The World Black Pudding Throwing Championships 2025 скачать в хорошем качестве

The World Black Pudding Throwing Championships 2025

There are many ways to test the limits of human ingenuity. You can split the atom, land a man on the moon, or, if you happen to be in Lancashire on a late summer’s day, you can stand on a painted house brick and throw lumps of pig’s blood into the air at some Yorkshire puddings. This, improbably, is a real competition, and it has been delighting and mystifying people for decades. The rules are charmingly straightforward: competitors stand on what is optimistically known as a “golden grid block” (though in reality it is a brick that has been given a brisk going-over with gold paint) and attempt to hurl black puddings underarm at a plinth twenty feet high. On the plinth sit a dozen Yorkshire puddings. The object is to knock off as many as possible in three throws. The record is not, I should stress, enormous. The weapon of choice—the black pudding. It is, for those unfamiliar, a sturdy torpedo made of pigs’ blood, suet, and breadcrumbs, traditionally packed into a pair of ladies’ stockings. Each pudding weighs about three kilograms, which makes for surprisingly effective missile work. Legend, or at least some bloke in the pub, has it that the contest commemorates the ancient rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire, which has been smouldering away since the Wars of the Roses. According to folklore, when the two armies ran out of arrows, they flung local foodstuffs at one another. Quite why they had the foresight to bring blood sausages to a battle is not explained, but it does make for a story. Today, thankfully, the only casualties are the puddings, and the only victors are the organisers, who raise money for the Stubbins Village Fund. And so the whole madcap spectacle will resume again next September.