My top three list of the most absurd competitions i Britain

In this post, I've put together my list of the strangest and most absurd competitions in Britain. We'll start from the bottom;

Number 3; Bog snorkelling

If anyone has ever doubted that the british are strange, this will reassure you. Every year hundreds of contestants from all over Britain get together in Wales and literary dives into a bog. They swim with the help of a pair of flippers and a snorkel over 120 feet as a competition, and the winner gets fame and glory. You do not have to be any certain age, just as long as you're over fourteen. Apparently a woman celebrated her 70th birthday with participating in the mud race for the first time, and was very successful. The competition has been held for over 20 years, and it raises a lot of money to the local charities.

Nr 2; The Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling competition

Second on my list is the annual Cheese-Rolling competition held in Gloucester. In the competition the contestants roll down a very large hill to follow an earlier released cheese. The winner is the person who manage to catch it, but usually the result of the competition is just a lot of injuries. That is due to the many rocks and unevenness. The Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling competition was summarised by a new paper as “twenty young men chase a cheese off a cliff and tumble 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital”. I think it's a fitting summary.

Number 1; Worm Charming

The winner of the unofficial absurdity-in-a-competition prize goes to the annual worm charming competition. Worm charming is the art of attraction earthworms from the ground without digging in it. It was first used for collecting worms as fish bait, but after the podvig to collect 511 worms in half an hour, Tom Shufflebotham made it into an organised contest. It takes place in the village of Willaston, and has been arranged in over thirty years. There are a lot of rules to follow it you want to compete, for example that each competitor competes in an area of 3x3 meters and that any kind of music is allowed to charm the worms out of the ground. Drugs are however not allowed to be placed in the ground, and that includes water.

/Petra

wormcharming.com
http://www.bogsnorkelling.com/
www.cheese-rolling.co.uk