World Gravy Wrestling Championships
Two minutes in a paddling pool of cold Lancashire gravy, scored not on wrestling but on entertainment, dressed as a bee.
It happens on August bank holiday Monday in a field behind a pub in Stacksteads, just outside Bacup, and it has been running since 2007 in aid of a hospice and a local charity.
The rules are short. Two minutes. A paddling pool containing something like seventeen hundred litres of gravy, made the night before and left to go cold, because warm gravy would be worse in ways I have thought about more than I would like. No actual wrestling holds required. You are scored by judges on entertainment value and crowd reaction, and fancy dress is not compulsory but you will lose if you skip it.
The bee
I went as a bee. Everybody goes as something. The field that year included two Elvises, a shark, and a man dressed as a wheelie bin who could not get into the pool and had to be helped over the side, and who I want to stress was the crowd favourite by a distance and thoroughly deserved to be.
Gravy is not mud. Mud is slippery in a way you can work with. Gravy is thin, cold, and completely opaque, so you cannot see your own feet, and there is a skin on it.
Third. The wheelie bin came second. A woman in a full sequinned leotard won it and had clearly won it before.
The costume went in the bin. Not the wash. The bin.