Today is the day that Common Riding is celebrated in Hawick. Because its ‘common riding season’ in the border towns. My favourite time of year. Hmmmm. Never actually heard of it before today but its just one more fantastic reason why Europe is the coolest (and most bizarrely stupid) place in the world, and must never be allowed to congeal into one great big, featureless, homogeneous cesspit lacking the wonderful individuality that makes every place so special, unique and daft.

Common riding is a Scottish tradition, celebrating something that happened on the border 500 years ago and so a few angry Scots, or Scots pretending to be angry (I’m gonna reckon these will be the ‘YES!!!’ voters in referenda to come) ride around on common ground, just like their ancesters did celebrating some ancient and meaningless historical bollocks because that’s the way its always been done, going all the way back to a time before Mel Gibson was a rabidly anti-semitic fundamentalist Catholic extremist.

Its like running the bulls in Pamplona. Stupid fucking idea, but some old Spaniard 200 years ago said: eh, I ‘as a groovy idea; let’s all go into da streets and get trampled on by bulls! for fun!!’ Hemingway thought that sounded just fab and now everyone does it. Get bored or gored; there is NO third option in Pamplona.

Back here we have that day when they have cheese-rolling in Gloucester, a bit like the bull-run but 3kg of cheddar is less potentially harmful than 3 ton of prime beef. And lacks horns.

Marching Season has always been a particular favourite of mine. When Irish protestants or ‘orange men’ as they are known, errrr… well, march. They don’t know why they march but ‘pissing off the catholics’ is always a good reason to do anything in Northern Ireland, so they take to the streets, these Orange Men. You don’t get Orange Women; they live in Essex and their ‘orange’ comes out of a bottle you buy in Boots.

In Germany on April the 7th they have Schpraugersnachtelwurst Jumping. When Bavarians dress up as milkmaids, but with high heels, take a piglet in each arm and jump over as many schpraugersnachtelwursts as they can round up in one evening, ending at 11.07 pm, when they all drink 3 steiners of Vodka mixed with anti-freeze and spend the rest of the month in hospital. Its as much fun as you can ever have. In Germany.

And this is just one small sample of the wonderful array of stupid, ridiculous, dangerous or just downright pathetic events happening in a European country near you any time soon. Don’t just sit by passively and let life pass you by; get involved. Swallow a leming tomorrow. Rape a strawberry next thursday. Roll down a Norweigian hillside with with a corpse in July.

and have a lovely Saturday

A xxxx