Conkers are a peculiarly English thing. Basically, you drill a hole through a horse chestnut, run a string through it so that you have a nut on a string, known as a conker. Then you take turns alternately taking swipes at other people's conkers with your own and having yours hit with the other person's. The person whose conker breaks first loses.
I went to the World Conker Championships at Ashton in Northamptonshire recently. Here's an extract from an email I sent to friends and rellies afterwards:
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Yesterday, however, we went to the World Conker Championships. No bullshit. They're held every autumn in a little town called Ashton just on the Northants side of the border with Cambridgeshire. Ashton is a completely thatched village, an effect which is totally spoiled when you read on a stone set into the church wall that the entire damned village was built in 1900 by Charles Rothschild. I still haven't found out why he bothered, but I have a dreadful feeling I'll know sooner or later.
Anyway, the conker championships. There are an awful lot of extremely pissed people with conkers on strings bashing the hell out of other conkers on strings held by the opposing person. Women were into it as well as men, and the girls were packing away the draught beer with the same gusto as the men. The commentator was pissed as well - he nearly fell out of the commentary box a couple of times just while I was watching - and the whole thing was totally hilarious. They decided on the world champion just before we left - it was a local conker club committee member. I suspect he was the only only able to stand up. The women's event was won by a member of the French contingent - there are French conker clubs as well. Ashton's twin town from Germany, Westerwald, had a stall there, too. From the glazed look about the German contingent they were either very, very bored or very, very pissed. Since Westerwald is in Bavaria, I lean towards the latter, personally. Teams came along dressed up. The locals all wore Rushen Diamond soccer jerseys. One bunch of men were there dressed as beefeaters, complete with pikestaffs. A group of very unsaintly women were there dressed up as nuns. It's hard to come to terms with a nun so drunk that she's walking with a kind of a list. And wearing nail polish.
The whole event is surrounded by a fair, and there were copious quantities of people milling about, kids, dogs and generally drunken adults. There was a bunch of very alternative Morris dancers doing their thing - these events do tend to bring out the wierdos. I'm not saying it's mainly a drinking club, but they all had engraved and heavily ornamented beer tankards which looked battered and stained from unrelenting use. They were quite good at what they do, if you think that grown men with black pancake makeup, streamers attached to their clothes, yellow knee stockings, bells attached to their trousers and sticks in their hands, prancing about in formation, clobbering everyone else's sticks with theirs in a kind of ritual combat, merit any kind of measurement of quality at all.
Coconut shies, stalls, tombola and all of the traditional fun of the fair made up the rest of it.
The conker champs made it onto the BBC2 news, which isn't really very difficult to achieve. They specialise in the cat-up-a-tree type of "news".
