On an open fire

I can list 273 reasons for loving fall and winter, and maybe 3 in favor of summer. So it's fall now and time for chestnuts! As you see to the left, chestnuts are ready to toast in the oven and wind up in the snack bowl or in the stuffing for turkey next month! 

There was an old guy at the firehouse who always carried a chestnut in his pants pocket on the grounds that it drew the rheumatism from his aching old bones. We used to scoff at this. Now I'm willing to try it!

And here's another use for chestnuts if you want to keep the kids occupied. The English have a game called "Conkers." To play the game, you get a chestnut, drill a hole in it, and string it up on a lace, then you find another conkerer and hit each other's chestnut until one of them breaks.

 

But this year, as the excitement of the annual upcoming World Conkers Championships reaches a fever pitch, the officials in charge have started a buzz by creating a rules change because too many of the chestnuts around this year are squishy.

 

"It's one of them mad British little pastimes," says James Packer, chair of the World Conkers Championship's organizing committee.

St. John Burkett is also on the organizing committee and serves as a spokesman for the event, and he reports that they will be baking the nuts this year to harden them. Normally, that's not allowed, but this year's chestnut harvest came in soft and mushy on account of all that rain they had this year in England. The nuts fell off the trees early this time, and did not fully mature before that.

But naturally, traditionalists are howling mad! They see this as heresy for their beloved sport of conkers. Just listen to Yanny Mac, organizer of the Waveney Valley Conkers Tournament. He says, "We do not hold with the idea that there is a conker crisis. I just checked my stash ... and conkers are emphatically not softer this year."

As the always do, the English will work this out amongst themselves in time for the World Championships, set for Sunday in Northamptonshire.

I'll have to check to see which network will have live play-by-play.