hot dog' and carried on!
<The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.>
I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.
It is a myth that it was banned nationally for health & safety (“nanny state”) reasons, as was incorrectly reported in the press (mostly in the red-top papers), but some schools certainly did ban the game.
This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.
Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).
The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.
Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.
> The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.
It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.
I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.
The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.
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[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…
Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety."
Not a myth. I went to school during the twilight of the conker. It absolutely died because risk-averse teachers banned it, to howls of protest from us kids.
Drilling/punching the hole in a conker might be vaguely dangerous, and you're not supposed to carry a stabby tool at school anymore. But the game itself is not that dangerous, though that won't have stopped some schools from banning it.
I'm between your ages and we played it. Not a lot, it definitely occupies a larger area of national psyche than it's played I think, but we did. Yes school banned it, but when did that ever stop us?
Imagine swinging two stones (many techniques to harden conkers including the game itself evolving the brutes by elimination) together at high speed with fingers and faces in very near proximity.
I can't really visualize the amount of momentum involved, or how sharp the chestnut is. Is that specifically about eye injuries, or could it hurt someone some other way?
After writing the above comment, I watched videos of people playing conkers and now I understand how it could, in theory, cause an eye injury. It was hard for me to visualize how close the defender's conker is to the defender's body before seeing the video. I was somehow wrongly imagining that it was being supported on a much longer string or with the help of other objects somehow.
Yes. Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school. My dad seemed to find the concept of fake conkers amusing enough to take it upon himself to craft me a resin filled one, although it didn't fool any kids.
In more recent years a bus driver complained to me conkers are not legal tender as I placed some down while in search of change. Around this time of year you will find most people have their pockets filled with conkers. </dev/random>
> Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school.
Same, but with peonzas/trompos[0]. It's interesting since it's also about breaking the other player's item thanks to the inertia provided by a string.
In short, they're hardcore spinning tops: large, generally with a metal tip, spun much faster due to the string winding, and as mentioned, the objective is to crack the other player's.
I did not know it was possible to break those things to be honest. We made a circle with a string or something, and then let the two spinning tops (as we called them) duke it out, and the loser is the one knocked out of the ring.
Ours were made from a very tough plastic, either nylon or HDPE.
As well as the old myth that putting a conker in the corner of a room will ward off spiders building a web there. The veracity of which, attest to I cannot.
It is a very, very British thing. A generation or two ago, almost everyone played it at school and it was Very Serious Business. I guess you needed something to occupy yourself before Pokemon Go was invented.
I have fond memories of playing conkers in primary school. Sometimes you got a rapped knuckle but children's sports is full of cuts and grazes, and it didn't hurt as much as slaps anyway. The main issue was that some kids would inevitably harden their conkers by putting them in the oven or lacquering them, and so on. But spotting that was part of the charm.
Being of a geeky bent, I tried them all. It never worked. They go brittle and shatter, or they go soft and fall apart.
(When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).
Yes, it was a big deal when I was in school in the 70s. Everyone played. There were never any conkers left unclaimed under any Horse Chestnut within a mile of the school. We all tried lots of tricks - soaking in vinegar, baking in the oven - practically anything was allowed, but I'm not sure any of it made a difference. It could be pretty painful as getting your hand hit by a high speed conker was common occurrence, but I don't recall anyone getting any lasting injuries.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article?
Absolutely. Very well known.
My Youtube-fu is not with me, so I can't seem to locate this video on Youtube, but see this BBC Archive footage from 1971 that was posted on Instagram[1] from a BBC News Report entitled "Conkers is no longer a kids' game."
I feel there is enough in the article to build an image of the game in your head: I'm imagining a game game where two people trying to destroy the other person's chestnut by whirring and hitting the chestnuts on the end of strings. Now I'm going to go check my mental image against wikipedia.
It's not a sport, it's something that kids used to do pre 1950s. People were poor, didn't have manufactured "stuff", so they made their own toys out of simple things like stones, sticks, old wheels etc Football was likely popular because a single ball could keep a while bunch of kids happy for an afternoon (if someone could actually afford a ball).
I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
> And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
It would be nice if we stopped stigmatising play. Growing up doesn't mean we stop playing. Acting grown-up might mean stop playing, but it's just that — an act, and a likely childish one. Real adults don't give up on what brings them joy.
Back when I was a teenager, I used to also have similar thoughts as the person you replied to about not playing with toys because it was childish behavior.
Luckily, I grew out of that and I do not feel self conscious when playing as an adult or being goofy.
>To carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
I don’t mind the nit on word choice but in my mind a game becomes a sport by the existence of a Championship match and title.
Also, I think this follows how most sports come to be. They are started as child play, when we have the time/leisure/energy, then they eventually become something some of us want to continue with as adults and the rest of us will pay to watch because we enjoy the sport so much (often fostered during youth play).
There are dozens of sports that I have no interest in simply because I wasn’t exposed to them as a kid. As an older American, we did not play Soccer(football) when I was a kid. It’s pretty popular now and my kid has had me go to professional games and such but I still just don’t really understand the game/rules/strategy or fully appreciate the difficulty of things that occur. I could learn I suppose but I still just have little effort in doing so as a middle aged person. I could say the same about Cricket and a handful of other sports that I never played as a kid but know are popular elsewhere. Likewise, when people move to the US, it usually takes them a while and likely never fully get into American Football and Baseball. Basketball has become more global and so I do expats that follow that sport. More likely than not, they follow the sports that interested them as a kid and just live with the time zone issue.
> I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Did you grow up in a city? I'm mid 30s and we used to regularly play conkers in the village where I grew up.
I played conkers in the 90's, my kids (7 and 10) play conkers now. We even have debates on whether applying nail polish is considered cheating - it is, it totally is! What's more, I was brought up in a poor area of Manchester, they've been brought up in quite an affluent area of Oxfordshire - so couldn't be any different!
I'm an 80s kid and we passionately played conkers at my primary school. We used to hang them on shoe laces or string, by burning a hole through the middle with a heated awl or kebab rod.
Cheating was always rife with people using all manner of techniques to try to preserve and strengthen their conkers: soaking in vinegar, baking them, coating in nail varnish, &c.
Pretty sad to hear it's fallen out of fashion, as it was good, cheap fun and, with long enough string, not very dangerous.
Round here, in the olden days the kids would fashion a crude type of ball called "basse" by cutting up a broken bicycle inner tube into a bunch of small rings, threading all the rings on a piece of string and tying this mess up in a particular way to form a roughly spherical object.
It does not roll well at all, but the kids stand around in a circle and kick the basse around to each other, trying to keep it in the air. If you cause it to fall to the ground, you lose.
I went to first school (3 tier system, first, middle, high) in the 1970s and we played conkers in the school yard in the 1970s, and into the mid 80s in middle school too. By the time I reached high school they'd been banned.
I see parents and children collecting horse chestnuts in the local market square and arboretum still today though, and it brings back fond memories of rapped knuckles and entanglement "clingy-niner's" or "clinchies" in some games, depending who you were playing with.
I think whether or not you grew up with a significant local population of 'conker trees' probably had a lot more to do with it than age. I'm younger than you (and didn't grow up 'poor') and we played too, 'pre-50s' is ridiculous.
I played conkers in the 80s, everybody in the school did. People had tricks like coating their conkers in gloss etc. but it was still a widespread game.
Played football and British bulldog type stuff too but conkers came in season for a bit every year.
Yeah, very much fron the 1950's 'Beano' era, but it did still go on in the mid 90s, at least in a wild throwing them about the place as entertainment. It was indeed a simpler time.
A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)
> I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Extremely common for kids to play this at least into the mid 2000s where i'm from, i moved away so i don't know if they still do
You make a hole through your 'conker' (horse chestnut, not the edible type) and thread a string or a bootlace through it.
Then you take turns.
One holds their string still and lets the conker hang down, the other gets a swing at it with their conker. Whoever's conker lasts the longest is the winner.
There were all sorts of rumours about baking them, or soaking in vinegar or what have you to harden them up, but effectively it's the sort of game that a bunch of kids can play under a horse chestnut tree with relatively few props.
Using a steel 'ringer' in that circumstance would be the worst sort of unsportsmanlike behaviour.
We used to have a BBQ skewer that we used for various purposes, including adding holes to belts. We'd heat it up on the gas hob and then burn a hole through the conker. I actually still have the same one I've inherited in my kitchen drawer. If you have an awl, you could use that instead, but I'd recommend heating it to get a cleaner hole.
You need to use a long enough string. Old cotton shoe laces are actually perfect as the aglets make threading that much easier.
The force of one conker against another is enough to sometimes make it spin round, but not enough to do any real damage. You just need a long enough string that your fingers are not in the firing range. Obviously there is a vanishingly small risk of a piece of conker ending up in the eye but I never witnessed that or any other injury happening. The biggest problem was usually upset kids when their prized conker got destroyed.
The memoir Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing describes using a heated icepick.
You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.
I'm not from Britain, but we used to craft with chestnuts. We always used a small hand drill (Wikipedia tells me it's called a gimlet). I assume it's the same in Britain
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Not usually in my experience, the string isn't that short and you're holding it at one end. Injury is still possible though, but that's part of the fun!
A gimlet? Hammer and a thick-ish nail? Honestly I can't remember how we used to do it. Might even have used a hand drill at some point. They're fairly soft when you've made a hole in the shell, so you might get away with a screwdriver?
When at school we probably made do with a compass (the drawing kind), as we all had them. I'm sure that resulted in a pretty high rate of conkers being destroyed before they could be strung, and a lot of ruined compasses.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Generally not, though the game isn't without its minor hazards :)
If my memory serves me: you used to announce your conker as a “two-er”, or “three-er”, for example, to inform your opponent how many conkers your particular conker had previously claimed. If your opponent decided to challenge you and won then they would claim your “three-er” and add its win total to their own. So a “two-er” would become a “five-er”.
I emigrated to Britain. These sorts of things mystified me for the longest time.
Yes. Picture some British parents and their child on a walk near a pond, river, canal or whatever. The child sees a swan. The parents will say something like "don't get too close dear, it could break your arm".
Swans are aggressive so it's probably not terrible advice, but not because they go around breaking people's arms specifically.
The idea that a swan can "break a man's arm with a blow of its wing" is (or was) ingrained enough into the British psyche that Peter Cook's comic creation, Arthur Streeb-Greebling, once said of his mother that she could "break a swan's wing with a blow of her nose."
In the Netherlands we are also taught a swan could break your arm if you get too close. I don't know if it's true or not because I've been too scared to find out.
They're not going to hold you down and break it with a tire iron .. but I'll bet for certain that Swans are responsible for arms being broken.
They've got a pretty savage and scary charge to them, it's highly likely they've startled more than one person in a park who've turned to run, tripped and fallen across steps or rockery edges and come out badly injured.
They are also able to swing their wings quite rapidly while charging you. In this way they can throw a surprisingly hard punch. But not break bones in healthy humans - kids included.
Black Swans in Perth, herdsman Lake and elsewhere, in the 1980s during breeding season (and likely still today) fully charged people and had the mass to knock over more than one kid or small teenager .. and scare the bejeebus out of many adults.
As I said, and supported by your link, I can't see a swan directly breaking a human bone - but they sure as hell can knock one arse over by charging and causing a step back fall over. That'll do some damge in some cases, easy.
I've never been charged by a swan, but I have been knocked into a ditch by the slightly smaller but no less aggressive Canada Goose while biking. No broken bones, but I did have to straighten the alignment of the wheels on my bike.
The smell test here is that swans are flying birds and a human is large(-ish) land mammal. Nature just cannot make a flying bird's bones strong enough because they have to be much lighter.
If we play conkers with each other's bones the swan will lose.
Was bitten by a swan as a child. Painful by all accounts, but not enough for me to remember the pain, though I recall being more careful around swans afterward Probably more scary for my parents.
All swans are owned by the crown and the monarch has the exclusive right to kill and eat them.
Or at least that's the way I heard it, come to think of it I have no idea at all if that's true. Stops people killing and eating swans though. Not that many would anyway these days.
Not all, just mute swans; so not Bewick’s or whoopers (if I remember correctly)
Edit:
“His Majesty specifically owns any unclaimed mute swan in open water in both England and Wales in a ceremonial fashion. This has been a law since medieval times. His ownership is shared with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, granted to them by the Crown in the 1400s.”
St John's College serves swan on formal occasions sometimes, because they have some connection to the royal family that means they have special permission. (Or used to in the Queen Elizabeth days, I don't know if they still do under Charles)
It's a game you play as a kid. This is the first I've heard of there being a professional league.
On the other hand, we also have competitions such as cheese rolling (trying not to get killed by a giant cheese wheel rolling down a hill), so I'm not that surprised.
I did that race twice, dislocated my left shoulder each time. Scariest thing i've ever done.
People have the misapprehension that you're supposed to catch the cheese. No idea why you'd think it's a good idea to catch a rock hard lump whilst running down a hill so fast that if you tense your legs once to slow down you do 3 cartwheels.
Also just remembered - they have local rugby players to catch those who can't stop running from hitting the fence of the house at the bottom. Saw at least one person they missed who smacked into the fence and got carted off by St John's Ambulance.
In Britain, it's very well known by those of us who are 40+, and I think even younger people will at least have heard of it, even if they haven't played it themselves. It was an absolute staple of playgrounds in the 1980s. There's a rich history of supposed 'cheats' — boiling the conker in vinegar was a classic. And, note, conker, not chestnut (two different things).
Yes, it's a quintessential childhood game here. You take turns to have a single swing at the opponent's conker, until one of the conkers is smashed off its string.
Cheating is a bit of an art. Baking the chestnuts at the right temperature was one method; a friend of mine filled his conker with glue.
I'm Norwegian, but have lived in the UK half my life, since I was 25, and I'm aware of it, though have never seen it played. I think most people who have lived her for a while will at least have heard references to it.
Yes, conkers is sufficiently well-known enough as a children's schoolyard game that I would expect pretty much every newspaper-reading adult to have heard of it. The fact that there is supposedly an "adult" championship event would be a surprise to most. If you're looking for the "story behind the story", other than the fact that it's a seasonally-specific, light human-interest story: there is probably a slight cultural bias amongst those who most fondly remember the game towards the private-school-educated, upper-class types who combine nostalgia for imagined "glory days" with political conservatism, so this is a good opportunity for the left-leaning Guardian to hand-pick someone who appears to belong to that class and expose them as a ridiculously-dressed scoundrel with childish interests and suspect morals. The subtext is: these are the sort of idiots we want you to associate with Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and co, and thus the Overton Window gets a tiny nudge in the opposite direction.
I think you’re reading way, way too much into this. Read the piece and it seems like just a goofy little oddball story, makes for a light and enjoyable read, I’m really not picking up any political angle in this piece.
The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.
I heard the conkers cheater was an illegal immigrant, the establishment covered it up and now they wont even report on conkers anywhere in the main stream media (/s?)
Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):
> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."
In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.
It never occurred to me that conkers could be a class thing and you could be right. But let it be known that conkers was extremely popular at my state school; me and all of my friends grew up to be pretty left wing too by the way. Also they banned it at my school, along with pogs, yoyos, etc.
Which of those are you imagining doesn't have horse chestnut trees? (Conkers come from those, not plain chestnut trees)
I'm sure there are parts of the country where they're less common, but there's huge numbers of conkers falling off trees in big British cities (even if the majority will be in parks) as well as in the countryside. We played with them at my pre-teen city centre school for sure, and the trees are a common sight on roads and in gardens as well as public parks.
edit: the Woodland trust actually says "Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens."
Live in London in Zone 2 and there are absolutely tons of conker trees around me including in areas which are not posh. They are very common in an urban setting.[1]
[1] Which kind of sucks for me personally because they cause me really terrible hayfever. I think I'm specifically alergic to their pollen maybe.
Skiing is a much more expensive activity in most of Britain, mainly since it requires taking a week off work, international flights and hotels to be able to participate. And to become good at skiing you'll have to do that once or twice a year for many years. In places where the local ski slope is a bus ride away it is much less of a class/wealth thing.
The height of ski chic in Scotland used to, at least when I skied regularly, consist of offshore foul weather gear emblazoned with the name of the oil company (or oil service company) the wearer had borrowed it from.
I find it highly suspicious that the reigning champion gets to drill the holes in the conkers. You can intentionally make some of them weaker by drilling closer to the edge or something.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers, and the participants must select their conker from the collection or given one at random. Prevents tampering I guess.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers
Going around the conker trees in your area and finding the perfect conker is a huge part of the game. There is also a certain amount of pre-game 'modification' that are generally allowed, like soaking them in various solutions, or baking them in an oven.
Having to use a provided conker would be like showing up to the Tour de France and being assigned a bike by the organisers.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland
I’m from elsewhere in Europe and I know about it from high school and it’s also something that pops up in the world sports section on news websites every now and then.
in my schools, the closest analog was probably using the school-supplied sporks to engage in "Spork Wars" (not the best example but it will do https://youtu.be/vO7SclBfpZ8?t=145 )
though through the "draft" nature of which spork you would receive, we never had a controversy on the level of the article's:
> "There are also suggestions that King Conker had marked the strings of harder nuts"
I'm British. I only have a very vague memory of the game from my childhood. I didn't remember what the goal was, but I remembered you have to hit the opponent's one. I don't remember if I ever played it or not.
You hold the conker in one hand and the string in the other with some tension and then release so it pings and bashes the other players conker, hoping to smash it off the string.
Repeat until one conker is smashed into oblivion.
If your conker wins against multiples it becomes named mythically: a twoer, a threer, and so on.
I only know about conkers due to photonicinduction's youtube video where they play conkers with two CRT televisions attached with ropes to the ceiling
However even without knowing that I think reading the article makes it clear enough what it's about and that a steel chestnut shattering the other one seems like an unfair advantage :)
Was confused too. My first thought was about conker crafting [1] and I was puzzled that there was a world championship for it and people were serious enough about it to cheat - but then again, weirder things exist...
> The 23-year-old said: “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.”
It’s just crazy that someone would cheat at something so low-stakes with such a high probability of being caught, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
People cheat on online cooperative computer games like Helldivers with almost no rewards for being performatively better other than a few imaginary in-game points. People can be weird about the smallest things
You shouldn’t state it so confidently as fact — nobody has ever produced any evidence that Hans Niemann cheated over the board (let alone with a Bluetooth butt plug, despite all the memes to that effect).
I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.
Thank you. This is the kind of speed-of-correction (~20 min or less) that is needed for social media discourse to work effectively. Indeed, no evidence has been found, this was just a silly meme from Reddit which predated the Hans drama by several years. When the Hans drama happened, of course Redditors started making silly flippant references to this joke. But some people didn’t understand that those were references, instead mistook them for actual “accusations”, bought into it, and started actually seriously perpetuating the accusation/rumor. It was repeated often enough in juuust serious enough tone that tabloid journalism eventually picked it up and ran stories with it.
But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.
So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?
Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.
But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.
With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).
So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.
Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.
> Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players.
It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.
Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.
It is a pretty straightforward wave shooter game. I had fun with it, but it isn’t high art or anything. I enjoy games like Hades or Dark Souls where the fact that you keep losing is an interesting part of the narrative and builds the overall ambiance. Helldivers (2, at least) is not really that sort of game, the plot is more like fun, even sillier Starship Troopers.
I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.
I think it's a special kind of person that gets a kick from "winning" at something that's not a challenge. You might as well write "winner" on a t-shirt in marker and wear it.
The games cheat industry was huge[1] back before the internet was a major thing. Entire books about cheat codes, walkthrough to get the best gear and to beat the game in the easiest way possible, then websites full of cheats, etc.
People, on average, like to do the easiest thing possible and on top of that, they frequently like to brag about what they've achieved and how good they are. Social animals and all that.
I dunno. The article states that David Jakins has been competing since 1977 and has never won. He was also a Judge, so this game seems to be extremely important to him for some reason. I guess he wanted to win by any means necessary before he has to retire from the sport permanently due to age or physical limitation
Veblen called sports Conspicuous Leisure. The goal is not fun but that everyone sees you win. So Stakes are Status. And Status gets people things in the same way Cash does.
Playing conkers at 23 years of age is a bit wrong. It is a bit like building LEGO kits as an adult, particularly wrong if the goal is to just build the design on the box and put the completed model on a shelf, rather than build your own creative masterpiece.
Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the school playground. Adults did not play LEGO then, it was the role of the father to read the newspaper and the role of the mother to be 'chained to the sink' in those days, with LEGO just for small children.
Conkers was very much for younger children, once an interest in the opposite sex, playing cards for match sticks or general juvenile delinquency was established, conkers was 'grown out of'.
Much like how fathers could teach their sons to beat up bullies, so it was that fathers could help with the technical aspects of conkers, such as getting the hand drill out (remember those contraptions, before battery power tools).
Conkers was a rite of passage, something that you would be expected to grow out of. It also came with a season, i.e. autumn, and the etiquette was to pick on someone of your own size. Hence, someone playing conkers at the age of 23 has not really got it right.
As for the guy with the steel conker, again we have a problem of age.
Now, as for playing with LEGO as an adult, or playing conkers as an adult, or, for that matter, the retro 8-bit computer scene, this is about regressing from the adult world of today, with all of its problems, and hiding in a recreated childhood. This is sort of understandable for people that were sent off to war, to see things they did not need to see. Those people kind of need the therapy that a return to the child world provides.
But nowadays, I see it as a response to the atomisation of community. If you are not spending your weekends with friends at pubs or at dinner parties, if you don't have an adult hobby such as with a lathe in a shed, if you can't afford big toys such as a boat, then childhood hobbies are a safe space to return to. Apart from anything else, you can buy all the LEGO that you could not buy then. Or, with conkers, you can find a social scene of like minded individuals and get a bit more scientific about winning.
Can you cheat by purposefully missing the opponent’s conker? Thus reducing the total impact on conkers in this match vs conkers in other matches and getting an advantage?
You take it in turns to hit, moving yours on their turn is cheating. Given that you have a lot more control over what kind of hit happens on your turn than on theirs, skipping your turn is never going to give you an advantage (unless your opponent is somehow anti-competent).
I can't imagine so. A match is over when one persons conker is destroyed. If you were purposefully missing, you'd be throwing the game. Theirs would still take a battering from hitting yours as well.
The guy the article is about won the men's. At the end, the men's champ plays the women's champ for overall champion.
This American mentioned was the women's champ, who apparently went on to beat him. Which either means he wasn't cheating, or was and then played fairly on the last match?
That would make sense to me, but it seems like maybe it isn’t how they did it?
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
The World Conker Championships is an annual event held in England, where competitors from around the world play the traditional game of conkers using chestnuts. Each player threads a chestnut, known as a conker, onto a string and takes turns striking their opponent’s conker, aiming to break it. The tournament follows a knockout format, with players advancing until a world champion is declared. The event has been running since 1965 and has grown in popularity, drawing international participants and spectators.
Considering that it's called a world championship, someone should study the sport in-depth! Are the players allowed to swing the chestnut in a circle like a sling? Can they use carbon fiber strings, or maybe some sort of elastic string to build up more energy? Or can the player use a heavy string so it can crack like a whip? Fancy arm/wrist/fingers movements to accelerate the chestnut in the last moment? What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages? This could be so exciting!
I’m do not think you always want to hit them hard. If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.
the two conkers hitting each other harder likely will lead to an earlier result, but it will also favor the conker that can withstand few hard blows over one that can withstand many softer ones.
So, assuming you can somehow judge how well your and your opponent’s conker do in this regard, you may want to go either for brute impact or for many rounds.
> What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages?
I think that’s more important. Even idealized conkers are fairly asymmetrical, so possibly, the ‘bottom’ of one hitting the side of another is a winning or losing strategy. If so, it’s more a matter of timing than of being brutal, at least for hypothetical perfect players. Whether humans can do much here, I wouldn’t know.
> If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.
That was my first thought too, but I don't know if it's true because of the strings they are attached to. The striking conker is at the end of a taut string the entire time, but the receiving conker is hanging loosely and bounces around after being struck. My guess is that the taut string helps with energy dissipation after a collision, but I could be wrong. And either way, it might be a negligible difference.
What you find fun or unfun need not match other people's preferences. You can tell us what's fun or unfun for you, but you can't tell other people they're having fun wrong.
I personally find a lot of optimization problems very fun and can keep at them for a long time.
I was very confused by that link calling it a horse chestnut. That is not what I grew up calling a horse chestnut, ie the keratin thing that your farrier trims (or you do with a rasp.)
Separately, what an absolutely nutty thing to cheat at.
This brought back so many fun childhood memories of fall time in Leeds, going for walks with friends in search of the best conker. I hadn't thought about it in years.
I developed a strange fascination with Horse Chestnut trees.
I remember in the nineties when I noticed Horse Chestnuts laying on the pavement, and felt a tinge of sadness kids would normally by scouting areas to pick up all the chestnuts like competitive squirrels.
You and your opponent each attach a chestnut to a shoestring. You try to destroy your opponent's stringed chestnut by swinging your own stringed chestnut at it. The video explains different ways to cheat, such as coating the chestnut with nail varnish.
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
So the "judge" who prepped the conkers for everyone and stringed them also competed in the competition and won
These things in the UK are generally simultaneously massively serious in terms of arbitrary rules and also massively not.
I suspect there are handful of entrants each year, a few obsessives and 'people around at the time it happens to be on. Hence this guy who has been around long enough he gets asked to help out.
UK law generally is based on previous screw-ups.
Doubtless next year they will add a rule, but in general abusing such power would fall under the general "good sportsmanship" rule and be dealt with far more seriously than just 'banned from a tiny competition with a grand sounding name'.
Surely every kids (in the UK) knows the secret to a winning conker is to keep it in a dark place for several weeks so it naturally hardens up. I'm not sure if this is considered cheating though.
I guess it could be that each country can only send at most one representative (making her the US Conker Champion) but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's a little unlikely.
I remember being so upset as a kid that my pinewood derby car never looked as good as anyone else's and that it never won. I didn't realize as a youth that the parents had built the other kids' cars, whereas I built mine entirely on my own.
Now that I have children, they, too, are feeling the grim disatisfaction of a stacked competition by losing to the other kids' parents in the pinewood derby.
I genuinely credit that experience with my attitude toward life (don't take anything too seriously, because everything we do is temporary, competition (I will work on my own when possible, to do my best, and if I win it is a reflection on my own skills and abilities), and helped me understand that no matter how good I am at something there is always someone who takes that thing far too seriously and will cheat to win.
The version of this game played by American kids is (was?) “pencil popping”. The idea being you take turns trying to break your opponents pencil by flicking it at theirs while they hold it on both ends.
Thanks to HN, now I know there's such a sport with hitting nuts attached to strings. I've read a lot of English-speaking material, but was only aware of rugby (it was aired on our TV in the 00's) and cricket. I'm amazed there's even a world championship, and that the Guardian has thumbnails to attract readers to important news on this sport.
Right, so picture this: you’re in the middle of a cracking game of Conker, and things aren’t exactly going your way. Your conker's looking as sturdy as a biscuit dunked in a cuppa for too long, and your mate’s conker is built like the Queen's Guard—completely unshakeable. But instead of taking the thrashing like a proper Brit, you think to yourself, “Why not get a bit creative, eh?”
Now, I’m not talking about anything on the level of Boris slipping through a political pickle. No, no. We're going full Del Boy here, a right dodgy geezer's guide to giving your conker a bit of extra “oomph” without your opponent being any the wiser.
First thing’s first, get yourself a conker that’s already hard as nails. If you rock up with a squishy, fresh-from-the-tree conker, you might as well bring a soggy chip to a fistfight. So, what’s the plan, Stan? You do what any self-respecting trickster does: you cheat. But in the most British way possible—subtle, sneaky, and with enough charm to get away with it.
The Vinegar Trick
Ah, the vinegar trick! An old-school classic, passed down from generation to generation like your nan’s dodgy trifle recipe. You soak your conker in vinegar overnight, let it dry out, and voilà! Hard as a rock. This trick’s so crafty, you’d think it was devised by the fox that pinched the farmer’s best hen. Just make sure it doesn’t reek like a fish and chip shop, or your mates will twig faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle!”
The Oven Gambit Now,
if you’re really feeling a bit more “James Bond,” you can stick your conker in the oven. But let’s not go burning the house down like a right muppet. Give it a low and slow roast, just enough to toughen it up. Just don’t let your mum catch you, or you’ll be in for a bollocking. Nothing says “I’ve been up to no good” quite like the smell of chargrilled conker wafting through the kitchen at half-past ten.
Nail Varnish Shenanigans
Feeling a bit flash, are we? Maybe you’re one of those who likes to add a touch of sparkle to your dastardly deeds. A sly coat of clear nail varnish will do the trick. It gives your conker an unbreakable shell—like a Ford Fiesta that somehow survives every banger race. Your opponent won’t know what hit ‘em, and you’ll be grinning like a Cheshire cat when your conker smashes theirs to smithereens.
Dodgy Drilling
If you’re the type who thinks “go big or go home,” then this one’s for you, mate. Hollow out the inside of your conker and fill it with something solid—maybe a bit of lead or, if you’re feeling particularly sneaky, a cheeky bit of cement. Just make sure your drill work isn’t as dodgy as the bloke who sold you that knock-off Rolex down the market, or you’ll end up in the doghouse faster than a footballer caught with his pants down.
The Ol’ Switcheroo
This one’s for the true legends of skulduggery. You show up with your ordinary, bog-standard conker, all innocent-like. Then, when your mate’s not looking—probably distracted by some bloke in the corner shouting about the price of pints—you whip out your pre-hardened, vinegar-soaked, oven-baked, nail-varnished super conker. It’s the ultimate con, and if you pull it off, you’ll feel like you’ve just nicked the crown jewels.
I love how the top comment is an American expressing disdain for having to google about another country's passtimes. It would be kinder to preface your comment more akin to "For those out of the know, here's what this sport entails..." instead of expressing displeasure at the imagined expectations imposed on readers of the article.
I know HN will always be US centric to some extent but it can't be too hard to be more curious as opposed to annoyed at news shared from outside of it.
Mainstay? First I'm hearing of it. I thought it was an onion article at first. It's really hard to tell when British people are serious sometimes. "Conker King"...like, WTH?
For sure it is. Every boy (and probably some girls, but never seen myself) plays conkers and likely puts their life in great peril climbing horse chestnut trees to gather the best conkers before anyone else gets them.
When I think back now to some of the massive (old) trees I used to climb and the action of shaking the branches to try to get the chestnuts to drop (whilst the branch is breaking underneath you, 100ft up), I’m surprised I’m here to talk about it!
You know, conkers is exactly the sort of sport that makes a good anime. Everyman protagonist finds the world's hardest conker, takes on a series of increasingly absurd super-conkerists, Baki the Grappler style, with frequent informational asides about the art and science of conkers, and eventually faces the mysterious Conker Lord ... who turns out to be his long lost older brother!
Maybe, but I took a guess based on how high horse chestnut trees can get. I’m almost sure I am underestimating. The best ones I used to climb were those that lined the entry to a country estate and they were clearly very old and were absolutely huge.
A horse chestnut tree can reach heights of approximately 30 to 40 meters (about 98 to 131 feet) [1].
I used to go pretty damn far up, one time really shitting myself up as the thinner weaker branches started breaking away as I was climbing higher.
It genuinely felt like, even if probably not entirely true, that I was sticking my head out of the top of the tree before it started giving way. It’s a memory that will stick with me forever!
Of course I can’t prove this, but it’s not entirely implausible that a very old horse chestnut tree could be over 100 feet high and it’s not entirely implausible that it’s possible to climb up a tree of that size. So I guess either take my word for it or not, your call ;)
Some trees are pretty damn good for climbing. It scares the shit out of me now, but I’m fairly certain I’ve gotten to some 7-10 meters up. That’s only like 30 feet though, I don’t think I’ve even seen trees that were 100ft high xD
“That’s an odd name! I’d a called em fuzzwozzers.”
It certainly is a mainstay. A yearly treat which children love. In Ireland I was taught this song in school: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bhebvq0O4GY
(and I still remember all the words)
You say this as if you were British, but then the rest of your comment seems to suggest that you're not (in which case it's not surprising that you might be unaware of some aspects of British playground culture).
You and your friends get a stick each, together you drop it off a bridge over a stream (upstream side), then you run to the other side of the bridge, whichever stick appears first is the winner.
Morriss dancing isnt a real thing. It is just something silly invented by the BBC as a self-deprecating joke, like Canadians street vendors selling fried beaver tails.
It's clearly the implication that you shouldn't have to Google for it. That isn't directness, it's passive aggressiveness, which the Dutch are not stereotypically known for.
Is no one allowed to mention stereotypes, because there's no defined authority? The Dutch being direct is about as uncontroversial as you could get.
In any case, the comment I replied to already made the claim. I deliberately weakened it by saying it was a stereotype rather than talking as if it were unconditionally true.
> instead of expressing displeasure at the imagined expectations imposed on readers of the article
Well it is the author's expectation, isn't it? I also left the article wondering what in the world conker was. I don't think it matters where the game is from or where the reader lives. It's just good writing to do a bit of explaining for the foreign readers, of which The Guardian knows they have.
Now imagine adding an explanation of american football rules on every article about it, of which there are probably hundreds written a day.
I have no clue about american football rules - I barely know the sport exists, the ball has a funny shape, and that it's popular in the states. Still it would be absolute nonsense to explain their basics every time someone talks about them and I won't expect anyone to do so. Explanations like that will just annoy the vast majority of readers, who will have a preexisting interest in the sport and thus will already be familiar with the rules.
That said, I had even less of a clue what the hell conkers is. Luckily I have basic technological literacy and was able to find the wikipedia article[1] in a fraction of the time it takes one to complain.
It's not obscure in the UK. You can find any number of equally 'obscure' cultural practices referenced in American newspapers without explanation. It's unreasonable to expect a British newspaper to be free of British cultural background assumptions just because it's viewable by an international audience.
I guess your point makes sense, though. There isn't the obligation to explain anything. I just personally think it's good writing to anticipate what your readers may not likely understand.
The NYT has 150 million monthly readers globally of which 27% are international. I still wouldn't expect it to insert helpful explainers every time it mentions a cultural phenomenon specific to the US.
American here. I first heard the word conkers from Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, but this was pre Google, so I just figured it was some scifi word.
Then I learned that it was a game from an episode of Kipper the Dog, in which his cheeky friend Tiger cheats at the game by painting something to look like a chestnut.
For the yanks and elsewhere, yes conkers is well known in Britain. You basically put a chestnut (but its a conker) on a string by making a hole in the middle. Take turns swinging them on the string, whoever's breaks is the loser.
It used to be great fun till it was banned/requires eye protection now. There's an opportunity there, someone could make a perfectly safe conker app. I'm sure that would adequately replace it. /s
It is banned in schools. As I said in another comment, that outlaws it for the vast majority of players at the place they used to play it.
Believe it or not adults playing conkers or people playing conkers outside of schools isn't a common pass time.
It is pretty much RNG, though you can massively nerf a conkers structural integrity by making the hole through the middle poorly, so there are some techniques. People also used to use thicker shoelaces like in vans, which I think made the centre more solid. I've never run an experiment to verify the difference that might make.
It probably betrays more about my contempt for how peoples biggotry is exploited to make them believe things that are not true. When that is not enough then show them some tits with the message and they will tell you all about how pigs fly.
It just looks as though you have your own set of biases, just against people instead of against overly coddling rules. No one's mentioned the Daily Mail or the EU other than you and the other poster with similar biases.
It's such a persistent myth that a health and safety organisation decided to sponsor the championships to try and debunk the idea. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7637605.stm
The reason I think this game is so popular is horse chestnut trees are very popular in the UK. For about a month each year, where I grew up the ground would be littered with conkers, both on my route to school and on school grounds. It's natural when walking around to try to find particularly large / impressive looking ones.
I have no idea why you think safety laws prevent people from playing conkers in spite of the very thread you are commenting on being evidence that people play conkers and it is perfectly legal.
Well it is banned in schools. I'm not sure how many adults you believe actually play conkers, beyond a few nutters (sic), but its mainly been banned for the people that used to actually enjoy it, kids.
I do wonder if by banning it in schools it will get less and less common till it disappears. I suppose you predictably think that's nonsense.
But pedantry aside, its banned for the people who used to play it most and enjoy it, at the place they did just that.
Conkers, bulldog, smoking behind the bike sheds (ok vaping these days), and porn (nowadays on screens rather than naughty magazines) ... a lot about British schools can be summed up in this quote:
“What exactly are you so happy about?' Harry asked her.'Oh Harry, don't you see?' Hermione breathed. 'If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!”
A quick google will get you websites of primary schools up and down this great nation with photos of their Conkers champions holding up their trophies.
As for "the law" - from a 2019 petition to make conkers legal again:
There's no law or government policy banning children from playing conkers, so we're not sure exactly what you'd like the Government or Parliament to do.
Apparently he was cleared of cheating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJKIbq2FuG8
I wish there were a picture of this steel conker somewhere. I mean, is it "steel colored"? Seems like it would be obvious if it were used.
That's the most hilariously British thing I've seen in a long time. Their expert is even wearing a melon hat with a string of chestnuts to the live interview.
Apparently he has been cleared by VAR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJKIbq2FuG8
Played conkers as a kid around age 7-9. We had several horse chestnut trees along our road and I would search in amongst the leaves everyday on the way to and from school. Drill a hole in each and thread about 18 inches of string through the hole and tie a knot so the nut cannot fly off when you swing the nut at your opponent's conker. Challenge others in a duel to the death of one or other of the conkers. Draw lots for who gets first swing. Loser holds the conker out dangling vertically at the end of the string. Other player takes a shot by holding their conker in their fingers well above the other players and pulls down sharply on the string releasing the conker from the fingers in such a way that it hits the dangling conker hard. Assuming both conkers survive you reverse rolls and continue. Winning conkers names increment so a one-er, two-er, three-er and so on. I once had a seventeen-er but the accumulated battle damage eventually spelled disaster.
The World Championship seems very fishy to me - firstly someone involved in setting up the conkers (inflating the footballs) should not be a competitor. Second having been caught with a steel imitation conker in his pocket how can he be cleared? He can't prove he didn't use it surreptitiously and so should be disqualified.
As someone that roasts and eats chestnuts, it's kind of odd to play with them. I suppose you ate many and also played, or are they simply not eaten there?
Conkers is typically played with Horse Chestnuts which shouldn’t be eaten as they’re toxic. We too roast and eat the edible varieties of Chestnuts.
The ones used for conkers are horse chestnuts (typically round in shape), not the same as the ones that are eaten which are spanish chestnuts and normally have flat sides.
Conkers are horse chestnuts, rather than sweet chestnuts. Similar name, unrelated tree.
These are horse chestnuts, they're inedible.
Horse chestnuts are different and not edible.
> The World Championship seems very fishy to me - firstly someone involved in setting up the conkers (inflating the footballs) should not be a competitor.
Clearly, considering the incredible stake at play here, it’s entirely outrageous. /s
> Second having been caught with a steel imitation conker in his pocket how can he be cleared? He can't prove he didn't use it surreptitiously and so should be disqualified.
The game is recorded so you can tell which conker he did or did not use. But just in case you didn’t notice, the reason it’s a media sensation is because the whole thing is ridiculous and therefore funny. There is no point in cheating at conker.
Conkers is a traditional children's game in Great Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees—the name 'conker' is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other's conker until one breaks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers
Can confirm that we had very elaborate rules for our conker championships in school in Ireland in the late 90s and early 00s.
The lore ran deep too - conkers were varnished in different ways, hardened in front of fireplaces, secret conker trees were coveted, rules were sometimes broken, airplanes were usually not allowed, disputes were not always mitigated, the occasional teacher grumbled. Fun was had.
Two lads set themselves up in the business of selling conkers one year.
Any accidentally dropped conkers were stamped on by any and all in the vicinity.
A conker that survived to the next year was considered "seasoned", although many's the wizened tippex-covered lump of questionable provenance appeared under this explanation.
Wait how do airplanes fit into all this?
I was curious too:
> An "airplane" in conkers is when a player swings their conker in a wide, sweeping, horizontal motion, typically at about shoulder height.
Correct, yes.
Did you have 'stamps' in Ireland too?
When a player's conker comes off the string but remains whole, the opponent can call "stamps!!" and attempt to stamp it to pieces.
We had an explicit "no stamping" rule, which could be overturned by agreement before a game.
Actually, we used to have a rhythmic string of rules which were very sayable, which I can't remember, along the lines of "no stamping no biting no _____ no _____ no ...", with a list of things, and a rhyme or two in there. I'm going to ask any old friends I run into and see if I can get the full thing back again.
I'm pretty sure the first two were no stamping and no biting though. If you'd anything like that, I'd love to hear it!
I learned about conkers when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time...
"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.
The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."
Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.
I had HGttG first read to me when I was 10. I'm 40 now. When I first saw the cheater story yesterday, I had the most awaited "ooohhh" reaction of my life.
Originally, I figured that conkers were some sort of candy bar.
For me, the whole notion of there being a professional conkers league, and its longtime judge, real old chap, using a steel replica to cheat, reads like something Douglas Adams could invent.
Would the word not be in a dictionary?
It would, but depending on the dictionary there might not be much, if any, context about the game.
You could get a simple “Concker(n), colloquial name for the seeds of the horse chestnut tree” or “Conckers(n), traditional game played mainly in the British Isles with seeds of the horse chestnut tree” – a concise definition of the what without any detail of the game or its cultural significance (it was a big thing for a short time each year back when I was of school age, and had been for generations).
“when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time” suggests this was quite some time ago, so further lookups might have required a physical trip to a library, rather than just clicking a link or throwing a term at an online search engine.
You'd need an encyclopedia to have any real chance of understanding what kind of game it is, a dictionary typically only gives very small amounts of context.
I guess it just wasn't worth the effort to check, compared to how easy googling is. Lots of things were like that back then.
I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades.
I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written
So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.
But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?
To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.
It's a childhood story dressed up in sci-fi. If an American child had told it, they might have said they demanded baseball cards, and the amused captain would have given them food, booze and "lots of baseball cards, of course". Children all over the world occasionally make demands of adults and are thrilled when the adults oblige them; their bold dare paid off! Children make up games at school, so when all the chestnuts fall off the trees, children make a game from the mass availability of chestnuts.
It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.
It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]
Re your last note (which is hilarious) I was hugely amused to discover that many Americans reading in Potter about Filch "punting" the kids across the temporary swamp assumed he was kicking them over rather than using a flat bottomed boat. Understandable but much funnier than the original intended.
> [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]
Savage reply.
Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote.
It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.
Getting a massive haul of conkers was almost as important as the game itself. So, that might add some context.
> why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"?
hmmm, these might be what they call "jokes"
Absurdist humour, Hitchhiker's is full of it, as is Discworld. Aggressive Britishisms as well (like conkers and tea references), like in the Cornetto trilogy.
This is honestly the first time I’ve seen ‘Aggressive Britishisms’, and I’m still somewhat perplexed at the concept.
Like I get it, theoretically. But…. Hmmm.
This article on hackernews reads the same as "Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data" would on conkernews.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
i also though i was on conckernews. the same colorscheme doesn't help!
i guess HN is out of kleptocoin or infinitesimal LLM overoptimization war stories today and had to find something to plug the top story spot.
I'm not into AI, so both read approximately the same to me.
I'm also pretty disturbed by it being here. Even worse on place #1.
I'd recommend finding more important things to be disturbed by.
Hijacking page on place#1 to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP3AAjsiqY
"Show HN: Two purple Conkers.. and one yellow honker. In Python using PyBangSwackThump With Fleshy Bits"
I'd rather read and learn about conkers than another snake oil AI / crypto blogspam.
It's almost like people upvoted it or it's quiet. Commenting on it won't help; downvote it if you want, upvote things you do want to see.
I for one am here for the random things that pop up on occasion. I have zero interest in LLMs and crypto-bollocks (mainly because I'm not earning money off of it)
#1 does feel a bit much but I don't mind getting a kick out of titles/situations which could be interpreted immaturely.
When I was a kid (many years ago) me and a friend once went "conkering" down quite a posh road with several horse chestnut trees on it. We had collected a few good ones when a guy came out of his house and called us over. We thought "Oh dear, get off my lawn time", but no! He had big bin full of conkers that he had picked up from his garden, and invited us to choose from them.
He probably played it himself back in the day.
Its interesting how games and other things like songs, stories etc. persist and/or disappear over time.
Things from my youth, as well as conkers:
- marbles (can you get them anymore?)
- kick the can (where would kids get cans today?)
- British bulldog/chain tig (far too dangerous)
I can't remember the rules of these, but they were very popular in the early 1960s, when I played them.
Elaborate marble runs are very popular, although many people use steel balls instead.
Marble runs are wildly different from marbles we played when I was a kid.
One is an engineering (lite) exercise, the other is a game of vague dexterity to take someone else's marble collection.
What a wonderful story, thank you for sharing.
Reminds me of trying to cheat myself in 70's by making a lead conker (painted to be right color). It got confiscated at school as being dangerous (lump of lead on a string) before I could even use it.
Conkers is half about cheating anyway - baking it to make it rock hard, or soaking in vinegar to make it rubbery and resilient.
The British are living proof of the fact that amazing things[1] can be achieved when the place you live in is extremely boring.
[1] For varied definitions of "amazing", such as "conquer countries 10x your size", "invent 20 sports the entire world plays", etc.
“The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made British men the best sailors in the world.”
So the bit about UK food being attrocious is unfortunately true from my limited experience but the country itself has a lot of beauty, I think, as long as you look in the roght places.
The UK excels at nicking bits of culture from other places, making them our own, but passing them off to the world as authentically foreign.
OTOH the national dish is Chicken Tikka Masala.
Still, can't beat a good British fried breakfast.
There's this quote from Andy Warhol that I think has great explanatory power:
> What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
The UK has the exact opposite of this. Everything that's for sale here is finely graded according to the buyer's budget and taste. Where someone chooses to do something as innocuous as their grocery shopping in the UK says an awful lot about them.
If you visit the UK without an awareness of all these little class indicators, you'll probably find yourself frequenting establishments that target the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, because discretion is highly valued by those at the top. There is truly excellent food to be had here - British cheeses win more international awards than French ones, for example - but if you don't know where to find the good stuff, you'll end up getting the slop the lower orders have to put up with.
> The UK has the exact opposite of this. Everything that's for sale here is finely graded according to the buyer's budget and taste. Where someone chooses to do something as innocuous as their grocery shopping in the UK says an awful lot about them.
Just sayin', I went shopping in... Denver? Let's just say that there was a mall with a bunch of shops and further down the street another bunch of shops.
The public at Nordstrom was wildly different than at the Gap which was also different than the one at Ross.
Similar story for stuff like Walmart versus Whole Foods.
The US has a lot of social stratification, too. They just like to ignore those parts, especially in their advertising.
In Watching the English, Kate Fox gives a thorough explanation of how much she can pin down someone's social class by what they buy at Marks and Spencers (which is a department store that's branched out into groceries). I forget the exact details, but I think it was that doing a full food shop there made you upper-middle class, buying some food items there made you middle-middle class, and buying food items for special occasions there made you lower-middle class. Buying clothes from M&S makes you middle-middle class, and buying homewares makes you lower-middle class. The upper class don't shop at M&S at all, and the working class only buy clothes or homewares from there if they want something special. (I think - it was a while ago that I read it.) And that's just one shop.
Everywhere does social stratification, but nowhere does it like Britain.
India would like to have a word with you.
'Watching the English' is nearly 40 years old now and a lot of things have changed. M&S is no longer hugely more expensive than other stores, for food I think Waitrose has taken its place. Also this article is veering into the idea that class is all about money, which may work in the US but is far from being true in the UK.
Honestly the focus on financial stratification here highlights the differences between what class means in the UK and the US.
In the US class distinction is (almost) entirely down to money. If you’re rich you can buy nicer things than someone poorer and so you can be immediately sorted into a higher social class.
In the UK just because you’re rich that doesn’t make you upper class. British society is riddled with subtle dress coding, language, and social cues designed to trip people up and differentiate the nouveau riche from the real old money aristocracy.
This is generally true but not entirely. The UK like most other countries is becoming more like the US (think tech tycoons, celebrities, 'influencers'). And the US has always had some pockets with similar (though less rigid) class distinctions (think WASPs and places like Martha's vineyard, parts of New England and 'old' New York, many parts of the South).
True, but even in the UK, I imagine that once you have the money, the next generation will be integrated, if you want to. You'll live in the right neighborhood, your kids will go to the right schools, problem solved.
It's just slower and doesn't include you directly, true.
Oh no, 'climbing the greasy pole' takes at least three generations. The 'right neighbourhood' is itself a complicated concept, because the working and middle classes in the UK live cheek-by-jowl. I live in a street of rundown Victorian working-class houses that are so close to each other and the street that everyone has net curtains in their windows to stop passers-by from seeing in, but from my bedroom window I can see into the back gardens of the comfortable 1930s middle-class houses in the next street, which have leafy front gardens to provide privacy. As for schools, much of the middle-middle class and all of the upper-middle and upper class pay fees to educate their children at private schools, some of which charge more than a software engineer's salary in annual fees.
It takes many generations, really.
Having money doesn’t easily buy you a hereditary lordship. You might be able to buy a load of land but probably not a prestigious ancient estate because the families that own them would usually rather let them fall into disrepair than sell them.
Money will buy your kids a place in prestigious public (read: private) school so they can rub shoulders with upper class kids and have connections when they grow up. But those upper class friends will always know that you and your kids are really just jumped up middle class since your great great great great grandfather wasn’t the Duke of Norfolk or some such.
For reference Kate Middleton’s family are wealthy multi-millionaires, and have been wealthy going back to the 19th century. When she married Prince William the press still waxed lyrical about the fact that the Prince of Wales was marrying a “commoner”.
Really the only rock solid way to wash away the middle class stink from your kids is to marry into the real top level of the upper class.
Do you know of some examples of dress, language, or social cues? Would it be possible to 'fake it' do you think?
I find it fascinating that being viewed as nuveau riche is a bad thing or 'lesser than' old money, when the money all buys the same access and privilege.
In the states we have New England waspy types that have families that go back to the mayflower or whatever. But it's pretty easy to ingrain yourself in their small society (as long as you have assloads of money), and flat out lie about your background if needed. I'm wondering if it's the same in the UK or not.
You can't fake your way into the upper class in the UK, because they all know each other already. As for behaviour, dress and speech, the standard books are:
* Noblesse Oblige[0] Mostly about vocabulary, and very outdated (1950s)
* The English Gentleman[1] Only about aristocratic men, and comedic in style
* Class: A View from Middle England (Jilly Cooper) Very 1970s
* Watching the English[2] Not specifically about social class, but class comes up a lot.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_Oblige_(book)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Gentleman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watching_the_English
Nah, they know who you are and aren’t actually confused about it.
They’ll be friendly, may even invite you to things, but they aren’t confused about who is who.
Warhol wrote that in 1975 when the US was a lot different.
Not sure where you've been eating, but even Birmingham—my unfashionable British hometown—has nine Michelin star restaurants within a short drive.
I grew up in the UK but I've lived for 15 years all over the US, and it's always confused me that Americans are convinced that British food is bad. On a whole, British supermarkets have far better produce, in both quality and diversity. UK restaurants run the gamut from cutting edge fine dining and wonderful traditional food to home-grown variants of immigrant cuisine. It's a great place to eat.
My home town is legendary for Indian restaurants—to the extent that Birmingham-style Balti curries have made their way back to India. Before you claim that this is Indian food, not British, can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants?
Home cooking is far more popular in the UK than the US: anecdotally, most British people cook most meals at home, while few of my American friends know how to boil an egg and rely almost entirely on take-out. British celebrity chefs and cooking shows are famous worldwide. It's odd to claim that British food sucks while binge-watching our prime-time baking show!
I love America and a lot of things are better over here, but food—unfortunately for me—is not one of them.
When I read comments like yours I wonder how you define "all over the US." Obviously, that is nowhere near enough time to experience the breadth of culture that spans the US, so I'm guessing just a few specific locations. It's the only explanation I can come up with for your generalizations being completely opposed to my experience (and I've spent more like 50 years living all over the US...).
FWIW, I'd say that while Gordon Ramsey is a good cook, obviously, he's a celebrity because he's hilarious. That is definitely something I will give credit to the British for.
I think the trope is that British cuisine, that is, dishes that are uniquely British, are bad. Not that there isn’t good food there. Being a rich country, an empire, and part of Europe means you can have many, many different cuisines there though, and like you said many are very good.
We have amazing dishes and even more amazing puddings!
I highly recommend you check out this book:
https://www.phaidon.com/store/cookbooks-food-and-drink/the-b...
Requiring something to be "uniquely British" to count as British cuisine seems like a pretty high bar. Are burgers and apple pie "uniquely American"? Not sure – and who even cares?
> apple pie "uniquely American"
My Romanian grandma, born in the 1920s, that never traveled more than 100km from her birthplace and never saw even the Black Sea, would beg to differ :-p
Such is the cultural reach of America's blue jeans and rock 'n roll.
Can confirm, as a Brit, our food is utterly shocking.
As another brit, I have better food available to me than I've encountered anywhere else, having travelled plenty in Europe, USA and Asia.
Depends greatly on where you are. London is great for food. I can see how someone from say, France or Spain, would find the average standard of food in the UK as a whole to be pretty bad. However, when this kind of critique comes from the other side of the pond I am a bit baffled, as food quality also tends to decline precipitously outside of major cities in the US (with exceptions, obviously).
I don't agree; find better places to eat. I for one loved the steak & kidney pie with a guiness I had after hiking a mountain. Don't take sad Wetherspoons food as an indicator of British food.
Surely you realize that kidney pie sounds utterly revolting to those of us who haven’t acquired the taste.
This is like concluding that Japanese food is terrible because the idea of eating raw fish grosses you out. (Also, it's "steak and kidney pie" as a unit, not a steak accompanied by a "kidney pie".)
Such an overused stereotype
> conquer countries 10x your size
> invent 20 sports the entire world plays
I mean, the two are kind of related, causally...
Football wasn't spread (just) through conquest.
The UK never conquered Argentina or Brazil yet if you'd look at football fans in both countries you'd think Argentina or Brazil not only invented football itself, but they also built an entire cult around it :-p
Football/soccer is a British import likely 'invented' somewhere else
How do you know?
I would argue that "Counquer countries 10x your size" is a misrepresentation as generally the British (and other European powers) conquered lands in which there were multiple small kingdoms or relatively sparse populations of tribes or similar. That is certainly the case in North America and Oceania and I would argue also the case in India and Africa too.
India for sure wasn't conquered that way. Yes, there was a lot of "divide et impera" going on, but just one simple example, the population of Bengal was about 40 million in 1800 while that of the UK was only around 10 million.
Britain didn't actually "overpower" India as much as gain traction by presenting themselves as a less bad alternative than some of the existing ones, for several major regions they conquered. They were even financed by major Bengali bankers for their conquest.
India was possibly the big outlier in this regard, ergo the whole "crown jewel of the empire" angle.
Read this: https://a.co/d/7r25CnA - The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.
I'm surprised they pick their conkers out of a bag. The whole fun when I was a kid was competing for who could find the toughest conker. Common cheating methods included putting it through the tumble dryer to dry it out (Mum didn't love that) or soaking in vinegar. If you're pulling conkers out of a bag I think each match is basically a coin flip, unless there's much more technique I'm missing?
As someone that played it over 60 years ago, there is quite a bit of technique involved - for example, aiming to hit the opponent's conker accurately and hard.
Wouldn't that newton's-second-law your own conker just as hard though? As the aggressor you get to choose the points of contact, which must be where the accuracy comes in. If you can strike your opponent downwards you're more likely to knock them off the string and lead to Stamps.
Vinegar makes it stronger? I would naively expect the opposite.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the "techniques" softened it but made it more resistant to shattering.
An extremely hard but brittle conker would probably make for poor results.
Interesting. I can certainly see how brittleness is probably fatal. But a soft one won't be any help at breaking your opponent's conker, either, right? Unless speed of your conker can overcome the increased inefficiency of transmitting energy into the opponent's...
Everything can be a sport if you try hard enough.
Everything can be a sport if you can bet on it.
I varnished mine
Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article? Or are you expected to have to google it?
Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.
I used to play conkers at school in England, however my children didn't.
The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.
I asked my 17 year old this morning and he had never even heard of the game of conkers.
So I think the age of conkers is passing, alas.
It's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones. The boredom of the pre-smartphone era led to all kinds of ingenuity. Kids were bored so they found ways to not be bored. Nowadays everybody is addicted their phone, simple pleasures such as violently smashing two nuts together no longer have the same pull.
It's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones
I know kids have a lot more money these days but I refuse to believe they are swinging two smartphones together instead of conkers.
I've seen enough clips of kids playing with their phone to drop them in the water to know that they probably would.
I would like to introduce you to my six year old.
Mind you, it's much more likely the two phones involved would be mine and my wife's.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carrotpop....
I was out for a walk yesterday, and kids were throwing sticks up trees trying to knock the chestnuts down, so I don't think it's dead completely.
I never really played it when I was a kid, but knew all about it from The Beano and Oor Wullie.
Not for long. Schools are looking at banning smartphones.
They are where I live, both elementary and secondary schools. The first results are promising; kids have more concentration, interact socially with each other more, etc.
I mean if it's a school where they also have to carry laptops and use digital schedules I don't think it makes a difference, but it's a good first step.
One issue was that each phone also has a camera, so people would seek out / make trouble on purpose, spy on people and post it online, etc.
...I mean, you could play conkers with smartphones. They even have that strap attachment built right in. Might have to outlaw old Nokias though.
I saw on the wikipedia page the following totally stupid reason for the ban in some schools:
Interesting, as conkers are seeds (not a nut) - so shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy - though no doubt some people are allergic to them.
It's not quite that simple. The line isn't quite as hard between seed and 'nut'. Namely people may commonly refer to things as a nut when it is a seed.
e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.
On this subject, I’d recommend Richard Osman’s lecture on nuts for “The Unbelievable Truth”: https://www.reddit.com/user/pfobwpfo/comments/18ohqi2/nuts/
Very true - I'll admit that while I knew that peanuts are legumes not nuts, I didn't know that the others you mentioned were not nuts. I learn something new every day (and my son has a severe allergy to many of them - though not all - so I should know these things!).
And while I know my son can safely play with conkers, we most certainly have not tried to eat one!
Ultimately it depends on the semantic meaning when you say 'nut'. They are not 'nuts' in terms of the technical definition, but they are in terms of 'what most people think of when you say nut'.
There's also some things with nut in their name. c.f. Nutmeg, coconut.
As others have mentioned, same kind of deal with 'berry'.
And to follow up, if you're travelling abroad it's worth noting that some countries have different naming structures/separate out the families of 'nuts'. So be careful if you're asking if something has 'nuts' in, there can be a language barrier. e.g. tree nuts vs. Lupins (peanut family).
This rabbit hole goes deep. Berries are particularly poorly named - stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries but tomatoes and bananas are.
This is only a problem if you mistake words for scientific classifications, instead of ways to convey meaning between communicating humans.
Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.
I was sticking with the context of the GP though. Maybe its pedantic to point out that many berries aren't technically berries, but that's much the same as the point that many nuts are actually seeds.
> stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries
Yes they are
> tomatoes and bananas are
No they’re not.
The word “berry” is much older and more fundamental to language than the technical botanical definition that a tiny minority of people know or care about.
You clearly understand that there's a difference between the colloquial name and the scientific definition. In the context of the GP comment, the discussion was related to nuts that are poorly named (like peanuts and tree nuts that are actually seeds).
Strawberries aren't berries and tomatoes are. You can say that's wrong all you like, but in the context of how they are botanically classified rather than what we named them you're incorrect.
The botanical classification is irrelevant outside of papers in botany journals.
If I made up a new, niche meaning of already-existing words, and tried to claim everyone else was using them wrong, you would think I was crazy.
> If I made up a new, niche meaning of already-existing words, and tried to claim everyone else was using them wrong, you would think I was crazy
People do this all the time, though it makes me feel old rather than crazy.
Imagine if someone said "this chair is an object", and you told them they were wrong, because in Object-Oriented Programming, an "object" is an abstract entity in a computer program, not a thing in the physical world.
They have never heard of object-oriented programming and yet, they're not wrong. You're the one who is wrong by assuming the terms made up by a niche field override common language used by everyone.
I'm one of that 'too young to be a millennial, too old to be a zoomer' cohort and we definitely played it in the '00s, I vaguely remember the rumours of it being banned encouraged its popularity quite a bit. They also banned British bulldog around that time so we renamed it 'hot dog' and carried on!
Side note, if you were playing conkers in the 00s are you still too young to be a millenial?
Someone born in 1996 ± 2 years or so would easily have played conkers in the 00s and consider themselves a zennial.
<The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.>
I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.
It is a myth that it was banned nationally for health & safety (“nanny state”) reasons, as was incorrectly reported in the press (mostly in the red-top papers), but some schools certainly did ban the game.
This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.
Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).
The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.
Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.
> The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.
It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.
I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.
The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.
----
[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…
The HSE posted on their mythbusting site that it was a myth at a national level, but I suppose individual schools might have done so?
https://web.archive.org/web/20211018040605/https://www.hse.g...
Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety."
Certainly there was at least one school that got goggles for pupils to wear while playing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm
The academy run by Lord Ashcroft has banned bicycles so I guess anything is possible when you're outside of local authority control
The headteacher said himself that story was misreported — he bought the goggles as a joke.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/09/conker...
I remember being a kid in the 80's, and being told by a primary school teacher we couldn't play conkers anymore :( We'd only just discovered it too!
Not a myth. I went to school during the twilight of the conker. It absolutely died because risk-averse teachers banned it, to howls of protest from us kids.
The myth is the game being a health hazard, not if it was banned (or not).
Just another brick in the wall.
Drilling/punching the hole in a conker might be vaguely dangerous, and you're not supposed to carry a stabby tool at school anymore. But the game itself is not that dangerous, though that won't have stopped some schools from banning it.
I'm between your ages and we played it. Not a lot, it definitely occupies a larger area of national psyche than it's played I think, but we did. Yes school banned it, but when did that ever stop us?
Also played at school in England.... probably ~22 years ago now I'd guess! Sad to hear that era is over!
Arguably with the steel conker endemic happening before us there are finally some valid health reasons...
What are the health and safety risks from this game? Do the chestnuts fragment violently when they break up?
Mostly it increases teacher stress levels having to referee.
Imagine swinging two stones (many techniques to harden conkers including the game itself evolving the brutes by elimination) together at high speed with fingers and faces in very near proximity.
accidentally hitting each other
I can't really visualize the amount of momentum involved, or how sharp the chestnut is. Is that specifically about eye injuries, or could it hurt someone some other way?
After writing the above comment, I watched videos of people playing conkers and now I understand how it could, in theory, cause an eye injury. It was hard for me to visualize how close the defender's conker is to the defender's body before seeing the video. I was somehow wrongly imagining that it was being supported on a much longer string or with the help of other objects somehow.
Literally the first video I watched, 2:28 min in, kid gets knocked in the teeth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egBjZaKNLuc
If you whip it above your head at a good 100-200 rpm, anything is possible.
Ah yes "accidentally"... ;-)
Yes. Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school. My dad seemed to find the concept of fake conkers amusing enough to take it upon himself to craft me a resin filled one, although it didn't fool any kids.
In more recent years a bus driver complained to me conkers are not legal tender as I placed some down while in search of change. Around this time of year you will find most people have their pockets filled with conkers. </dev/random>
> Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school.
Same, but with peonzas/trompos[0]. It's interesting since it's also about breaking the other player's item thanks to the inertia provided by a string.
In short, they're hardcore spinning tops: large, generally with a metal tip, spun much faster due to the string winding, and as mentioned, the objective is to crack the other player's.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompo
I did not know it was possible to break those things to be honest. We made a circle with a string or something, and then let the two spinning tops (as we called them) duke it out, and the loser is the one knocked out of the ring.
Ours were made from a very tough plastic, either nylon or HDPE.
As well as the old myth that putting a conker in the corner of a room will ward off spiders building a web there. The veracity of which, attest to I cannot.
It is a very, very British thing. A generation or two ago, almost everyone played it at school and it was Very Serious Business. I guess you needed something to occupy yourself before Pokemon Go was invented.
I have fond memories of playing conkers in primary school. Sometimes you got a rapped knuckle but children's sports is full of cuts and grazes, and it didn't hurt as much as slaps anyway. The main issue was that some kids would inevitably harden their conkers by putting them in the oven or lacquering them, and so on. But spotting that was part of the charm.
Being of a geeky bent, I tried them all. It never worked. They go brittle and shatter, or they go soft and fall apart.
(When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).
It was very common in Ireland too, hunting for conkers was always fun. However I don't think it is common at all now
In many places the cup-and-ball [1] game was/is popular. It's incredible to think now about games that doesn't require batteries and USB ports.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball
"A generation or two ago" roughly corresponds to the Tamagotchi era too.
Or two? Why do you have to be like that?
Yes, it was a big deal when I was in school in the 70s. Everyone played. There were never any conkers left unclaimed under any Horse Chestnut within a mile of the school. We all tried lots of tricks - soaking in vinegar, baking in the oven - practically anything was allowed, but I'm not sure any of it made a difference. It could be pretty painful as getting your hand hit by a high speed conker was common occurrence, but I don't recall anyone getting any lasting injuries.
Indeed, it was still popular in the 80s and 90s. I assume still is, given the Guardian is a national newspaper.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article?
Absolutely. Very well known.
My Youtube-fu is not with me, so I can't seem to locate this video on Youtube, but see this BBC Archive footage from 1971 that was posted on Instagram[1] from a BBC News Report entitled "Conkers is no longer a kids' game."
[1] https://www.instagram.com/bbc_archive/reel/DA7zkmkAShz/
I feel there is enough in the article to build an image of the game in your head: I'm imagining a game game where two people trying to destroy the other person's chestnut by whirring and hitting the chestnuts on the end of strings. Now I'm going to go check my mental image against wikipedia.
I’m American and never heard of this sport in my life yet article painted a similar picture in my mind.
It's not a sport, it's something that kids used to do pre 1950s. People were poor, didn't have manufactured "stuff", so they made their own toys out of simple things like stones, sticks, old wheels etc Football was likely popular because a single ball could keep a while bunch of kids happy for an afternoon (if someone could actually afford a ball).
I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
> And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
It would be nice if we stopped stigmatising play. Growing up doesn't mean we stop playing. Acting grown-up might mean stop playing, but it's just that — an act, and a likely childish one. Real adults don't give up on what brings them joy.
Back when I was a teenager, I used to also have similar thoughts as the person you replied to about not playing with toys because it was childish behavior.
Luckily, I grew out of that and I do not feel self conscious when playing as an adult or being goofy.
>To carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
- C. S. Lewis
I played conkers in the 1990s. Everyone did.
Money has nothing to do with it, most of my friends had computers, some had those mini cars to drive — it was a wealthy area.
I don’t mind the nit on word choice but in my mind a game becomes a sport by the existence of a Championship match and title.
Also, I think this follows how most sports come to be. They are started as child play, when we have the time/leisure/energy, then they eventually become something some of us want to continue with as adults and the rest of us will pay to watch because we enjoy the sport so much (often fostered during youth play).
There are dozens of sports that I have no interest in simply because I wasn’t exposed to them as a kid. As an older American, we did not play Soccer(football) when I was a kid. It’s pretty popular now and my kid has had me go to professional games and such but I still just don’t really understand the game/rules/strategy or fully appreciate the difficulty of things that occur. I could learn I suppose but I still just have little effort in doing so as a middle aged person. I could say the same about Cricket and a handful of other sports that I never played as a kid but know are popular elsewhere. Likewise, when people move to the US, it usually takes them a while and likely never fully get into American Football and Baseball. Basketball has become more global and so I do expats that follow that sport. More likely than not, they follow the sports that interested them as a kid and just live with the time zone issue.
> I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Did you grow up in a city? I'm mid 30s and we used to regularly play conkers in the village where I grew up.
I played conkers in the 90's, my kids (7 and 10) play conkers now. We even have debates on whether applying nail polish is considered cheating - it is, it totally is! What's more, I was brought up in a poor area of Manchester, they've been brought up in quite an affluent area of Oxfordshire - so couldn't be any different!
My kids play conkers. They also have games consoles and other luxury toys.
Kids just love to play.
I'm an 80s kid and we passionately played conkers at my primary school. We used to hang them on shoe laces or string, by burning a hole through the middle with a heated awl or kebab rod.
Cheating was always rife with people using all manner of techniques to try to preserve and strengthen their conkers: soaking in vinegar, baking them, coating in nail varnish, &c.
Pretty sad to hear it's fallen out of fashion, as it was good, cheap fun and, with long enough string, not very dangerous.
> if someone could actually afford a ball
Round here, in the olden days the kids would fashion a crude type of ball called "basse" by cutting up a broken bicycle inner tube into a bunch of small rings, threading all the rings on a piece of string and tying this mess up in a particular way to form a roughly spherical object.
It does not roll well at all, but the kids stand around in a circle and kick the basse around to each other, trying to keep it in the air. If you cause it to fall to the ground, you lose.
I went to first school (3 tier system, first, middle, high) in the 1970s and we played conkers in the school yard in the 1970s, and into the mid 80s in middle school too. By the time I reached high school they'd been banned.
I see parents and children collecting horse chestnuts in the local market square and arboretum still today though, and it brings back fond memories of rapped knuckles and entanglement "clingy-niner's" or "clinchies" in some games, depending who you were playing with.
I’m 47 and played conkers in school on merseyside.
The local ‘conker trees’ were famous!
I think whether or not you grew up with a significant local population of 'conker trees' probably had a lot more to do with it than age. I'm younger than you (and didn't grow up 'poor') and we played too, 'pre-50s' is ridiculous.
I grew up in the 90s and we played conkers.
The main detail I remember was that soaking them in vinegar was supposed to make them stronger!
> I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Inner-city kid, same age as you, and it was everywhere. Not universal, I guess.
I played conkers in the 80s, everybody in the school did. People had tricks like coating their conkers in gloss etc. but it was still a widespread game. Played football and British bulldog type stuff too but conkers came in season for a bit every year.
Yeah, very much fron the 1950's 'Beano' era, but it did still go on in the mid 90s, at least in a wild throwing them about the place as entertainment. It was indeed a simpler time.
A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)
> I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Extremely common for kids to play this at least into the mid 2000s where i'm from, i moved away so i don't know if they still do
Another voice here of someone (in my 30s) who played conkers growing up. Was great fun!
That's more or less it.
You make a hole through your 'conker' (horse chestnut, not the edible type) and thread a string or a bootlace through it.
Then you take turns.
One holds their string still and lets the conker hang down, the other gets a swing at it with their conker. Whoever's conker lasts the longest is the winner.
There were all sorts of rumours about baking them, or soaking in vinegar or what have you to harden them up, but effectively it's the sort of game that a bunch of kids can play under a horse chestnut tree with relatively few props.
Using a steel 'ringer' in that circumstance would be the worst sort of unsportsmanlike behaviour.
Ho do you drill the hole? I'm having trouble imagining kids with needles in their pockets, do you do it with a pencil or toothpick?
We've got a ton of horse chestnuts in my neighborhood but I've never heard of this game and I'm eager to introduce it to my kids.
Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
We used to have a BBQ skewer that we used for various purposes, including adding holes to belts. We'd heat it up on the gas hob and then burn a hole through the conker. I actually still have the same one I've inherited in my kitchen drawer. If you have an awl, you could use that instead, but I'd recommend heating it to get a cleaner hole.
You need to use a long enough string. Old cotton shoe laces are actually perfect as the aglets make threading that much easier.
The force of one conker against another is enough to sometimes make it spin round, but not enough to do any real damage. You just need a long enough string that your fingers are not in the firing range. Obviously there is a vanishingly small risk of a piece of conker ending up in the eye but I never witnessed that or any other injury happening. The biggest problem was usually upset kids when their prized conker got destroyed.
We'd heat it up on the gas hob and then burn a hole through the conker.
That's brilliant. Why did this never occur to me? That's going on the list of things to tell my younger self when time travel becomes possible.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
It does until you learn, usually quite quickly, to do it properly.
Hurting your opponent's hand is a different matter :)
The memoir Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing describes using a heated icepick.
You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.
We randomly had something like this in our kitchen draw...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/SpitJack-Trussing-Butchers-Roasting...
Attach string, push through, detach string and remove.
sweet!
I'm not from Britain, but we used to craft with chestnuts. We always used a small hand drill (Wikipedia tells me it's called a gimlet). I assume it's the same in Britain
> your hand hitting it and hurting you?
WHen you were a kid, accidentally hitting yourself or the other person was just part of it!
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Not usually in my experience, the string isn't that short and you're holding it at one end. Injury is still possible though, but that's part of the fun!
A gimlet? Hammer and a thick-ish nail? Honestly I can't remember how we used to do it. Might even have used a hand drill at some point. They're fairly soft when you've made a hole in the shell, so you might get away with a screwdriver?
When at school we probably made do with a compass (the drawing kind), as we all had them. I'm sure that resulted in a pretty high rate of conkers being destroyed before they could be strung, and a lot of ruined compasses.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Generally not, though the game isn't without its minor hazards :)
There's a (very sweet) video here that seems to do a good job of showing the process and the game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
Through the exact rules are up to the players and I personally consider the "stamps" rule they mention to be foul play :)
compass makes a ton of sense, and that is indeed a sweet video, thanks for sharing!
Horse chestnut shells are very hard, normally you would drill the hole.
We used a corkscrew then threaded a shoelace through it.
Here's a video that explains it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
And one from the championship:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5t6ej8Jzew
And here I was thinking that curling was the most ridiculous-looking sport in the world. I stand corrected.
I don’t think conker players pretend it’s a sport. It would ihmo be more accurate to call it a game.
If my memory serves me: you used to announce your conker as a “two-er”, or “three-er”, for example, to inform your opponent how many conkers your particular conker had previously claimed. If your opponent decided to challenge you and won then they would claim your “three-er” and add its win total to their own. So a “two-er” would become a “five-er”.
I also recall this, but suspect sometimes numbers may have been inflated...
I at nearly 50 years old still own my undefeated 48’er. It’s on a yellow bootlace in a box in the loft at my dad’s house.
This is really probing the dusty, cobwebbed corners of my memory but yes, I have a very vague recollection of a 'six-er' being somewhat special...
The phrase "a sixer at conkers" is floating to the surface.
Was it that once you reached six, you stopped counting? Or do you retire it, undefeated?
I'm having the utter best time as a 12 year old replacing conker with something less wholesome
soo.. bayblade with nuts?
Innate knowledge to Brits, similar to knowing a swan might break your arm
Don’t draw on your hand with a pen or you’ll get ink poisoning
Don't make that silly face. If the wind changes, it'll stay like that forever.
Don't lean on your chair, I had a student who died doing that
Eating carrots makes you see in the dark
How holding a feather and you’ll get a “red ring of fungus” in your hair.
I thought that was stupid then as well.
Lol, I don’t understand what THAT means! A swan might break your arm?!?
I emigrated to Britain. These sorts of things mystified me for the longest time.
Yes. Picture some British parents and their child on a walk near a pond, river, canal or whatever. The child sees a swan. The parents will say something like "don't get too close dear, it could break your arm".
Swans are aggressive so it's probably not terrible advice, but not because they go around breaking people's arms specifically.
Anecdotal reports, all of them true I'm sure:
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-24...
Lovely read!
The idea that a swan can "break a man's arm with a blow of its wing" is (or was) ingrained enough into the British psyche that Peter Cook's comic creation, Arthur Streeb-Greebling, once said of his mother that she could "break a swan's wing with a blow of her nose."
It’s the British version of an urban myth. It’s like an urban myth… but more British.
In the Netherlands we are also taught a swan could break your arm if you get too close. I don't know if it's true or not because I've been too scared to find out.
They're not going to hold you down and break it with a tire iron .. but I'll bet for certain that Swans are responsible for arms being broken.
They've got a pretty savage and scary charge to them, it's highly likely they've startled more than one person in a park who've turned to run, tripped and fallen across steps or rockery edges and come out badly injured.
They are also able to swing their wings quite rapidly while charging you. In this way they can throw a surprisingly hard punch. But not break bones in healthy humans - kids included.
https://outdoorswimmer.com/coach/myth-busting-can-a-swan-bre...
The beak is probably more dangerous, or at least give you a nasty pinch or nibbing.
Black Swans in Perth, herdsman Lake and elsewhere, in the 1980s during breeding season (and likely still today) fully charged people and had the mass to knock over more than one kid or small teenager .. and scare the bejeebus out of many adults.
As I said, and supported by your link, I can't see a swan directly breaking a human bone - but they sure as hell can knock one arse over by charging and causing a step back fall over. That'll do some damge in some cases, easy.
I've never been charged by a swan, but I have been knocked into a ditch by the slightly smaller but no less aggressive Canada Goose while biking. No broken bones, but I did have to straighten the alignment of the wheels on my bike.
The smell test here is that swans are flying birds and a human is large(-ish) land mammal. Nature just cannot make a flying bird's bones strong enough because they have to be much lighter.
If we play conkers with each other's bones the swan will lose.
Upvote for the subtle reference to the conkers story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844545).
It's this thread, did you suffer HNception? :)
Was bitten by a swan as a child. Painful by all accounts, but not enough for me to remember the pain, though I recall being more careful around swans afterward Probably more scary for my parents.
Ye and the queen eats swans for breakfast or something like that.
Less often since September 2022.
We still have a queen, just not the one we want ;)
All swans are owned by the crown and the monarch has the exclusive right to kill and eat them.
Or at least that's the way I heard it, come to think of it I have no idea at all if that's true. Stops people killing and eating swans though. Not that many would anyway these days.
> All swans
Not all, just mute swans; so not Bewick’s or whoopers (if I remember correctly)
Edit:
“His Majesty specifically owns any unclaimed mute swan in open water in both England and Wales in a ceremonial fashion. This has been a law since medieval times. His ownership is shared with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, granted to them by the Crown in the 1400s.”
https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/king/does-the-king-really-own-...
St John's College serves swan on formal occasions sometimes, because they have some connection to the royal family that means they have special permission. (Or used to in the Queen Elizabeth days, I don't know if they still do under Charles)
it is a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance
Apart from the ones at Abbotsbury swannery. Those ones are privately owned. It is true to say all mute swans in Britain are owned by someone, though.
So well known that it was even famously used in an advert for a kid's chocolate bar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC9BBLSZZdQ
Yes, it is. It’s a game most news-reading-age adults will have played when they were at school as children.
It's a game you play as a kid. This is the first I've heard of there being a professional league.
On the other hand, we also have competitions such as cheese rolling (trying not to get killed by a giant cheese wheel rolling down a hill), so I'm not that surprised.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-gloucestershire-6...
I did that race twice, dislocated my left shoulder each time. Scariest thing i've ever done.
People have the misapprehension that you're supposed to catch the cheese. No idea why you'd think it's a good idea to catch a rock hard lump whilst running down a hill so fast that if you tense your legs once to slow down you do 3 cartwheels.
Also just remembered - they have local rugby players to catch those who can't stop running from hitting the fence of the house at the bottom. Saw at least one person they missed who smacked into the fence and got carted off by St John's Ambulance.
I know the version where you try not to kill yourself chasing the cheese. Are you saying there's one where the cheese chases and tries to kill you?
I feel we've entered Terry Pratchett territory in this thread, and I'm very happy about it.
Shhhh! The first rule of cheese-chase is never talk about cheese-chase.
British coroners know the signs….
If it is a serious game, I’m surprised they don’t examine the chestnuts first
The alleged cheater was also the head judge of the tournament.
Geez, we just had tetherball. No one tried to destroy each other’s nuts.
If we had those in my schoolyard, that would literally happen within 5 minutes -"spinny-spinny-whack-to-the-sack"
You're starting to get why the game used to be so popular.
They did at my school.
roshambo. southpark style.
In Britain, it's very well known by those of us who are 40+, and I think even younger people will at least have heard of it, even if they haven't played it themselves. It was an absolute staple of playgrounds in the 1980s. There's a rich history of supposed 'cheats' — boiling the conker in vinegar was a classic. And, note, conker, not chestnut (two different things).
Yes, it's a quintessential childhood game here. You take turns to have a single swing at the opponent's conker, until one of the conkers is smashed off its string.
Cheating is a bit of an art. Baking the chestnuts at the right temperature was one method; a friend of mine filled his conker with glue.
It is in Spain, any self-respected pre-smartphone-childhood person has at the very minimum least seen this in action at the playground.
It's sufficiently well known that as a British 30 something I understood what was being alleged just from the headline
I only know of the game because the Conkerer web browser was named after it. http://conkeror.org/
Here are some pictures of a previous championship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2015/oct/12/5... .
I'm Norwegian, but have lived in the UK half my life, since I was 25, and I'm aware of it, though have never seen it played. I think most people who have lived her for a while will at least have heard references to it.
Yes, conkers is sufficiently well-known enough as a children's schoolyard game that I would expect pretty much every newspaper-reading adult to have heard of it. The fact that there is supposedly an "adult" championship event would be a surprise to most. If you're looking for the "story behind the story", other than the fact that it's a seasonally-specific, light human-interest story: there is probably a slight cultural bias amongst those who most fondly remember the game towards the private-school-educated, upper-class types who combine nostalgia for imagined "glory days" with political conservatism, so this is a good opportunity for the left-leaning Guardian to hand-pick someone who appears to belong to that class and expose them as a ridiculously-dressed scoundrel with childish interests and suspect morals. The subtext is: these are the sort of idiots we want you to associate with Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and co, and thus the Overton Window gets a tiny nudge in the opposite direction.
I think you’re reading way, way too much into this. Read the piece and it seems like just a goofy little oddball story, makes for a light and enjoyable read, I’m really not picking up any political angle in this piece.
The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.
This is silly. Conkers aren't a rich person's sport, and this article in the guardian isn't pushing any political subversive subtext.
News is what you don't get to read.
The rest are political ads.
I heard the conkers cheater was an illegal immigrant, the establishment covered it up and now they wont even report on conkers anywhere in the main stream media (/s?)
Right on.
Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):
> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."
In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.
0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr75xyn1rd8o
It never occurred to me that conkers could be a class thing and you could be right. But let it be known that conkers was extremely popular at my state school; me and all of my friends grew up to be pretty left wing too by the way. Also they banned it at my school, along with pogs, yoyos, etc.
It's not a class thing.
Fox hunting, horse riding, polo and skiing... yes. Conkers, No.
Wherever there is a chestnut tree you'll get conkers. I would imagine it's more of a town/village vs city thing rather than class thing.
Which of those are you imagining doesn't have horse chestnut trees? (Conkers come from those, not plain chestnut trees)
I'm sure there are parts of the country where they're less common, but there's huge numbers of conkers falling off trees in big British cities (even if the majority will be in parks) as well as in the countryside. We played with them at my pre-teen city centre school for sure, and the trees are a common sight on roads and in gardens as well as public parks.
edit: the Woodland trust actually says "Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens."
Live in London in Zone 2 and there are absolutely tons of conker trees around me including in areas which are not posh. They are very common in an urban setting.[1]
[1] Which kind of sucks for me personally because they cause me really terrible hayfever. I think I'm specifically alergic to their pollen maybe.
Depends where you are - I went to a very modest comprehensive in Scotland and yet we still went skiing at weekend to Cairngorm because it was close.
What if you ski in jeans?
Skiing is a much more expensive activity in most of Britain, mainly since it requires taking a week off work, international flights and hotels to be able to participate. And to become good at skiing you'll have to do that once or twice a year for many years. In places where the local ski slope is a bus ride away it is much less of a class/wealth thing.
The height of ski chic in Scotland used to, at least when I skied regularly, consist of offshore foul weather gear emblazoned with the name of the oil company (or oil service company) the wearer had borrowed it from.
Exactly! I used to ski double black diamonds in the Sierra Nevada range wearing jeans, with gaiters to keep the snow out of my boots.
Eton wall game is a class thing. Conkers is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game
Considerably more pleasant than the St. Tadger's Day wall game played at Graybridge public school.
https://youtu.be/dDjV9iKmT9k?t=118
Conkers is about the least upper class game i can think of. We played it on council estates.
In Britain, maybe. In the USA, I don’t think so.
Is the game skill-based? How can you influence which chestnut breaks? Is the challenge chestnut selection? Or a specific swing method?
I find it highly suspicious that the reigning champion gets to drill the holes in the conkers. You can intentionally make some of them weaker by drilling closer to the edge or something.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers, and the participants must select their conker from the collection or given one at random. Prevents tampering I guess.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers
Going around the conker trees in your area and finding the perfect conker is a huge part of the game. There is also a certain amount of pre-game 'modification' that are generally allowed, like soaking them in various solutions, or baking them in an oven.
Having to use a provided conker would be like showing up to the Tour de France and being assigned a bike by the organisers.
Indeed, but apparently this is the way it works. I suspect to prevent 'foul-play' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Conker_Championships#WCC...
I stand corrected. Perhaps Tour de France should apply this rule as well to avoid foul play?
I thought it might be like formula 1 where having the right equipment is part of the challenge.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland
I’m from elsewhere in Europe and I know about it from high school and it’s also something that pops up in the world sports section on news websites every now and then.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article?
I got the gist just from reading the headline, yes. And I'm not even a limey, I just lived there for a few years.
in my schools, the closest analog was probably using the school-supplied sporks to engage in "Spork Wars" (not the best example but it will do https://youtu.be/vO7SclBfpZ8?t=145 )
though through the "draft" nature of which spork you would receive, we never had a controversy on the level of the article's:
> "There are also suggestions that King Conker had marked the strings of harder nuts"
Swede here. I know from just reading the headline what happened.
Byt then I’ve watched some British costume dramas.
Here's how it looks like apparently:
https://youtu.be/hXUbTKd6pmo?t=29
I'm British. I only have a very vague memory of the game from my childhood. I didn't remember what the goal was, but I remembered you have to hit the opponent's one. I don't remember if I ever played it or not.
You hold the conker in one hand and the string in the other with some tension and then release so it pings and bashes the other players conker, hoping to smash it off the string.
Repeat until one conker is smashed into oblivion.
If your conker wins against multiples it becomes named mythically: a twoer, a threer, and so on.
I once had a niner. a fiver took it down.
I only know about conkers due to photonicinduction's youtube video where they play conkers with two CRT televisions attached with ropes to the ceiling
However even without knowing that I think reading the article makes it clear enough what it's about and that a steel chestnut shattering the other one seems like an unfair advantage :)
Was confused too. My first thought was about conker crafting [1] and I was puzzled that there was a world championship for it and people were serious enough about it to cheat - but then again, weirder things exist...
[1] https://curiousandgeeks.com/conker-animals-autumn-crafts
More UK people will have played conkers then soccer.
More Brits will have played football than soccer too, I believe.
> it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it.
Sounds like a British version of pencil break - but with way more scandal, apparently
I think most people would know just from the headline.
> The 23-year-old said: “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.”
It seems the suspicious was pretty quick.
It’s just crazy that someone would cheat at something so low-stakes with such a high probability of being caught, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
People cheat on online cooperative computer games like Helldivers with almost no rewards for being performatively better other than a few imaginary in-game points. People can be weird about the smallest things
Fair enough. People cheat at chess too which makes absolutely no sense to me.
Not just cheat but cheat using Bluetooth butt plugs at an extremely high level of play (https://nypost.com/2022/10/06/chess-champ-gets-butt-inspecte...). Some people have all the fun.
You shouldn’t state it so confidently as fact — nobody has ever produced any evidence that Hans Niemann cheated over the board (let alone with a Bluetooth butt plug, despite all the memes to that effect).
I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.
Thank you. This is the kind of speed-of-correction (~20 min or less) that is needed for social media discourse to work effectively. Indeed, no evidence has been found, this was just a silly meme from Reddit which predated the Hans drama by several years. When the Hans drama happened, of course Redditors started making silly flippant references to this joke. But some people didn’t understand that those were references, instead mistook them for actual “accusations”, bought into it, and started actually seriously perpetuating the accusation/rumor. It was repeated often enough in juuust serious enough tone that tabloid journalism eventually picked it up and ran stories with it.
But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.
So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?
Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.
But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.
With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).
So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.
Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.
> Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players.
It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.
Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.
Cheating at a PvE game like Helldivers is basically a victimless crime (I don’t do it, but I can see why people would).
It is a crime against oneself.
It is a pretty straightforward wave shooter game. I had fun with it, but it isn’t high art or anything. I enjoy games like Hades or Dark Souls where the fact that you keep losing is an interesting part of the narrative and builds the overall ambiance. Helldivers (2, at least) is not really that sort of game, the plot is more like fun, even sillier Starship Troopers.
I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.
Cheating with only your friends - yeah, mostly. Cheating with randos sounds like it would lead to boring gameplay.
Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?
Hey, dopamine is dopamine. This ain’t stolen valor or a plagiarized thesis.
I think it's a special kind of person that gets a kick from "winning" at something that's not a challenge. You might as well write "winner" on a t-shirt in marker and wear it.
Speaking of which [https://www.thepopculture.co/products/need-room-full-mirrors...]
The games cheat industry was huge[1] back before the internet was a major thing. Entire books about cheat codes, walkthrough to get the best gear and to beat the game in the easiest way possible, then websites full of cheats, etc.
People, on average, like to do the easiest thing possible and on top of that, they frequently like to brag about what they've achieved and how good they are. Social animals and all that.
[1] By the standards of the time.
I dunno. The article states that David Jakins has been competing since 1977 and has never won. He was also a Judge, so this game seems to be extremely important to him for some reason. I guess he wanted to win by any means necessary before he has to retire from the sport permanently due to age or physical limitation
Veblen called sports Conspicuous Leisure. The goal is not fun but that everyone sees you win. So Stakes are Status. And Status gets people things in the same way Cash does.
He is approaching the end of his life and been competing for decades but never won. Risk vs reward.
cf. wordle
Playing conkers at 23 years of age is a bit wrong. It is a bit like building LEGO kits as an adult, particularly wrong if the goal is to just build the design on the box and put the completed model on a shelf, rather than build your own creative masterpiece.
Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the school playground. Adults did not play LEGO then, it was the role of the father to read the newspaper and the role of the mother to be 'chained to the sink' in those days, with LEGO just for small children.
Conkers was very much for younger children, once an interest in the opposite sex, playing cards for match sticks or general juvenile delinquency was established, conkers was 'grown out of'.
Much like how fathers could teach their sons to beat up bullies, so it was that fathers could help with the technical aspects of conkers, such as getting the hand drill out (remember those contraptions, before battery power tools).
Conkers was a rite of passage, something that you would be expected to grow out of. It also came with a season, i.e. autumn, and the etiquette was to pick on someone of your own size. Hence, someone playing conkers at the age of 23 has not really got it right.
As for the guy with the steel conker, again we have a problem of age.
Now, as for playing with LEGO as an adult, or playing conkers as an adult, or, for that matter, the retro 8-bit computer scene, this is about regressing from the adult world of today, with all of its problems, and hiding in a recreated childhood. This is sort of understandable for people that were sent off to war, to see things they did not need to see. Those people kind of need the therapy that a return to the child world provides.
But nowadays, I see it as a response to the atomisation of community. If you are not spending your weekends with friends at pubs or at dinner parties, if you don't have an adult hobby such as with a lathe in a shed, if you can't afford big toys such as a boat, then childhood hobbies are a safe space to return to. Apart from anything else, you can buy all the LEGO that you could not buy then. Or, with conkers, you can find a social scene of like minded individuals and get a bit more scientific about winning.
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Yes. Usually conkers were banned at school. So we had to play space invaders, for which you need a tennis ball not an Atari.
Can you cheat by purposefully missing the opponent’s conker? Thus reducing the total impact on conkers in this match vs conkers in other matches and getting an advantage?
You take it in turns to hit, moving yours on their turn is cheating. Given that you have a lot more control over what kind of hit happens on your turn than on theirs, skipping your turn is never going to give you an advantage (unless your opponent is somehow anti-competent).
But then how would you smash theirs? That sounds a bit like cheating by staying at home and not playing.
I can't imagine so. A match is over when one persons conker is destroyed. If you were purposefully missing, you'd be throwing the game. Theirs would still take a battering from hitting yours as well.
Yes it is, everyone I grew up with in Ireland played conkers.
gosh i remember those halcyon days back when I had a niner, sadly it was taken by a fiver.
Yeah, like saying 'tetherball' or 'keep-away' to someone in the US; which I only know from a Monk episode I watched last night.
I didn't know and wouldn't have guessed there were world championships, though.
They did play conkers with cranes and caravans in Top Gear, so I feel that at least a large portion of non Brits will know the game from there.
it's pretty easy to infer by the article. Or ask GPT-n to do it.
I'm puzzled as well, what the heck the article is talking about and why it's posted here?
Yeah it’s a game you play as kids.
Some people pay for conkers
But I get mine for free
I go round my grandmas house
She's got a horse chestnut tree
Bass drop
I love the glimpses that give away the British people on here. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one but this thread has brought them all out
This wins the day for me
...
conkers
It seems like a bad move to have a participant responsible for drilling the holes and attaching the strings.
Also I don’t understand the one paragraph aside about the American who is never mentioned before or after(?)
>It seems like a bad move to have a participant responsible for drilling the holes and attaching the strings.
It is probably the kind of event where the only people who would be willing to do the timely prep work are the contestants.
The guy the article is about won the men's. At the end, the men's champ plays the women's champ for overall champion.
This American mentioned was the women's champ, who apparently went on to beat him. Which either means he wasn't cheating, or was and then played fairly on the last match?
I assume he wouldn't cheat everytime and instead would only do it to reduce the overall wear on the chestnut over many matches?
Apparently they pick a new one each round.
>It seems like a bad move to have a participant responsible for drilling the holes and attaching the strings.
Part of the "point" of conkers is that conker-prep is just as much as a skill as the technique during the hitting phase.
I think this was just poor scrutineering (or corruption) on the organizers side.
That would make sense to me, but it seems like maybe it isn’t how they did it?
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
The World Conker Championships is an annual event held in England, where competitors from around the world play the traditional game of conkers using chestnuts. Each player threads a chestnut, known as a conker, onto a string and takes turns striking their opponent’s conker, aiming to break it. The tournament follows a knockout format, with players advancing until a world champion is declared. The event has been running since 1965 and has grown in popularity, drawing international participants and spectators.
Considering that it's called a world championship, someone should study the sport in-depth! Are the players allowed to swing the chestnut in a circle like a sling? Can they use carbon fiber strings, or maybe some sort of elastic string to build up more energy? Or can the player use a heavy string so it can crack like a whip? Fancy arm/wrist/fingers movements to accelerate the chestnut in the last moment? What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages? This could be so exciting!
I’m do not think you always want to hit them hard. If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.
the two conkers hitting each other harder likely will lead to an earlier result, but it will also favor the conker that can withstand few hard blows over one that can withstand many softer ones.
So, assuming you can somehow judge how well your and your opponent’s conker do in this regard, you may want to go either for brute impact or for many rounds.
> What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages?
I think that’s more important. Even idealized conkers are fairly asymmetrical, so possibly, the ‘bottom’ of one hitting the side of another is a winning or losing strategy. If so, it’s more a matter of timing than of being brutal, at least for hypothetical perfect players. Whether humans can do much here, I wouldn’t know.
> If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.
That was my first thought too, but I don't know if it's true because of the strings they are attached to. The striking conker is at the end of a taut string the entire time, but the receiving conker is hanging loosely and bounces around after being struck. My guess is that the taut string helps with energy dissipation after a collision, but I could be wrong. And either way, it might be a negligible difference.
The strings and the conkers are supplied by the organisers. Contestents can't use different types of string.
This all kind of takes the fun out of it don't you think?
Not every game needs to have the fun sucked out of it by endless optimization and instrumental play.
Just conk some chestnuts. Simple as.
Well, the winner this year was an American so I bet we’ll be back next year with high tech nano-engineered strings and carefully bred chestnuts.
What you find fun or unfun need not match other people's preferences. You can tell us what's fun or unfun for you, but you can't tell other people they're having fun wrong.
I personally find a lot of optimization problems very fun and can keep at them for a long time.
Stop optimising my fun! :-p
What is conker, you ask? Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LcaUTAuQfc
The alleged cheater is in this video @3:29
I was very confused by that link calling it a horse chestnut. That is not what I grew up calling a horse chestnut, ie the keratin thing that your farrier trims (or you do with a rasp.)
Separately, what an absolutely nutty thing to cheat at.
Thanks for sharing the video!
Am I the only one here who instantly redirected mentally to "Conker's Bad Fur Day" ?
I thought of it, too. It must have been a reference, given that he was a squirrel.
VAR evidence leads judge to say that it would have been "impossible for him to cheat at that point".
Dang, please update the link title to reflect that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJKIbq2FuG8
Gotta admit, it takes some nuts of steel to pull this through.
Conkers are just cool things. Like unwrapping a present to get a perfect little gift.
This brought back so many fun childhood memories of fall time in Leeds, going for walks with friends in search of the best conker. I hadn't thought about it in years.
Stop the steel.
absolutely fascinating. conkers is an amazing game
I developed a strange fascination with Horse Chestnut trees.
I remember in the nineties when I noticed Horse Chestnuts laying on the pavement, and felt a tinge of sadness kids would normally by scouting areas to pick up all the chestnuts like competitive squirrels.
I needed this cute video to tell me what the heck conker is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
You and your opponent each attach a chestnut to a shoestring. You try to destroy your opponent's stringed chestnut by swinging your own stringed chestnut at it. The video explains different ways to cheat, such as coating the chestnut with nail varnish.
Folks, you all get it wrong! This is "hacking a real world system for your advantage" (YC interview question)!
It's only cheating if my competitors do it!/s
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
So the "judge" who prepped the conkers for everyone and stringed them also competed in the competition and won
These things in the UK are generally simultaneously massively serious in terms of arbitrary rules and also massively not.
I suspect there are handful of entrants each year, a few obsessives and 'people around at the time it happens to be on. Hence this guy who has been around long enough he gets asked to help out.
UK law generally is based on previous screw-ups.
Doubtless next year they will add a rule, but in general abusing such power would fall under the general "good sportsmanship" rule and be dealt with far more seriously than just 'banned from a tiny competition with a grand sounding name'.
I had a hard time figuring out where the cheating comes in. Especially with the metal chestnut. Marking the strings so they break more easily?
If he sees his opponent with a marked string, he knows it's time to bring out the metal chestnut.
If, like me, you were wondering WTF this is all about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
Surely every kids (in the UK) knows the secret to a winning conker is to keep it in a dark place for several weeks so it naturally hardens up. I'm not sure if this is considered cheating though.
The conkeror this year is from Indianapolis! She only learned about conkers a few months ago.
The field of entrants is probably like 50.
Sad to experience this kind of Indianapolisphobia in the hallowed pages of HN
Judging by the photos it's definitely in the 2 digits, although given the existence of a number 70 let's assume it's ~99: https://www.worldconkerchampionships.com/gallery/all/Geoff%2...
I guess it could be that each country can only send at most one representative (making her the US Conker Champion) but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's a little unlikely.
I’m pondering why and how this made to the top of HN.
Pinewood Derby vibes
I remember being so upset as a kid that my pinewood derby car never looked as good as anyone else's and that it never won. I didn't realize as a youth that the parents had built the other kids' cars, whereas I built mine entirely on my own.
Now that I have children, they, too, are feeling the grim disatisfaction of a stacked competition by losing to the other kids' parents in the pinewood derby.
I genuinely credit that experience with my attitude toward life (don't take anything too seriously, because everything we do is temporary, competition (I will work on my own when possible, to do my best, and if I win it is a reflection on my own skills and abilities), and helped me understand that no matter how good I am at something there is always someone who takes that thing far too seriously and will cheat to win.
I just found this on the conker championships, quite funny. https://youtu.be/q8CYrM9xkUc
Some stuff really makes you lose faith in humanity.
welp, looks like a conker’s having a bad fur day over this
I'm just amazed to see that this was not The Onion
I would not want to be conked on the head with that one.
The version of this game played by American kids is (was?) “pencil popping”. The idea being you take turns trying to break your opponents pencil by flicking it at theirs while they hold it on both ends.
Thanks to HN, now I know there's such a sport with hitting nuts attached to strings. I've read a lot of English-speaking material, but was only aware of rugby (it was aired on our TV in the 00's) and cricket. I'm amazed there's even a world championship, and that the Guardian has thumbnails to attract readers to important news on this sport.
Instantly reminded of this gem of a news report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53w9E774fGE
Seriously, who gives a cheat?
thanks for making me discover this sport.
What a bunch of nutters.
It's Not Cricket
But was it a cheeser?
Just found this on the Conker championships - https://youtu.be/q8CYrM9xkUc
I wonder if we'll find it's related to the infestation of gambling in sports these days
This is bonkers!
Right, so picture this: you’re in the middle of a cracking game of Conker, and things aren’t exactly going your way. Your conker's looking as sturdy as a biscuit dunked in a cuppa for too long, and your mate’s conker is built like the Queen's Guard—completely unshakeable. But instead of taking the thrashing like a proper Brit, you think to yourself, “Why not get a bit creative, eh?”
Now, I’m not talking about anything on the level of Boris slipping through a political pickle. No, no. We're going full Del Boy here, a right dodgy geezer's guide to giving your conker a bit of extra “oomph” without your opponent being any the wiser.
First thing’s first, get yourself a conker that’s already hard as nails. If you rock up with a squishy, fresh-from-the-tree conker, you might as well bring a soggy chip to a fistfight. So, what’s the plan, Stan? You do what any self-respecting trickster does: you cheat. But in the most British way possible—subtle, sneaky, and with enough charm to get away with it.
The Vinegar Trick
Ah, the vinegar trick! An old-school classic, passed down from generation to generation like your nan’s dodgy trifle recipe. You soak your conker in vinegar overnight, let it dry out, and voilà! Hard as a rock. This trick’s so crafty, you’d think it was devised by the fox that pinched the farmer’s best hen. Just make sure it doesn’t reek like a fish and chip shop, or your mates will twig faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle!”
The Oven Gambit Now,
if you’re really feeling a bit more “James Bond,” you can stick your conker in the oven. But let’s not go burning the house down like a right muppet. Give it a low and slow roast, just enough to toughen it up. Just don’t let your mum catch you, or you’ll be in for a bollocking. Nothing says “I’ve been up to no good” quite like the smell of chargrilled conker wafting through the kitchen at half-past ten.
Nail Varnish Shenanigans
Feeling a bit flash, are we? Maybe you’re one of those who likes to add a touch of sparkle to your dastardly deeds. A sly coat of clear nail varnish will do the trick. It gives your conker an unbreakable shell—like a Ford Fiesta that somehow survives every banger race. Your opponent won’t know what hit ‘em, and you’ll be grinning like a Cheshire cat when your conker smashes theirs to smithereens.
Dodgy Drilling
If you’re the type who thinks “go big or go home,” then this one’s for you, mate. Hollow out the inside of your conker and fill it with something solid—maybe a bit of lead or, if you’re feeling particularly sneaky, a cheeky bit of cement. Just make sure your drill work isn’t as dodgy as the bloke who sold you that knock-off Rolex down the market, or you’ll end up in the doghouse faster than a footballer caught with his pants down.
The Ol’ Switcheroo
This one’s for the true legends of skulduggery. You show up with your ordinary, bog-standard conker, all innocent-like. Then, when your mate’s not looking—probably distracted by some bloke in the corner shouting about the price of pints—you whip out your pre-hardened, vinegar-soaked, oven-baked, nail-varnished super conker. It’s the ultimate con, and if you pull it off, you’ll feel like you’ve just nicked the crown jewels.
I miss when long rambly silly comments like this were off topic and weird but at least kind charming
AI ones don't have the same juice :c
We didn't have conkers so we played mumblety-peg.
Man, this is conkers!
He was said to have nuts of steel, but the claim wasn't taken seriously, or literally.
I love how the top comment is an American expressing disdain for having to google about another country's passtimes. It would be kinder to preface your comment more akin to "For those out of the know, here's what this sport entails..." instead of expressing displeasure at the imagined expectations imposed on readers of the article.
I know HN will always be US centric to some extent but it can't be too hard to be more curious as opposed to annoyed at news shared from outside of it.
I love how your comment is assuming that anybody here who's not British must be American. I'm Dutch and had never heard of conker before either.
I'm pretty sure it's you assuming that the comment is assuming that.
I think the assumption is more that someone who's offended that the Guardian didn't explain a mainstay British playground game to their readers...
Is probably from the USA.
I think the assumption is that the assumption assumes asinine intent akin to adopting ambiguous alliteration.
Mainstay? First I'm hearing of it. I thought it was an onion article at first. It's really hard to tell when British people are serious sometimes. "Conker King"...like, WTH?
> Mainstay?
For sure it is. Every boy (and probably some girls, but never seen myself) plays conkers and likely puts their life in great peril climbing horse chestnut trees to gather the best conkers before anyone else gets them.
When I think back now to some of the massive (old) trees I used to climb and the action of shaking the branches to try to get the chestnuts to drop (whilst the branch is breaking underneath you, 100ft up), I’m surprised I’m here to talk about it!
This is a serious business.
You know, conkers is exactly the sort of sport that makes a good anime. Everyman protagonist finds the world's hardest conker, takes on a series of increasingly absurd super-conkerists, Baki the Grappler style, with frequent informational asides about the art and science of conkers, and eventually faces the mysterious Conker Lord ... who turns out to be his long lost older brother!
Not to disparage your heroics, but I am fairly sure you weren't 100ft up, and the tale grew taller in the telling.
Conkers is good fun. Though a bit dangerous for modern sensibilities perhaps.
Maybe, but I took a guess based on how high horse chestnut trees can get. I’m almost sure I am underestimating. The best ones I used to climb were those that lined the entry to a country estate and they were clearly very old and were absolutely huge.
A horse chestnut tree can reach heights of approximately 30 to 40 meters (about 98 to 131 feet) [1].
I used to go pretty damn far up, one time really shitting myself up as the thinner weaker branches started breaking away as I was climbing higher.
It genuinely felt like, even if probably not entirely true, that I was sticking my head out of the top of the tree before it started giving way. It’s a memory that will stick with me forever!
Of course I can’t prove this, but it’s not entirely implausible that a very old horse chestnut tree could be over 100 feet high and it’s not entirely implausible that it’s possible to climb up a tree of that size. So I guess either take my word for it or not, your call ;)
[1] https://directree.org/horse-chestnut-aesculus-hippocastanum/
Some trees are pretty damn good for climbing. It scares the shit out of me now, but I’m fairly certain I’ve gotten to some 7-10 meters up. That’s only like 30 feet though, I don’t think I’ve even seen trees that were 100ft high xD
“That’s an odd name! I’d a called em fuzzwozzers.”
It certainly is a mainstay. A yearly treat which children love. In Ireland I was taught this song in school: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bhebvq0O4GY (and I still remember all the words)
>Mainstay? First I'm hearing of it.
You say this as if you were British, but then the rest of your comment seems to suggest that you're not (in which case it's not surprising that you might be unaware of some aspects of British playground culture).
I honestly can't believe you're British and have never heard of conkers.
It is a part of our culture, like pubs, pooh sticks, morriss dancing or cheese rolling.
It would be a totally valid citizenship question.
Maybe you're a city child?
I’m not even British but I’ve read enough novels to know of those things.
What is a pooh stick and is it related to a poop knife
You and your friends get a stick each, together you drop it off a bridge over a stream (upstream side), then you run to the other side of the bridge, whichever stick appears first is the winner.
Morriss dancing isnt a real thing. It is just something silly invented by the BBC as a self-deprecating joke, like Canadians street vendors selling fried beaver tails.
We have conkers in London.
The commenter asks if the game is well known in Britain / Ireland itself.
I don't see the commenter expressing displeasure but rather only curiosity
The Dutch are direct.
In Britain you’re not allowed to be.
> Or are you expected to have to google it?
It's clearly the implication that you shouldn't have to Google for it. That isn't directness, it's passive aggressiveness, which the Dutch are not stereotypically known for.
And you are? The one who deals out the stereotypes?
Is no one allowed to mention stereotypes, because there's no defined authority? The Dutch being direct is about as uncontroversial as you could get.
In any case, the comment I replied to already made the claim. I deliberately weakened it by saying it was a stereotype rather than talking as if it were unconditionally true.
> That isn't directness, it's passive aggressiveness, which the Dutch are not stereotypically known for.
No need to be passively aggressive if you can be actively aggressive ;)
I live in Belgium, near the Dutch border. I can confirm that the Dutch can be passive-aggressive.
I don’t think the capability precludes it from being something they’re not stereotypically known for.
Don’t rope this persons antics in with all Americans. Just sounds like a negative person in general. They exist all over the world.
I wasn’t annoyed at all and I don’t think I expressed disdain. You misjudged the tone I was going for.
> instead of expressing displeasure at the imagined expectations imposed on readers of the article
Well it is the author's expectation, isn't it? I also left the article wondering what in the world conker was. I don't think it matters where the game is from or where the reader lives. It's just good writing to do a bit of explaining for the foreign readers, of which The Guardian knows they have.
Now imagine adding an explanation of american football rules on every article about it, of which there are probably hundreds written a day.
I have no clue about american football rules - I barely know the sport exists, the ball has a funny shape, and that it's popular in the states. Still it would be absolute nonsense to explain their basics every time someone talks about them and I won't expect anyone to do so. Explanations like that will just annoy the vast majority of readers, who will have a preexisting interest in the sport and thus will already be familiar with the rules.
That said, I had even less of a clue what the hell conkers is. Luckily I have basic technological literacy and was able to find the wikipedia article[1] in a fraction of the time it takes one to complain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers
No one said it was true for every game. Conker is more akin to corn hole than football, but maybe even more obscure.
It's not obscure in the UK. You can find any number of equally 'obscure' cultural practices referenced in American newspapers without explanation. It's unreasonable to expect a British newspaper to be free of British cultural background assumptions just because it's viewable by an international audience.
It appears that about 38% of visits to their site come from the UK, so it might be that the majority of their readers aren't familiar with conker. https://www.similarweb.com/website/theguardian.com/#geograph...
I guess your point makes sense, though. There isn't the obligation to explain anything. I just personally think it's good writing to anticipate what your readers may not likely understand.
The NYT has 150 million monthly readers globally of which 27% are international. I still wouldn't expect it to insert helpful explainers every time it mentions a cultural phenomenon specific to the US.
It's the guardian. You're not the target audience. Not everything is about america.
To be fair it was written in English.
American here. I first heard the word conkers from Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, but this was pre Google, so I just figured it was some scifi word.
Then I learned that it was a game from an episode of Kipper the Dog, in which his cheeky friend Tiger cheats at the game by painting something to look like a chestnut.
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lmao this is always so funny to me. This is all that matters to these dudes.
They said he had balls of steel to try that one
For the yanks and elsewhere, yes conkers is well known in Britain. You basically put a chestnut (but its a conker) on a string by making a hole in the middle. Take turns swinging them on the string, whoever's breaks is the loser.
It used to be great fun till it was banned/requires eye protection now. There's an opportunity there, someone could make a perfectly safe conker app. I'm sure that would adequately replace it. /s
How is it banned? Banned in schools you mean?
Because I can’t see how authorities could ban anyone from picking up a conker from the ground and tying a string to it.
On a different note, if you’re just pulling a random one out of a bag, what is the competitive aspect? Is there a technique involved? Or just RNG?
It is banned in schools. As I said in another comment, that outlaws it for the vast majority of players at the place they used to play it.
Believe it or not adults playing conkers or people playing conkers outside of schools isn't a common pass time.
It is pretty much RNG, though you can massively nerf a conkers structural integrity by making the hole through the middle poorly, so there are some techniques. People also used to use thicker shoelaces like in vans, which I think made the centre more solid. I've never run an experiment to verify the difference that might make.
I doubt it's banned in all schools. It'll be banned in a few which made headlines.
The HSE is pretty clear it doesn't justify it:
> The HSE said the safety risk from playing conkers was "incredibly low and not worth bothering about"
It's not banned, but the Daily Mail would like you to think the EU banned another British tradition.
I don't read the daily mail. Try again. Maybe be less partisan.
Page 3: "Carly 32D, 21 from Ipswich, thinks EU regulations on conkers is against British traditions"
I'm not sure if that betrays more about your opinion of women than you may have been aware.
I think they were just parodying the typical text that used to be shown against a page 3 girl bitd.
It probably betrays more about my contempt for how peoples biggotry is exploited to make them believe things that are not true. When that is not enough then show them some tits with the message and they will tell you all about how pigs fly.
It just looks as though you have your own set of biases, just against people instead of against overly coddling rules. No one's mentioned the Daily Mail or the EU other than you and the other poster with similar biases.
The "legislation against playing conkers" is demonstrably false.
You're writing that as though you're quoting someone. Where are you quoting that from?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dangerous-daffodils-and-1...
I sincerely hope life starts treating you better than it clearly has.
I also hope you see the irony of your ways.
IIRC at some point schools decided to put a stop to it (it was a popular playground game in Autumn) because of the possibility of injury.
Or that might have just been a tabloid outrage-bait headline.
It's such a persistent myth that a health and safety organisation decided to sponsor the championships to try and debunk the idea. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7637605.stm
So the game is to test who has the stronger conker by hitting them into each-other?
Yes, that's it.
The reason I think this game is so popular is horse chestnut trees are very popular in the UK. For about a month each year, where I grew up the ground would be littered with conkers, both on my route to school and on school grounds. It's natural when walking around to try to find particularly large / impressive looking ones.
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I have no idea why you think safety laws prevent people from playing conkers in spite of the very thread you are commenting on being evidence that people play conkers and it is perfectly legal.
Well it is banned in schools. I'm not sure how many adults you believe actually play conkers, beyond a few nutters (sic), but its mainly been banned for the people that used to actually enjoy it, kids.
I do wonder if by banning it in schools it will get less and less common till it disappears. I suppose you predictably think that's nonsense.
But pedantry aside, its banned for the people who used to play it most and enjoy it, at the place they did just that.
You're downvoted because you're repeating unfounded tabloid rage-bait, hours after someone else posted a reliable source showing the opposite.
Ah yes your experience of a 2008 BBC news article from Copenhagen outweighs my lived, witnessed reality.
How could I be so clueless?
It is legal, but it also did get banned at my primary school. It continued to be played.
Conkers, bulldog, smoking behind the bike sheds (ok vaping these days), and porn (nowadays on screens rather than naughty magazines) ... a lot about British schools can be summed up in this quote:
“What exactly are you so happy about?' Harry asked her.'Oh Harry, don't you see?' Hermione breathed. 'If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!”
And they are generally banned in 1 school from one incident by one head trying to quell anger from parents.
The ban is generally lifted or just not enforced at all after a year or two.
For starters the playground monitors have more important stuff to do than remember the list of banned activities and try to enforce them.
A quick google will get you websites of primary schools up and down this great nation with photos of their Conkers champions holding up their trophies.
As for "the law" - from a 2019 petition to make conkers legal again:
There's no law or government policy banning children from playing conkers, so we're not sure exactly what you'd like the Government or Parliament to do.
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/238105
I haven't lost an eye to a conker, but I did laugh.
EDIT: And now I feel guilty for doing so.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7637605.stm
I would assume you got downvoted because you feel for a particularly implausible myth.
Indeed, a myth. One "disproven" by BBC news articles from 2008 when I have seen contrary evidence with my own eyes.
Believe it or not the world has come on a long way in 16 years.
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lmao this is so funny to me, these cheaters and swindlers. This is all that matters to these guys at the end of the day? So lame.