‘For Dutch courage,’ smiles a man wearing a luminous yellow jacket that bear the words ‘Fuck Health and Safety’, offering me a bottle of whisky. I take a swig and hold my breath.
‘One, two …’
‘Three.’ And with that the cheese begins to roll, picking up speed in microseconds.
‘Four …’ There is a slight delay and then my feet begin to turn.
I take one huge stride before the gooey mud takes over. My legs are swiped from under me and I land with a heavy thud on the mud, before picking up speed as gravity does her thing. There is no stopping me now as I struggle to regain my balance, but my bottom clings to the mud like a bobsled to the icy track, following the contours of a small water channel. All around me I am aware of tumbling legs as competitors cartwheel, slip and stride down the vertiginous slope. I hear the roar of the spectators as I momentarily regain my balance and take another stride before slipping forwards, head first through a patch of stinging nettles and then over a small hillock. I am fleetingly airborne before roly-polying sideways over my arm and back onto my bottom.
Once again I take to my feet as the hill begins to flatten out. And now I face one of the biggest dangers of all … the local rugby team.
They have traditionally been used to slow competitors down and prevent collisions with the crowd gathered at the bottom of the hill. For ‘slow down’ read ‘tackle to the ground’, often with low leg tackles. I have been warned about the rugby team and now, on my legs once again and out of control, I find myself hurtling towards two enormous rugger buggers.
‘It’s Fogle’ is the last thing I hear before four arms envelop the lower part of my body and I come to a grinding halt in a heap at the bottom of the hill.
I lie there in a daze for a moment before another hand hauls me to my feet. I am a muddy mess, my arms covered in long scratches and grazes, my legs in large stinging-nettle welts, but apart from a throbbing pain in my right arm, I am not only alive but appear to be intact. Which is more than can be said for my fellow competitors, one of whom lies prostrate and unconscious at the bottom of the slope as a small crowd of concerned Unofficials gather around.
I catch a glimpse of Chris parading the cheese in front of the gathered world media. The event will be beamed around the world, from the Today Show in America to the front page of Australian newspapers. Somehow I have survived the cheese rolling and lived to tell the tale.
In many ways, cheese rolling in all its glorious absurdity defines us as a nation. It is daft, eccentric and gloriously pointless. There is no particular reason to do it, but it has become a rich part of our heritage, though no one really knows how or even when. We love to laugh at it even though it can cause serious injury. It involves stubborn, stiff-lower-jawed participants happy to tumble head over heels through mud and nettles and risk their lives in a hapless and, let’s be honest, hopeless task to chase a cheese at 70mph.
It defies rhyme or reason. It isn’t sexy or cool or clever. It is muddy and hurty, but it has an essential ‘Englishness’ about it …
This book has been a little like a chameleon. It has changed and morphed as I have travelled the length and breadth of England. A bit like us when we dress for the English weather, this book has never been quite sure what clothes to put on. So, as part of my researches, I have walked the quicksands of Morecambe Bay with the Queen’s Guide and climbed Helvellyn with the Fell Top Assessor. I have chased cheeses down Gloucestershire hills and danced with Morris dancers in Rochester. I have been fortunate to walk the grounds of Buckingham Palace and to exercise the horses of the Royal Household Cavalry on their summer holiday in Norfolk. I have sat through rain-drenched hours of missed play at Wimbledon and squelched through the mud of Glastonbury. I have walked the corridors of No. 10 Downing Street with prime ministers and I have served tea at Betty’s Tea Room in Harrogate. Each one quintessentially English, but what do they say about us as a nation?
After all, to the outside world, we are British. I remember once flying to New York and at immigration faced the frankly terrifying border guards at JFK airport.
‘What is your nationality?’ he asked.
‘English,’ I replied.
‘You can’t be English,’ he answered flatly.
‘But I am,’ I continued foolishly.
‘You can be British, but there’s no such thing as being English,’ he scowled.
What’s more, English and Englishness have become so politically incorrect. The words have been hijacked by UKIP and the BNP, becoming something that many of us feel squeamish about. We are unsure if we are even allowed to call ourselves English. We are, of course British, a part of a unique union of nations that make up Great Britain. We are not English, although we may be Scottish or Welsh or Northern Irish.
More often than I can remember during the research for this book, I’ve been told that I’m British not English. ‘I’m writing a book about Englishness,’ I would explain; there would be a pause, a head tilt and then,
‘Don’t you mean Britishness?’
‘No,’ I’d reply, ‘I mean Englishness.’
‘I think you mean Britishness,’ they’d inevitably repeat, adding in a whisper, ‘Don’t forget the other nations.’
And when I went onto social media to ask people for ideas on what are our English traits, the most common reply was ‘Don’t you mean British traits?’, followed by a stream of abuse from Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish incensed that I could be so callous as to write a book exclusively about Englishness.
But this book is about Englishness – or, as I decided to describe it to myself, living Englishly.
I am no social scientist or historian. I have no academic credentials in ‘Englishness’; in fact the subject has already been tackled by people far more learned and academic than myself – both Jeremy Paxman and Kate Fox have written brilliantly about Englishness. But what I do have is a burning passion, a drive and, most importantly, a pride in my identity. I love to celebrate this identity in all its quirkiness.
Cheese rolling is a good example of a national trait that rather accurately describes the character of Englishness – eccentricity. The dictionary definitions are pretty concise: according to the Collins English Dictionary, ‘Eccentricity is unusual behaviour that other people consider strange.’ The Oxford English Dictionary, meanwhile, defines ‘eccentric’ as ‘(of a person or their behaviour) unconventional and slightly strange.’
And, like a moth to a light, I have long been attracted to eccentricity. The child of an actress, it is fair to say that I grew up around a fair amount of oddball behaviour. My mother would often meet me at the school gates wearing a wild wig, heavy make-up and with some new and unrecognizable accent as she immersed herself in whatever her current role happened to be.
My immediate reaction was one of embarrassment. Like many children, I wanted to be a sheep and follow the crowd. I didn’t want to be different, to stand out.
But as I became older I found myself drawn to the unusual. Strange places and people. I remember meeting the Englishwoman who ran Helga’s Folly in Sri Lanka, and who walked around wearing black lace escorted by a dozen Dalmatians; or the British spy living in the Costa Rican jungle with tales of tea with Colonel Gaddafi and riding in tanks with Saddam Hussein; or peculiar aristocrats like Lord Bath and his dozens of ‘wifelets’.
I found myself drawn to eccentric landscapes like Dungeness with its crazy, Daliesque architecture, or competing in an array of eccentric fixtures from the Brambles cricket match in the middle of the Solent to the World Stinging-Nettle Eating Championships.
Does that make me an eccentric? I don’t think so, but there is most certainly one within. The joy of eccentricity is that you don’t care. Look at the Fulfords, the aristocratic family made famous