Britons and their unusual pastimes
Like thousands of British men, I have a shed in my garden.
It’s where I keep my tools, some books, and where I retreat from time to time if I need some solitude. I’m very proud of it, because I built it myself. A man needs a shed, in other words.
But there are sheds and there are sheds. Take Kevin Kicks from Oxfordshire, in central England. On Sunday he went to his shed, like tens of thousands of other British men enjoying a day off in the last days of summer.
The difference is he then drove it at 141 kilometers an hour along a disused airfield runway.
Kevin, whose shed is an impressive wooden-planked affair with double-glazed windows and a proper A-framed roof, mounted it on a van chassis and joined a few dozen other people with frankly weird tastes.
While Kevin was muscling his way down the runway — he didn’t quite break the record (Unfortunately the organisers don’t know that Kevin actually broke the record), as far as I can tell — another fellow eccentric mounted a jet-propelled shopping trolley and blasted his way to a world record of 99 km/h, literally astride a jet turbine engine and strapped to a shopping cart. Matt McKeown, you’re a very brave man. Daft as a brush, of course.
If there’s one quality Britons prize above anything else, it’s eccentricity. I should know, I come from a long line of eccentrics.
My maternal grandfather, for example, was a large, bombastic former chief of police and a bona fide war hero from World War I, who had been a boxer in his youth. Not what you would call a subtle man.
My late uncle John was the real deal as far as eccentricity was concerned. Our family folklore is littered with stories of his oddball antics. I mean, do you known anyone who would eat Brussels sprouts raw, or suck the last dregs out of used tea bags?
His eccentricity attained new heights when he reached his old age. Unable to drive anymore, he acquired a custom-built tricycle, and he’d wear a woolen bobble hat surmounted by a giant pair of headphones with a radio he’d built in, and a long antenna sticking out.
Then, with his two dogs attached to the handlebars on a long lead, he would wobble off around the country lanes of Buckinghamshire every evening.
Motorists, needless to say, gave him a wide berth.
It must be genetic. His father was a true gentleman with exquisite Edwardian manners, who never learned to drive.
Instead, he built his thriving real estate business by using the local rural bus service — and after each journey, would solemnly tip the rather bemused driver.
So I imagine reading about people breaking world speed records for sheds, shopping trolleys, sleds, mono-motorcycles and rocket-powered motorbikes seems normal to us Brits.
But what on earth does the rest of the world make of it all? I shudder to think. Contact the writer at chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com