In a strange way, hearing about the weird tradition detailed here earlier triggered a few memories. It’s about the traditional annual cheese rolling race in Gloucestershire, where people hurtle down a very steep hill in pursuit of a round piece of cheese. Utterly insane, but it looks like fun.

Behind my old special school, just beyond the playground, used to be two moderately-sized mounds made from all the soil excavated when the school was being built in the seventies. They were only a few metres high, but were once a major feature of the surrounding school landscape. When I was at school, before I was ten or eleven, I used to use a rollator: a walking frame with four wheels which I used to stabilise myself when I was walking. Rather than pushing it like the kind of zimmer-frames which you see elderly people using, I used to pull it as it had a bar which crossed at the back connecting it’s two sides. When I first started using it, it didn’t take my young self long to realise that, if I got going fast enough, I could then push myself up to sit on the bar and glide along on the momentum. I never went more than two or three metres, but it was great fun, rattling down the school corridors.

The problem came when I realised that it was even more fun to climb to the top of the mounds and whizz down on the back of my rollaor. As a youngster I thought it was awesome: every break time or lunch time, I used to clime the mound and glide down endlessly, like I was on a rollercoaster or a Ghostbuster aboard Ecto-1. The thing is, some sides of the small hills were steeper than others, so to begin with I just stuck to the less steep sides. When I eventually mustered up the courage, however, I decided it would be cool to try to ride down the steepest slope of them all.

The first couple of times, if memory serves, I was perfectly okay; but then I wanted to go faster and faster, until, quite inevitably, BANG. I remember tumbling off the walking frame, and the next thing I know I was opening my eyes with one of my fellow students standing over me. I had obviously fallen off the back of my walker and knocked myself briefly unconscious. Needless to say, that was the last time I ever played that game; yet watching all these guys in Gloucestershire rush down a hill after a rolling cheese strikes me as similarly foolish. Their hill might be larger and steeper, and my childhood game had nothing to do with dairy products, but I daresay they get the same thrill from doing something most people would deem utterly crazy.