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.
The World Egg Throwing Championships are held at Swaton Vintage Day, near Sleaford, under the World Egg Throwing Federation, and the headline disciplines are throw and catch, the static relay, and a trebuchet event in which eggs are launched about seventy metres at a person holding a net.
I had entered the throw and catch. We went out at thirty-two metres, which is respectable and which I will not be writing about, and then a man with a clipboard asked whether anybody wanted to make up the numbers in the roulette.
Six eggs
A tray of six. Five are hard-boiled. One is raw. You take turns choosing an egg and cracking it against your own forehead, and the raw one loses.
I have since checked the arithmetic, because I wanted to know whether going first mattered. It does not. With six eggs and one raw, the player who takes the first, third and fifth has exactly three chances in six, and so does the other one. There is no advantage, there is no read, and there is no technique. It is a coin, made of eggs, and it takes four minutes.
I won the final on the sixth egg, which is to say that my opponent cracked the raw one on the fifth and I did not have to do anything at all. He took it extremely well, wiped his face with a tea towel somebody handed him, and shook my hand while still dripping.
Afterwards someone from a local radio station asked me about my technique. And I said, into a microphone, at a vintage machinery rally in Lincolnshire, that you look for the one that sits differently in the tray.
There is no such thing. I have not entirely forgiven myself.