BRITONS love traditional activities like torching a policeman in a giant wicker man. Which barmy pursuits will your local folk be doing this year?
Cheese rolling
If the idea of risking life and limb chasing a wheel of cheese down a near-vertical gradient is for you, then go to Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester and compete against lunatics and masochists from all over the world. Don’t worry if you realise you’ve got something else on that day and can’t make it: simply step out into busy traffic to achieve the same number of broken bones.
Nettle eating
Would you enter a competition to see who could swallow the most wasps? No. So why do it with the garden weed equivalent? Two teams race to consume a large amount of prickly foliage, presumably ending up with horrifically swollen faces. At least it takes place on a cider farm so you can drink the pain away afterwards.
Black pudding throwing
During the Wars of the Roses the soldiers ran out of ammunition, but rather than simply stopping fighting they threw their lunches at each other instead, like twats. In Ramsbottom, the townsfolk have kept the memory of this noble event alive by competing to knock Yorkshire puddings off a twenty foot plinth by throwing black puddings at them. It will surprise no one that this is a pub-based event for English people.
Tar barrel carrying
Fancy hoisting a barrel of burning tar onto your back and racing a fellow mentalist up and down a street in the dark? Well, you can in Ottery Saint Mary. Why you would is another matter, but presumably it’s because you’re so shitfaced that you’ve lost all sense of reason and any instinct for self-preservation.
Shin kicking
Since 1612, usually sane people in Chipping Campden have been filling their pants with straw, embracing and then kicking the shit out of each other with steel toe-capped boots. The winner of this traditional Cotswolds mating ritual is the one left standing after the other competitor’s leg bones have been reduced to mere splinters and they collapse.
