https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrove_Tuesday – and the origins of pancake races:
On Pancake Day, “pancake races” are held in villages and towns across the United Kingdom. The tradition is said to have originated in 1445 when a housewife from Olney, Buckinghamshire, was so busy making pancakes that she forgot the time until she heard the church bells ringing for the service. She raced out of the house to church while still carrying her frying pan and pancake, tossing it to prevent it from burning. The pancake race remains a relatively common festive tradition in the UK, especially England. Participants with frying pans race through the streets tossing pancakes into the air and catching them in the pan while running. The pancake race at Olney traditionally has women contestants who carry a frying pan and race over a 415-yard (379 m) course to the finishing line. The rules are strict: contestants must toss the pancake at the start and the finish, and wear a scarf and apron.
It was 12°C with 42km/h gusts of wind when we left home at 12.52pm, Holly (the now quite elderly 1 of our 2 pet chickens) had been sat down and looking a bit purple (with Willow – the other hen – stood next to her) in the hen house…
…and Soot (the 20 year old cat) was completely unconscious in the dent he has gradually been making on the back of a sofa cushion. In the town – the river was really high, there was a big queue of traffic going in the other direction due to roadworks, the church tower was mostly encircled by scaffolding…
…a parking ticket had to be purchased by a big local hall, and then we made it to the market square in a nearby town at 1.16pm. There, people in fluorescent jackets from the Rotary Club and the Lions Club were gathered, a woman was walking around with canapés on a tray, a French family were talking about ‘les enfants’, and 4 lanes (about 25 metres long) were laid out with plastic cones.
There were 4 teams (1 from each school) in the first run (at that point – the 5th team was missing), and there were to be 4 heats, with 4 kids in each team, 2 flips of the pancake per run, and the winners of each heat would go through to the final.
It began (and school names have been changed) Stonewall won the first, and then Westside appeared, the mayor came over and enquired about my notepad – meaning I got out the info card I now always have with me (explaining encephalitis and short term memory loss – at times people have suspected me of being a journalist!), and during a brief chat – he said the races have been going on for 10 years (and they were proper pancakes being used – which I enquired about), and I complemented the commentating. There were 5 teams by what we thought was the 4th heat, and Sandalwood had 2 teams; Mum quietly remarked to me that no-one had fallen over, a girl from Westside was getting emotional, a man was getting tortillas out of a packet, and then Sandalwood won the year 2 heat.
Westside, Trinity Prep, and Stonewall were involved in a heat of older pupils (and heats were going so fast that I couldn’t keep up with who was winning), and I’d seen some pancakes getting stuck to pans. I heard a girl saying ‘we gotta win those mini eggs!’, a Year 6 boy from Westside finished without one shoe, and the final of the year 6s – Westside, Stonewall and Sandalwood – was won by Westside at high speed.
After that, the older pupils were given a very official looking trophy….
….by which point it was 2.15pm (and Mum had spotted an ambulance parked nearby presumably in case of injuries); an Oxfam shop we briefly stuck our heads into on the way back to the car contained Harry Potter calligraphy sets and Help This Elf Christmas crackers (among a lot of other stuff), and by the time we made it back to the car (just before 2.30pm) I was losing feeling in my fingers due to the cold. Banners for a beer festival were strung up nearby, an enthusiastic Labrador was pulling his owner along a street and peed on a lamp post, 18 hole adventure golf was being advertised by the leisure centre, seagulls were drifting around in the sky near the retail park (and the Avenue Road not far from that made me wonder if there’s a Road Road); and at 2.48pm – we were parked in our home town. The man in the framing shop told us the painting of the cat we were bringing in was on papyrus; we walked to the high street, daffodils and crocuses were in the park at the top, Poundland was advertising Price Pounders, and then Mum went into the haberdashery for a suitcase (due to a well travelled one now disintergrating). We were back in the car by 3.38pm (and I’d noticed prices at a Shell petrol station: 143.9p/L and 152.9p/L), and home 6 minutes later, Soot greeted us. Once he’d had his spa treatment (the term given to his daily brushing)…
…he came over and immobilised me – and started snoring with a twitching tail; and by then (4.25pm), it was 11°C with 47km/h gusts outside.
