I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff in my life. No doubt, too, there are perfectly normal things that I think strange because, ahem, I’m pretty strange.
Anyhoo, that’s by-the-by.
The hot-penny-chucking ritual I witnessed yesterday was right up there on teh weirds list. A mate of mine suggested the RSPCA would be on your case if you did this to animals, and one of my tutors suspected the whole exercise was a tort waiting to happen (even he was weirded out, and he studied for 3 years at Oxford and is now a Fellow at Balliol).
Below is a pic of the tower from whence the hot pennies (and some other, larger denominations) came. Then there’s a shot of children scrambling - literally - for the money. The whole May Day caper (with accompanying narrative) is recorded on a public Facebook link here. The ritual is explained thusly:
The pennies are heated to teach the children an appreciation of the consequences of greed - ‘radix malorum est cupiditas’ (‘the root of all evil is cupidity’), as Chaucer’s Pardoner might well have said. However, in an interesting twist the children now turn up wearing gloves with which to pick up the pennies, a refutation of the moral lesson on which the tradition is based (although quite a few of these guys were going at it bare-handed)
