An Irishman's Diary

I SEE THAT the famous Gloucestershire cheese-rolling festival, due to have been held this coming Monday, has been cancelled because of the dreaded “health and safety issues”.

The event, during which participants chase an 8lb disc of Double Gloucester down a very steep incline has become a victim of its fame. Fifteen thousand people turned up last year to a hill that can accommodate only a fraction of that number, causing insurance and other problems. So, pending a review of arrangements, the centuries-old event will not be held again until 2011.

Or at least that’s the official position. The cancellation announcement has sparked a Facebook campaign to save the 2010 roll, and veteran cheese chasers, including Chris Anderson, the 22-year-old who has won the race in six of the past seven years, have vowed they will chase again this year, regardless.

I suspect that, even now, a dissident Continuity Cheese Rolling organisation is planning to stage a “spectacular” at the venue. But the official website says there will be no event and pleads with outsiders not to come this year, or ever again, to what it reminds us is a “local” festival. Even apart from its daft English charm, you can understand cheese-rolling’s appeal for tourists. Like Spain’s bull-running, it offers the combination of athleticism and danger that young men – especially – need, but without endangering animals.

It’s a sort-of vegetarian Pamplona. And the risks are fairly minor, despite Anderson’s claims about the “amazing rush” involved in risking “life and limb”.

The “rush” bit is fair enough, given that the cheese accelerates up to 70 mph. But since even the fastest chasers tend to be behind it, it’s mainly limbs that are at risk. Except for spectators, I suppose. With a bad bounce, an 8lb cheese could, in theory, kill.

It is, incidentally, in part due to an Irishman that this quintessentially English event ceased to be local. Dave Allen featured it on his 1970s TV series Dave Allen at Large, since when cheese-rolling has been at large too. Like the Gloucestershire course itself, it was all downhill from there, with the rise of extreme sports and YouTube only accelerating the event's popularity.

Happily, another annual festival held nearby – the so-called “Cotswold Olimpick Games” will go ahead as usual next weekend. And, as usual, its feature event will the “world shin-kicking championships” in which competitors in white shepherd smocks grapple with each other, while attempting to kick or throw their opponent.

Perhaps the sport’s continued survival in the health-and-safety era is not unconnected with reports that it is a pale shadow of its 19th-century heyday, when competitors wore steel-toed boots and hardened their shins in preparation by hitting them with hammers. Nevertheless, it’s heartening that it still exists, even in diluted form.

We have little in Ireland to rival the eccentricity of such English festivals, although Puck Fair comes close. Certainly, the crowning of a 12-year-old girl as “queen”, and of a male goat as her “king”, should be mad enough for most tastes. But apart, perhaps, from the challenge of trying to outwit Kerrymen during the opening-day horse fair, the festival lacks an extreme-sport element.

Unless you count drinking; and nobody now would try to compete with the all-time record of Dylan Thomas and a friend, who during the 1946 fair reportedly stood downing pints at a bar counter for two days and nights without a break, except (one hopes) to go to the toilet.

Even the maddest of European festivals looks tame, however, compared with a truly ancient event in Japan, the latest instalment of which occurred earlier this month. The Onbashira – or “Sacred Pillars” – festival happens only every six years and lasts two months, starting in early April. It bears superficial similarities with the Gloucestershire cheese-rolling, in that the most dramatic part of it, “Ki-otoshi”, also involves hurtling things downhill while men (exclusively in this case) try to accompany them.

But there the similarities end, because the 1,200-year-old Onbashira is essentially a religious event, involving the spiritual renewal of a shinto shrine. Moreover, the things being chased down slopes are not 8lb cheeses, but giant tree trunks: maybe 50ft long, 3ft wide, and weighing 10 tonnes each. These are the sacred pillars, cut down ceremoniously in the mountains and then dragged by rope to the shrine, where they are finally erected.

In between, they must descend some very steep hills, and this is where “Ki-otoshi” happens. As the huge logs are pushed over the top of ski-jump-style inclines, men ride them like toboggans, or try to jump on board on the way down. As you can imagine, this can be rather more dangerous than colliding with a cheese. In fact, there are fairly regular reports of participants being killed, and injuries are commonplace.

Japan being Japan, such deaths used to be regarded as “honourable”. They probably still are. But health and safety is catching up even there and ever-increasing precautions are taken to prevent serious injury.

I don’t know whether insurance is an issue yet. I hope not. The event attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators, so western-style litigation would be expensive. And even in Japan, I imagine, the concept of an honourable death is not popular with insurers, who as a species are duty-bound to avoid honouring things, wherever they can.