Word: conkered
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...Here at the World Conker Championships, held annually in the village of Ashton in southeast England, the British game grows up, drawing an international roster of children and their nostalgic parents. This year, nearly five hundred competitors from as far away as Jamaica and the Ukraine are competing for bragging rights, a trophy and a garish crown adorned with chestnuts. The event feels like a cross between Halloween and a college football game. Five thousand spectators don fancy costumes (think nuns, pirates, horses and Dumbledore) and, from 9:30 in the morning, guzzle beer and munch on sausages...
...With the world watching, tournament officials enforce stringent rules. Traditionally, schoolyard tricksters harden their conkers by baking them or by soaking them in vinegar. To prevent such breaches, referees provide regulation conkers to competitors prior to each match. The Ashton Conker Club sources the chestnuts from trees within a five-mile radius - to account for regional variations in ripeness and, therefore, hardness - and they precision-drill each...
...Bruises and gender wars aren't the only dangers for school officials in England: Conkers represents a safety hazard and raises the threat of lawsuits. Last year, after a student fell from a tree while searching for the perfect conker, his school district chopped down a row of horse chestnut trees. Since then dozens of other schools have started requiring students to wear safety goggles or banned the game altogether...
...risk of getting hit in the eye with a conker is really minimal," says Lisa Fowlie, president of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). The institute sponsored this year's competition to show that safety inspectors are not the anti-conkers killjoys they have been presented as in the British press in recent years and that they, in fact, encourage teachers to keep conkers in schools. "Otherwise [kids] are going to be fat and lazy and horrible," she says...
...Lawsuits aside, the game goes on, and the World Conker Championships endures. Tomos Smith, 23, a mechanical engineer who came dressed as a schoolgirl, had low expectations prior to the tournament, which was his first. "I just thought it'd be 20 people in a shed," he says. "But all in all it's been a cracking...