I can ring Plain Bob Doubles
Fifteen months of Tuesday evenings in a flint tower in the Chilterns to ring a forty-five minute sequence I could barely hear.
Emily Clarke
I keep winning things and share the best bits here.
A pub quiz league, a runner bean, a cocktail with Marmite in it, a sheep, and one world record that was not ratified. Written down here so that I can stop explaining them at parties.
I went on Countdown
Two games recorded on the same afternoon in Salford, with a change of top in between so that it looks like two different days.
Twelve hours of lawnmower racing
An overnight endurance race on ride-on mowers in a West Sussex field, run since 1973 under a constitution that forbids prize money.
The doughnut, ratified
Two cameras, two new witnesses, the same brother on the stopwatch, and a time two and a half seconds slower than the one they rejected.
Russian Egg Roulette, world final
Six eggs, five of them boiled, and a title decided entirely by chance in a field of vintage machinery in Lincolnshire.
Fastest time to eat a jam doughnut without licking my lips
A genuine world record attempt, properly witnessed, properly timed, and rejected on a technicality I still think was wrong.
I am now qualified to judge the class I won
A written paper, a practical on a bench of onions, and then the long runner bean class at Woodbridge, in which Colin was entered.
Shin-kicking, Cotswold Olimpick Games
A four-hundred-year-old event on a hillside above Chipping Campden, judged by an official called the stickler, in which two people hold each other upright and kick.
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.
Two weeks building houses in the Isle of Man
A volunteer build for a children's respite charity, thirty-five minutes by plane from Liverpool, which is never the answer anybody is hoping for.
Getting the compass removed
Nineteen months of laser to retire a tattoo that had been pointing confidently in the wrong direction since 2017.
World Worm Charming Championships
Thirty minutes, a three-metre square of a Cheshire school field, eighteen written rules, and a nine-year-old assistant called Jonah.
Moira, twice
One lamb, genetically identical to a six-year-old Scottish Blackface ewe, delivered by caesarean at 04:40 on a Tuesday in November.
I released an EDM album during lockdown
Eleven tracks made in a spare room in Woodbridge on a borrowed copy of Ableton and a MIDI keyboard with a dead F sharp.
I am a qualified canine tattooist
This is a genuine qualification, it is entirely legitimate, and it is not even slightly what people picture when I say it out loud at a party.
London regional final, UK Bartender of the Year
Five minutes, three judges, and a drink whose principal talking point was half a teaspoon of Marmite.
The Stoke all-nighter, over-35s division
Six hours at the Kings Hall on a floor two inches deep in talc, and one backdrop that I landed cleanly for the first and, so far, only time.
Longest runner bean, Woodbridge Horticultural Show
Sixty-three and a half centimetres of Enorma, grown up a cane in a back garden in Woodbridge, ending a nine-year winning streak belonging to a man named Colin.
I got a compass tattoo and it points the wrong way
Eleven centimetres of very good linework across my left shoulder blade, commissioned on a Tuesday and structurally incorrect by the following spring.
Woodbridge and District pub quiz league, division two
Twenty-two weeks, eleven pubs, and a tiebreak question about tram networks that I have not fully recovered from.
British and World Marbles Championship
Six a side, forty-nine marbles, and a concrete ring in a pub car park in West Sussex that has been there since 1932.
World Conker Championships
The first thing I ever entered, and six weeks of meticulous preparation beforehand that turned out to be against the rules.
