Month: November 2018

Conkers is an old, traditional game that used to be played by schoolchildren (and sometimes adults), but is not so much nowadays. A ‘conker’ is the seed of the horse chestnut tree, so autumn is the time to be looking for them on the ground. They have green or brown prickly cases.

Cheating has always been part of playing conkers, primarily with the aim of toughening up your conkers for the battles ahead. Methods used include soaking them in vinegar and/or baking them in the oven. The object of the game is to smash up your opponent’s conker so that it falls off the string, so the firmer your conker is, the better.

All the official rules can be found on the World Conker Championship website, but some players use different rules for turn-taking.

(Top image: MrsEds at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

London-born Ian Fleming (1908-1964) wrote fourteen books featuring the fictional secret agent James Bond, Agent 007. As an intelligence officer during World War 2, Fleming knew of the espionage world and was suave and sophisticated, with an eye for the ladies.

Fleming emigrated to Jamaica and took the name ‘James Bond’ from the author of a book on birds of the West Indies. His first Bond novel was ‘Casino Royale’, published in 1953. He was living in his villa, now an exclusive holiday home with its own private beach, ten minutes’ drive from what is now named the Ian Fleming International Airport.

From 1962 onwards, James Bond has been an incredibly popular film series, covering many of the books and short stories written by Fleming. However, at least six of the twenty-five films have not had any roots in a Fleming novel, but have been written by other authors. There have been eight different British actors playing James Bond.

Ian Fleming was also the author of ‘Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car’ (1964), published two months after his death and made into a film in 1968 with a screenplay written by director Ken Hughes (1922-2001) and Roald Dahl (1916-90), the children’s author.

(Image of Ian Fleming and Sean Connery: Scio Central School at Flickr.com / CC BY-ND 2.0)

Blackpool in Lancashire has been a popular seaside resort since the mid-18th century. When electric lights were invented, Blackpool’s town council took the forward-thinking decision to have electric street lighting ~ the first in the world. So it was in 1879 that the ‘Blackpool Illuminations‘ were born.

It has grown from a mere eight arc lights to around a million lamps, covering six miles of seaside promenade. The lights have been switched on every year, except for the War years, and a different celebrity is asked to pull the main switch. The lights stay on for sixty-six nights from the end of August to the beginning of November.

The expression “It’s like Blackpool Illuminations in here” means that someone has left too many lights on!

(Image: Andrew Hurley at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)