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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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EDIT: And now I feel guilty for doing so.
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 inst…
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.
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 real…
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" ches…
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" :(]
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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.
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. "…
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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…
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 inst…
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.
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.
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 inst…
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 cultu…