The World Pooh Sticks championships...

... are held each year in Oxfordshire, just south of the town. For those not familiar, Pooh Sticks, as described by AA Milne (yes, it's a Winnie-the reference, not the stinky kind), involves throwing sticks off a bridge and seeing whose comes out the other side first.England being England, they've turned this into a global, erm, sport. As a bizarre 'world championships', it's up there with cheese rolling (races down a hill in Gloucester, held in May), nettle-eating (near Dover somewhere, I think), and the air guitar and wife-carrying (to win one's wife's weight in beer) gigs invented by those wacky Finns.

So of course, we had to go.

It was like lots of community festival things - Rotary ran it, there was a sausage sizzle, a dodgy PA system, kids everywhere, about 200 competitors. Fantastic. And, to cut a long story short, my friend Heather came third, and can now claim to be a bronze medallist in the Pooh Sticks Championships of the World. (That's right, of the world!).