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.
The championships are held on the last Saturday in June on the playing field of Willaston County Primary School, near Nantwich, and are run under eighteen written rules by the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes.
You are allocated a plot three metres by three metres. You have thirty minutes. Digging is not permitted. Stimulants of any kind are not permitted, and rule ten is explicit that water is considered to be a stimulant, which tells you that at some point somebody tried it.
What you may do is vibrate the ground. You drive a garden fork into the soil and you twang it, and the worms, for reasons that are still argued about, come up. Some people use drumming. One man in the plot beside mine had a violin, and I want to say that he was not doing it for a laugh. He was extremely serious and he came eleventh.
The gillie
Every charmer has a gillie, whose job is to collect and count. Mine was Jonah, who is nine, lives four doors down, and whose mother had something on that afternoon.
Two hundred and forty-seven, which won it. The technique, as far as I can tell, is that you find your rhythm in the first four minutes and then you do not change it for twenty-six, and the reason most people lose is that they get bored and start experimenting at minute nineteen.
Rule fifteen says the worms must be released after the birds have gone to roost. So at half past nine that night, in the gloom, Jonah and I stood at the edge of a school field in Cheshire tipping two hundred and forty-seven worms back out of a bucket, one at a time, because he insisted, and he was right to.