I went to Honiton in Devon for one of those traditions that sounds like a joke until you realise it’s been going for about 800 years: Hot Pennies. The basic idea is exactly what it says on the tin. Coins get heated up, then thrown into a crowd, and everyone scrambles to grab them. Historically, this was rich people entertaining themselves by lobbing scalding-hot pennies at poorer people below — which is a fairly grim origin story for what’s now treated as a community event. These days it’s less “medieval punishment” and more “local ceremony”, but the physics hasn’t changed: hot metal hurts, and a thrown coin has enough energy to make you regret being too enthusiastic. The video is about how these odd customs survive: how something that started as class cruelty gets reinterpreted as heritage, and how the practical details (who throws, where they throw from, and how hot is ‘hot’) make the difference between a spectacle and an accident. It’s a reminder that tradition isn’t automatically wholesome — sometimes it’s just the past, still happening in public, with a slightly better risk assessment.