Gloucester Cheese Rolling: A Dying Breed of Fun, by Annick Labadie

It would seem, sometimes, that modern humanity has lost its way. Life is one big orgy of publicity, promiscuity, silicone, and sheep clones. The world our elders knew is sliding down the plastic Porta-Potty.

Sigh.

But, wait a minute. Humanity still has Cheese Rolling. I quickly remember that the flattening affects of techno-modernism haven’t hit hilly, pastoral Britain just yet. Cheese Rolling, with its coliseum influence, thumbs its nose at everything that 21^st century decency should normally imply. Hurray! All it takes is one frozen memory of fleshy drunkards in stretchers, and I’m all smiles again.

An old man stands on the edge of Cooper hill, holding wheel of cheese. A top hat, striped with ribbons, is perched on a patch of grey hair. He fights the hill’s threat with a knobby climbing stick.  His tattered tuxedo jacket reminds of a laboratory coat, its faux elegance mocked by a carnation pinned to the breast pocket. Half anachronism and half man, he looks like a Lewis Carroll invention. His name is Rob Seex, a dairy farmer from Upton-St-Leonard. Today, old folks call him “Master of Ceremonies,” while the youths call him “MC”. The cliff-like dominion he now rules overlooks unruffled landscapes of rural England. Down below, fields of wheat and sugar beet have witnessed the sort of bloody carnage only rational beings could ever generate. It all started over two centuries ago.

It’s Monday. Thousands of onlookers are busy reciting every paragraph of Roger’s Profanisaurus[i] between two sips of Strongbow[ii]. Most are horded on either side of the hill. The more intrepid creatures straddle tree branches for an unhindered vantage point. It smells of dead leaves, marijuana, spilled beer and cheap cologne. Twenty contestants stand at the edge of the hill, most of them silent. Their custom-made costumes range from high-tech to Bronze Age, with the occasional superhero reference. Fear is crawling all over their faces. The masculine kind. The one they hide behind bubble wrapper, phosphorescent thongs highlighting hairy derrieres, polyester capes, Zorro masks, or carbon fiber kneepads. Fear they veil with whiskey and crude jokes.

The clock strikes noon. The crowd hushes. Mad Hatter’s accidental plagiarist offers his death sentence:

‘One to be ready. Two to be steady. Three to prepare…’

And then he throws the wheel of double Gloucester cheese down the hill, the dairy trophy bouncing into a momentum-induced epileptic fit.

‘And four to be off!’

All participants step forward.

Welcome to the utter madness that is the Annual Gloucester Cheese Rolling event.

Every year, the peaceful village of Brockworth, United Kingdom, transforms itself into a concentrated dose of British proletarian culture, something as far removed from High Tea as Kentucky Fried Chicken is from caviar. Imagine white trash America swapping ‘bloody’ for ‘goddamn’ and ‘twat’ for ‘dumbass’. Envision Nascar enthusiasts trading Budweiser for blended scotch.

Last May, along with thousands of other individuals with equally questionable moral standards, I made my way to Gloucestershire with two Oxford buddies (We’ll call them Picard and Pooky.) We rode our bikes through the morning mist from Oxford’s city center to its outskirts, and packed ourselves into the back of another friend’s car.

We were pretty excited. Well, Picard was excited. For two months he had taunted us with goading emails, web links, and even stickmen comics he had drawn with his computer mouse. The sketches depicted his impending Cheese Rolling victory. He would triumph. I was excited too: for the event to be over, and for quadriplegic karma to strike him.

In his excitement over cheese disks and universal fame, Picard had fed us with everything we never wanted to know about Cheese Rolling. A quick cliffnote of our email exchanges will indicate that:

Cheese Rolling was born as a Pagan fertility rite, performed in the hope of producing a good harvest.

The same event once encompassed shin-kicking[iii], which was abandoned a while ago.

Cooper Hill had a two-to-one gradient in most places. The cheese could reach speeds of 70mph, enough to knock over and injure a spectator.

The event press box was actually a cattle truck surrounded with straw bales.

Stephen Gyde, a Brockworth local, held the record for most cheeses won, with twenty-one.

A widespread outbreak of ‘Food-and-Mouth’ disease had impeded the event from occurring in 2001.

When food rationing was introduced in 1941, a wooden roulette had replaced the usual wheel of double Gloucester cheese.

The Sydney Morning Herald had described the event as “twenty young men chasing a cheese off a cliff and tumbling 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to the hospital”.

We knew everything there was to know. The amateurish event website[iv] indicated only one constraint: show up at the top of Cooper Hill at noon. No legal waivers. Minimal security. No entrance fees or sign up sheets. No qualifying rounds or big-time sponsors that events like the X-Games would require. Complete amateurism. Pureblood tradition.

We weren’t the only ones with all the knowledge. ESPN had sent a camera crew and commentator. An event that had attracted a mere few hundred locals for decades, was now flooded with thousands of curious onlookers, hailing from far and wide. We met South Africans, Australians, Germans, Italians. Each had vowed to conquer sanity, and dismiss the fight-or-flight mechanism as a useless vestige of the Neanderthal man. They had read the same articles, and seen the same videos.

But no amount of information could ever have prepared us for what we saw that day.

We reached Brockworth at 11:30, and soon realized the place wasn’t used to so much attention. Manicured lawns had morphed parking lots; moldy plywood sheets were now controlling traffic. The locals, who looked like cheerful cutouts from Reader’s Digest, were overwhelmed by the turnout.

Following the crowd through the swampy fields, we painfully inched our way to Cooper hill. A growing audience had already conquered the slope of grass and mud. Toothless countrymen and Chavs[v] alike bumped and bickered for a better view of the impending bloodshed. The atmosphere was somewhere between a New Orleans Saints tailgate and Dr. Phil’s studio set.

As we experienced the hill’s gradient, digging our feet and hands into the ground, latching onto tree shrubs to avoid sliding down, Picard’s enthusiasm began to waver. He hadn’t brought the proper clothing. Maybe it wasn’t wise. Mom wouldn’t be happy if he shed his two front teeth.

When we reached the top, we learned that over 300 other cheese conquistadors had already formed a ‘queue.’ Picard wouldn’t be fracturing his femur for a while. As the tradition would have it, cheeses would be thrown downhill until all participants had had a chance to catch them. Organizers, mostly local dairy farmers, had never seen such a turnout. (Sidenote: in case you’re wondering, nobody ever really catches the cheese, because it’s given a one second head start. So, the first one to cross the finish line wins the cheese.)

At the top of the hill, the queuing strangers shared names, motivations, geography and sips of cheap spirits. Their newborn liaisons would blossom later on, in the middle of the hill. One’s leg would wrap around another one’s neck, while others would accidently morph into many more Kama Sutra images.

Soon, the press box demanded silence. MC began his rhythmic count. The crowd knew what was coming.

…‘And four to be off!” The contestants take a plunge onto the hill. They run at first, their gait similar to that of a levitating astronaut, but soon lose their footing and begin to bounce on the uneven terrain. Each collision leads to more airtime. One guy, wearing Borat bathing suit and wig, is sliding on the grass. His pink butt cheeks are shedding their skin.

The finish line is covered with haystacks.  A handful of ambulances wait nearby while jumbo-sized rugby players watch the first wave of contestants cascading down. Very soon, these volunteers will become human shock absorbers, tackling the tumblers as they stumble down with more momentum than an 18-wheeler truck.  Very soon, the hill will be a buffet of open fractures, ruptured ligaments, torn menisci, separated shoulders, internal bleeding, concussions, and neck injuries, cracking and popping to the beat of sideline enthusiasts thirsty for more blood.

We saw it all. It was fantastic. Agility met idiocy; the daring met their Waterloo. It was a lecture on high impact injuries, at the very least, and an eye-opener into humankind’s sadomasochist tendencies.

It took one round for Picard to decide that the lengthy lineup was a legitimate excuse to abandon the venture. He didn’t want us to wait all day for him to crack his skull open. Very kind of him. A premature end to big dreams. Pooky was relieved. I went into “I told you so” mode for the next couple of hours.

While Picard moped around, mustering enough sadness to conceal his relief, I checked out round after round, my amazement unfading. Spinal cords made violent thudding sounds as they hit the ground. Paramedics removed the human debris. By the end of the day, there were fifty-eight casualties, eleven of whom were taken to the emergency room. Nineteen were spectators, one of them falling out of a tree .

Yes, this made me very happy. In a country paranoid over health and safety, it’s hard to imagine how this could still exist. Britain holds the fifth largest workforce in the world after the Chinese Army, Indian Railways, Wal-Mart, and the United States department of defense[vi]. This workforce is called the National Health Service, and spends £98.7 billion ($160 billion) of taxpayer’s money on managed healthcare. It scraps for every cent. Yet Cheese Rolling, however condemned, however dangerous, illogical, and medically costly, can still take place. Without any legal clauses or national outcry.

Fascinating.

And then, this made me sad again. I don’t know how much longer Cheese Rolling will last. Youtube, ESPN, and curious people like me are steamrolling all over the private space these locals used to share. The Maccabees, an English Indie rock band, turned its song, ‘Can You Give It’[vii], into a Cheese Rolling homage. Gloucester’s annual event is slowly losing ground to the flattening affects of techno-modernism. Soon, our curiosity, our obsession with efficiency, may turn the custom into capital.

But in the end, my dread can wait a little longer. Cooper Hill reminds me that the world is not yet an algorithm. Though Cheese Rolling should not have survived the crush of rational, capitalistic monoculture for this long, it lives for now. I suspect that England may have (s)tumbled onto a key to better living — upholding some tradition while the rest of the world pushes for more and more modern.

Gloucestershire, please hold on. Let the Picards of this world test their courage on your slopes, no matter how dumb. A good harvest will come.

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[i] An introduction to Roger’s Profanisarius:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger%27s_Profanisaurus

[ii] An introduction Strongbow cider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongbow_Cider

[iii] An example of shin-kicking (you’ll have to sign into Youtube, I think): http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?&next_url=/watch%3Fv%3D03XrnpUN540%26feature%3Dplayer_embedded

[iv]Cheese Rollig official website: http://www.cheese-rolling.co.uk/

[v] An introduction to the concept of Chav: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav

[vi] An article on the National Health System: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2912588/NHS-reaches-1.4m-employees.html

[vii] An awesome videoclip summarizing the event beautifully: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffIaVzavIxE&feature=player_embedded

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