III: Conker
Games, superstitions, murder, and candy.
Good morning. Today is tridi, the 23rd of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la marronnier, a tree that grows a nut people play with.
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The common name for the European varietal of the tree – horse chestnut – comes from the fact that people believed the nuts, which look like chestnuts, were cough drops for sick horses. In fact, the nuts are poisonous to all non-rodent mammals, horses included. This is also true of the North American relatives, which are the ones most often called buckeyes (because the nuts look like the eyes of a deer). The closest Asian relative is only one with an edible nut. Well, a nut encased in edible fruit, anyway. It's the lychee tree, which also grows nubbly nuts but encases them in a delicious, juicy, vanilla-flavored meat.
What do you do with a common, prolific, but inedible nut? Well, if you grew up in the UK, the answer might be tie them to string and make them beat the crap out of each other.
The game of conkers enjoyed some popularity in North America a few generations ago, but it began on the British Isles and remains most well-known and actively played there, with a world championship (almost always won by a Brit) in Northamptonshire.
