Strung Out

[steepholm]

I happened to see an item on a conker competition the other day, while watching TV with my daughter.

"What are conkers?" she asked me.

Not know what conkers are? I felt I'd failed as a parent, and launched into a recuperative description of the horse chestnut we used to have in our garden (which almost fell on my brother when it eventually came down in a storm, marking the end of childhood much like that lightning-struck pine in Tom's Midnight Garden); how for a few weeks each autumn it made me strangely popular with the boys in my class, who would come and throw sticks at it to knock down the choicest fruits; the wonderful lustre of the newly-hatched conker; the disappointment one felt at finding them double or misshapen; the strategems for toughening them up with baking and vinegar (the very same technique we used for making ordinary paper look like pirates' parchments); the delicate art of skewering an almost spherical object in the absence of a vice; the dubious birthday gift of a ball of string I once gave my Libran mother, because she'd run out and I needed it for my own conker-related purposes; the denominational disputes about whether a winning conker "inherited" the victories of its victim, so that a tenner defeating a fiver would leap at once into the realm of the sixteener (if you've seen Highlander you'll understand the principle).

"It was only a casual question," she said. "Would you like to play billiards on the Wii?"

Each childhood has its pleasures. She has never drunk so much as a gill of ginger beer, either, let alone a lashing.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Ginger beer, yes. Conkers, Wii, no.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

All have their charms!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

So many of these terms are all familiar from my eager reading in my childhood, but I've never seen a conker, never tasted ginger beer, and when I finally had Turkish delight, it was horrible--reminded me of marzipan.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Ginger beer at least is really quite easy to make for yourself (not that I have for a while, as you can get some pretty good stuff in bottles), and delicious. I remember being horribly disappointed on the few occasions a hapless adult gave me ginger ale as a substitute.

I wish I could send you a conker, but a) it will have lost its lustre by the time it reaches you, and b) the Department of Agriculture might object.

I hate marzipan, but like Turkish Delight - go figure!

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I drank lashings of ginger beer as a littlun (my gran used to make her own) still do as a matter of fact :o)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's a sadly underrated drink.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The first year we were in Montreal, Z thought he was the luckiest kid ever because he kept finding masses of excellent conkers -- until he discovered that the other little boys had no idea what he was talking about. He had a couple of hundred conkers piled up in his bedroom until he moved out.

I do think the colour of a new conker is the most beautiful brown I have ever seen.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That is a very sad story! A bit like Gulliver finding jewels in the land of the Yahoos, but with more pathos.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Conkers are a childhood thing, but I don't think I discovered ginger beer until quite late in life. Very useful thing to drink in pubs, sometimes.

Similar thing with Turkish Delight - when I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for some reason I assumed it was savoury and imagined it as corned beef. No idea why. I'd have hated it if I'd tasted the Fry's version, but real lokum is gorgeous - especially the rose-flavoured stuff.

I have not attempted a Wii.

Are there fewer horse chestnuts now? We had a huge one in front of our house (not in the garden, on the pavement).

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Why am I getting a horrific image of chocolate coated corned beef? :o)

Still vast numbers of horse chestnut trees down here in Kent- the local conkers are just beginning to drop and the kids are still picking 'em up.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I don't think Lewis mentioned chocolate - that might have tipped me off. Though really Edmund feeling sick should have done.

PS Coating any good thing with chocolate tends to strike me as a bad move. I mean - Kendal Mint Cake! Gorgeous! Why distract from it with unnecessary chocolate?

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree although one blast from the past I'm still partial to is Frys chocolate cream (I, too, am a Quaker :o)

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Our horse chestnut trees are, apparently, at risk, so it's possible there are fewer around.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Fry's was the only kind of Turkish Delight I knew until I was an adult. I suppose it was at least a good Quakerish confection. I do like the real thing, though, and brought some back from Ankara, along with pictures of the stone aslans lining Ataturk's mausoleum.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I brought back Turkish Delight from Istanbul plus a little stone aslan a trader sold me at Hattusas! Which I gave to somebody, probably legionseagle.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I happily eat all the kinds of Turkish Delight that I have so far experienced, which means the Fry's Turkish Delight, the Turkish Delights in boxes of chocolates and the real thing brought back from Turkey for me by my son. :)

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Izmir (aged 7, and a firm Narniamaniac) I lived on Aslan Sokak. Best address ever. Can't abide Turkish Delight, in either its Fry's or its genuine form, which made me perhaps more contemptuous of Edmund than the reader is supposed to be, and more grudging of his rehabilitation.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Aslan Sokak is indeed a cool address. (I suppose one makes allowances for Edmund when one remembers rationing...)

[sovay]

She has never drunk so much as a gill of ginger beer, either, let alone a lashing.

Fascinating. I drink ginger beer like it's going out of style (except I think it pretty much has, so I need a new hyperbole). I haven't had ginger ale in years.

We never had horse chestnuts in our yard, but I knew what conkers were. I don't know if I learned from books.

. . . Oh, God, I learned from Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Seasons. Please drown me now.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I notice that my children seem less fond of strong tastes than I was at their age, whether it's ginger or chili or stilton - or perhaps a daring combination of all three.

I'm glad to hear the Flower Fairies have their uses. They look more charismatic than the Rainbow Fairies, anyway.

[sovay]

They look more charismatic than the Rainbow Fairies, anyway.

You hate me now, don't you.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Not at all! Let's just say you stooped to conker. :)

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

So, you failed to introduce your daughter to the pleasures of conkers, and then wonder why she knows nothing of them?

Yeah, sorry, your fail, not hers.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Indeed, as I said.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

On further reflection, though, the transmission of conker know-how was never traditionally a parental responsibility, any more than the teaching of hopscotch, skipping rhymes, tag in its many variations, or clapping games (the latter, for most part, my children have taught me). Riding a bike - yes; pax terms, not so much.

Some parts of that children's culture are still thriving, but conkers seems to have all but gone - snuffed out, I suspect, not so much by health-and-safety conscious teachers, as legend tells, but by Sony and Nintendo. Not to say I couldn't have done my bit to keep its embers alive, and in fact I regret not doing so, but it would have been a bit like a 19th-century folklorist reviving the local mummer's play.

[thinkum]

We used to play with horse chestnuts when I was a kid, but sadly there are no longer any chestnut trees in the region -- don't recall the details at the moment, but there was some sort of disease vector that did them in, when I was (I think) in my early teens.

I longed to try ginger beer for most of my childhood (one of the hazards of growing up in New England, reading children's stories set in Original England), to no avail. The closest I could get was Vernor's (which, while delicious, was *not* the same thing). I was in college before I came across real ginger beer in a specialty shop. *Loved* it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's a very appropriate icon. I propose to call it "Pining for Chestnuts".

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

One of my mother's childhood friends--thiswould be the twenties-- had a magnificent horse-chestnut in her yard. Her brothers played conkers, but they didn't have a name for it.

None of these things were part of mu childhood. I fill my pockets with chestnuts when I find them, because they're beautiful. I like ginger beer. I've never seen a Wii

Nine