#yes. yes it is. I accept all major currencies including your agonized groans and wails

[wenamedthedogkylo]

Gloucester, England is best known for its cathedral, but it ought to be known as well for a marvelous little tradition dating back at least 600 years.

Every year on the last Monday of May (formerly on Whit Monday, now every Spring Bank Holiday), the people of Brockworth flock to Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester for the Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake.

The event is simple: a 7-9 lbs. wheel of Double Gloucester (a semi-hard cheese like cheddar) is rolled from the top of the 200 yard hill. With only a one second head start, the wheel of cheese is then pursued by enthusiastic runners down the hill, each hoping to be the first to either catch the cheese or cross the finish line, either victory awarding them the rolléd cheese as their prize.

The event was semi-formally regulated by locals until 2009, when it was officially cancelled. However, love for the tradition is such that a smaller informal Cheese-Rolling was held the next year anyway, and in 2011 a “Save the Cheese Roll” campaign brought some 500 people out to race even without management. Despite the lack of paramedics, no one was injured. And despite being cancelled during the start of the COVID pandemic, the intrepid cheese rollers of Brockworth were back at it again starting in 2022. It is so popular that foreign runners started participating and winning as early as 2004, and people have come from as far as the US, Canada, New Zealand, Belgium, Australia, Egypt, and Japan to take part.

The event, while hilarious good fun and exercise, does not come without risk. In rolling down the steep 200 yard slope, the cheese can reach speeds of up to 70 mph, and enough spectators have been summarily… erm, creamed… by it that in 2013, the cheese wheel was replaced by a wheel of foam for health and safety reasons. Though absent in 2011, paramedics from local St John Ambulance brigades are on hand to administer first aid. Additionally, volunteers from the local rugby club and Young Farmers Club are stationed to catch racers who stumble at the bottom, as well as to carry down those who fall partway up.

This last point was of particular prominence during the most recent Cheese-Rolling on May 29th of this year. A lad from Wellington who flew in to run took a rather spectacular fall just feet from the finish line, and managed to tumbleweed his way right into the arms of a strapping young member of the Brockworth RFC. Witnesses claim that the chemistry was immediate and palpable, with both young men seemingly melting into one another at once with shy chuckles and much blushing, marking 2023 as the year of the first ever meet-charcute.