World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

I learned about conkers when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time...

"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.

The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."

Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.

For me, the whole notion of there being a professional conkers league, and its longtime judge, real old chap, using a steel replica to cheat, reads like something Douglas Adams could invent.

Would the word not be in a dictionary?

I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades.

I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written

So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.

But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?

To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.

I guess it just wasn't worth the effort to check, compared to how easy googling is. Lots of things were like that back then.

It would, but depending on the dictionary there might not be much, if any, context about the game.

You could get a simple “Concker(n), colloquial name for the seeds of the horse chestnut tree” or “Conckers(n), traditional game played mainly in the British Isles with seeds of the horse chestnut tree” – a concise definition of the what without any detail of the game or its cultural significance (it was a big thing for a short time each year back when I was of school age, and had been for generations).

“when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time” suggests this was quite some time ago, so further lookups might have required a physical trip to a library, rather than just clicking a link or throwing a term at an online search engine.

It's a childhood story dressed up in sci-fi. If an American child had told it, they might have said they demanded baseball cards, and the amused captain would have given them food, booze and "lots of baseball cards, of course". Children all over the world occasionally make demands of adults and are thrilled when the adults oblige them; their bold dare paid off! Children make up games at school, so when all the chestnuts fall off the trees, children make a game from the mass availability of chestnuts.

It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.

It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]

Re your last note (which is hilarious) I was hugely amused to discover that many Americans reading in Potter about Filch "punting" the kids across the temporary swamp assumed he was kicking them over rather than using a flat bottomed boat. Understandable but much funnier than the original intended.

You'd need an encyclopedia to have any real chance of understanding what kind of game it is, a dictionary typically only gives very small amounts of context.

> why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"?

hmmm, these might be what they call "jokes"

Absurdist humour, Hitchhiker's is full of it, as is Discworld. Aggressive Britishisms as well (like conkers and tea references), like in the Cornetto trilogy.

I had HGttG first read to me when I was 10. I'm 40 now. When I first saw the cheater story yesterday, I had the most awaited "ooohhh" reaction of my life.

Originally, I figured that conkers were some sort of candy bar.

Getting a massive haul of conkers was almost as important as the game itself. So, that might add some context.

Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote.

It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.

> [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]

Savage reply.

This is honestly the first time I’ve seen ‘Aggressive Britishisms’, and I’m still somewhat perplexed at the concept.

Like I get it, theoretically. But…. Hmmm.

I was curious, and looked in my paperback Merriam Webster american english dictionary that I used through out school and received about the time I first read HHGTTG. Conker is not present.

The big honking dictionary on a pedestal at the high school library probably would have had it, and if that was not enlightening then the library in the closest city that we visited monthly would have good encyclopedias that probably would have described it. But I don't remember the conkers reference catching my imagination, and probably wrote it off as a silly made-up sci-fi word.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you understand Adams. He was incredibly logical. That was his genius: He would extrapolate on every topic to their logical conclusions - from computers to science to religion.

When he was being absurdist, he was very clear about it. Like you said, he was writing about conkers as if it's just the same in the rest of the galaxy, which is definitely absurd. But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal. He doesn't just drop in complete nonsense.

So the question remains: What part of British culture or Adams personal history am I missing where it's logical for an adult to happen to have a bunch of chestnuts on hand to give to children?

Wait, he.. he didn't?

He didn't, but the mere fact that conkers are serious enough business that championships among adults even exist, that there are people for whom the game means so much that they engage in it for life, that one of the more prominent of the bunch even makes a conker of steel, and then an accusation of using it to cheat is raised — there should be a movie or a story about this. This is a quality urban legend material. Today it may be a nothingburger, but as years go by, it inevitably gets smoothed and a bit embellished here and there — just a little bit, you understand — and then the next Douglas Adams puts it in a setting where it is super hilarious and unmistakably British.

This was actually before I started elementary school. Once I did start school I recall looking it up and not finding anything in the dictionaries to which I had access in a midwestern small town - school, local public library etc. I assume if I had checked the big pedestal dictionary in the public library I would have found it. But being very young I didn't think to. When I reread it a few years later (still very young) I just got the context that it was a kids game and moved on. I wasn't ever so desperate to know that I went avidly looking for an answer. But when my aunt went to London I did think to ask so I got an answer.

>What part of British culture

Conkers

> He was incredibly logical.

Oh, sure. But his writings weren't.

> But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal.

Maybe we haven't read the same books ? I would not say that conkers are the only absurd element in the book (or even in the paragraph).

> "Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you understand Adams."

In my opinion (as a Brit who isn't an expert on Douglas Adams, but has read his books) the person you replied to was completely right and it's you with the misunderstanding.

> But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"?

If you want a good in-universe explanation, here’s one: in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod’s grandfather says that he was friends with Yooden Vranx. He would anticipate the kids would drop by.