One The World Lying Championships

 

‘The thing is,’ Sarah said suddenly, as she steered our hired car through the Lake District in the gathering gloom of a November evening, ‘I’m not really sure I want my boyfriend to be the world’s best liar.’

            For a moment I said nothing, and instead watched shreds of red cloud slowly parallax behind the black prongs of the southern fells. I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I had decided to enter as many world championships as possible in a year so that even though I wouldn’t win any, I would gain world rankings in each. The World’s Biggest Liar competition was the first to come up after I had made the decision and there wasn’t another championship that I would be able to enter for several months, minority sporting events apparently being a summer pastime. It was obvious that I had to take part in this event to get the ball rolling and to get some idea of what I was letting myself in for over the next twelve months. But now it seemed I had to put my girlfriend’s mind at rest about it before the venture had even begun. What should I tell her? I could see that she might be worried if I was revealed that night to be an outstandingly good liar. But then if I was lying on a world stage surely I would be less likely to lie in my spare time? Wouldn’t expecting a competitor in the world lying championships to lie in their leisure time be like expecting an Olympic athlete to spend their evenings hurdling over the sofa? I turned to Sarah to explain this only to see her grinning quietly. The verbal tricks had already begun, it seemed. I smiled back and went back to gazing out of the car window as grey rivers and black woodlands slipped lazily past. Eventually the bruised sky of twilight gave way to the full darkness of a Cumbrian night and we turned onto the small country road that would lead us to Wasdale, the venue for the World’s Biggest Liar event.

            ‘Have you got your own transport?’ the woman from the local council had asked when I called for information. ‘It’s just that the competition’s a bit in the middle of nowhere and some people have turned up in the past and found themselves stranded.’ For the rest of that week I had entertained myself by constructing elaborate scenarios involving the Slovakian national lying team in the driving rain outside Whitehaven railway station.

            The world lying championship is an annual event, started in 1974 in honour of Will Ritson, a Victorian landlord who was so proud of his native Wasdale that he would frequently get carried away describing its virtues to visitors from outside the area. He famously told one guest at his inn that Wasdale’s turnips were so huge that the locals didn’t so much dig them up as quarry them. Once thus exhausted as food supplies, he went on to explain, the turnip shells were used as barns for the local sheep in winter. It is in this tradition that the people of Wasdale each November invite the world’s foremost liars to come and outdo one another in a festival of falsehood. The rules – sent to me in advance by the local council – stated that entrants had between two and five minutes to lie to the crowd. No lawyers or politicians were allowed to enter. Non-English speaking competitors must provide their own translators, although any English dialects were acceptable. No mechanical aids. Judges’ decision would be final. The competition is brilliant in its simplicity.

            I had been lucky enough to get a last-minute room in the Santon Bridge Inn, where the event was being held that year. Teresa, the hotel manager, gave us a quick tour of the venue. ‘This is the bar,’ she said, ‘here’s the dining area and off here is the bistro area. It’s the same as the dining area but someone’ll bring the food to your table. This room is where you’ll have your breakfast tomorrow, and this room,’ she opened a final door, ‘is where the competition will be held.’ I walked in behind her and immediately got my first surprise of the night. Given the frivolous nature of the World Biggest Liar competition I had expected it to be held in a bar-room, in front of perhaps twenty shepherds who were there for want of something better to do on a cold Thursday evening. I was very wrong. The competition was being held in a large function room. It was filled with long tables covered with white cloths, most running vertically along the room with two placed perpendicular at the head. It looked like the reception venue for a large wedding. Teresa led us inside and started explaining the arrangements.

            ‘These tables are where the audience sit. This table here,’ she gestured to what would have been the top table had this really been a wedding, ‘is where the judges will sit. You should try and get here early as it’ll soon fill up. Oh, and this here is the media table.’ Media table? Crumbs.

            We went to our room to change and reappeared about an hour later. The inn had filled up considerably and there was an lively buzz about the place. Two men sat outside the competition room with the pile of entry forms on a table between them. One man had hair and the other didn’t.

            ‘Did you get my form?’ I asked. ‘My name’s Ian Walker.’

            Hair leafed through the forms. ‘Yes, here’s yours.’

            ‘Are there many entrants?’

            ‘Only eight so far. But more people can enter on the night if they want.’ It looked like my rush to return the entry form as quickly as possible had been slightly misguided, although this was understandable given the form’s stark warning: Note: Competitors are advised to enter at last [sic] 14 days before the date of the competition, in case of elimination rounds due to the popularity of the event. Obviously it had been written by a member of Copeland Council with a better feel for marketing than the ‘middle of nowhere’ lady.

            ‘Do you really think more people will enter tonight?’ I asked. I was set to become one of the top eight liars in the world and I didn’t want more people sneaking in and pushing me further down the rankings.

            ‘A few, I should think,’ said No-Hair.  He laughed and added,  ‘After all, who could resist the great prizes?’ The winner got £25 and a tie.

            ‘Are the ties not very nice, then?’

            ‘They’re rubbish,’ said Hair. ‘Like his!’ He gestured to No-Hair’s neck.

            ‘That’s  a lovely tie,’ I said.

            ‘Yeah, right!’ laughed No-Hair.

            ‘Well, I am in training for the event.’

            Over the next hour, as the room filled with an expectant crowd, I began to feel increasingly nervous. I dealt with the situation by carefully getting myself drunk. By the end of the second pint the room was filled with people tucking into a potato stew in which lumps of black pudding lurked ready to snare the unwary. I started my third pint and passed the time until the competition began by goading Sarah into trying her black pudding. Surprisingly, she did it almost readily. Less surprisingly, she pulled a face and decided that one mouthful was enough.

            Black puddings are going to be something of a leitmotiv in this book, and one of the interesting things about them is not so much that people don’t like them, but rather the reasons for this. On the face of it, it’s tempting to conclude that it’s the thought of eating a sausage made mostly of blood that puts people off. But I can reveal here that I have conducted naturalistic blind taste tests with black puddings and have discovered that even people who have no idea what is in them rarely like them too, which rather implies that people don’t eat black puddings because they are nasty.

            The blind taste tests happened when I was a student and spent a summer working for my university’s catering department. All universities try to make money over the vacation periods when the students aren’t around, and one way that mine had hit upon was to provide bed and breakfast accommodation for parties of elderly American tourists who were staying overnight in York whilst being taken round Britain on whistle-stop coach tours. All in all, several hundred retired Americans must have passed through the college that summer, and their unfamiliarity with British cooked breakfasts provided some interesting results. When I cleared their breakfast plates I would generally find the same two things left on each. First, there would be a piece of fried bread thickly coated in jam or marmalade with exactly one bite missing. Clearly all the tourists had thought that it was a new variety of toast, and the shock they must have encountered as they bit into the marmalade only to find themselves with a mouthful of dirty oil can only be imagined.

            The second thing that would be left on every plate would be the black pudding. But there was the important difference between these two leavings. The idea of eating a mouthful of greasy fried bread smothered with jam is so bad that just typing this is making my stomach twitch. However, when the dirty plates came back to the kitchen that mistaken mouthful of sweetened fat and starch would, in almost every case, have been gamely swallowed before the rest of the slice was abandoned. Not so the black pudding. Each day I would discover with delight new and more ingenious hiding places for ejected mouthfuls of blood sausage. The less imaginative people made do with spitting it back onto the plate or into a napkin. Others, however, fashioned duvets out of tomatoes or tents out of toast so that they might hide the ejected bites beneath them. One poor soul was clearly so disgusted by the taste of the black pudding that they were prepared publicly to sacrifice all dignity by spitting their mouthful into a milk jug rather than swallow it. Sarah ate her mouthful with good grace before pushing the rest firmly to the side of her plate.

            As I neared the end of my fourth pint the event was almost ready to begin. The judges filed to their table from an antechamber: the mayor in his gold chain sat at one end and was joined by several women who made up the rest of the judging panel. They seemed to be having a good time, laughing and drinking. I looked around the room and wondered who the other competitors were and whether they were having a good time as well, or whether they were nervous like me. In all, there were well over a hundred people in the room and I couldn’t decide which were liars and which were spectators. A smartly waistcoated man with a grey beard sat on a table to my right and something about his slightly prinked appearance made me think that he must there as a competitor, but of the other people in the room I hadn’t a clue who was who. Was the person laughing uproariously with his friends a competitor? How about the one sitting quietly behind me? There was no equivalent of tracksuits or running shoes to identify the athletes here.

            Finally, things began to happen. A jovial MC took up the microphone and introduced the competition and the judges (the women proved to be various officers of the local council and a representative from the brewery). He then announced the start of the event and explained how the evening would proceed. We would each have up to five minutes to lie, and this was to be a freestyle lying event with no restrictions on what we could talk about. A bell would be rung when a minute of lying time remained and people going over five minutes would be disqualified. In all, there were twelve liars to speak that night (again I felt a momentary pang of annoyance that people who hadn’t bothered to enter in advance should be allowed to compete against me, and then wondered why I was getting competitive about such a patently silly event). Our entry forms would be randomly drawn from the pile to decide the order in which we would lie. The MC pulled one out.

            ‘Our first contestant,’ he announced, ‘is Dr Indiana Mason, who is… an archaeologist and adventurer!’ At once I scented trouble. I’d naively put my real name, address, and occupation on the form. I hadn’t realized we were supposed to lie on there as well. Great. I’d been exposed as a rank amateur before I’d even opened my mouth.

            As ‘Dr Indiana Mason’ took to the stage and began to speak, I finally got an idea of what the competition was going to be about. ‘Lying’ can of course cover all sorts of things, and there was no guidance given to the competitors in advance. However, the competition was, as I had suspected, essentially about telling tall tales and ‘Dr Mason’ did well, giving us an implausible and comical story about travelling around Cumbria in a Sopwith Camel with a chimpanzee. The audience, I noticed, was very good. They sat in encouraging silence, breaking only to laugh appreciatively at the jokes. Indeed, perhaps they were too eager to listen to what ‘Dr Mason’ had to say. He long overran his five minute period and so disqualified himself. He sat back down to generous applause.

            Next  up was a tall young woman in a white shirt, one of the hotel’s employees. She stood in front of the stage and gave us a clever lie about how she had discovered a herb that prevented people from telling falsehoods and how she had slipped it into the Tatie Pot supper that everybody had eaten that night. If only that had been true. The looks of disdain I had endured for being the only person in the room to order something different would have been a little more worthwhile.

            And then my form was drawn out. Fantastic! If I’d had the choice of speaking in any position then third would probably have been my preferred option. I had been given enough time to see how others approached the event but didn’t have to wait so long for my turn that the audience was jaded or that the various liars started to blur together in the judges’ minds.

            ‘And next up is Ian Walker,’ announced the smiling MC, reading from my entry form. ‘Ian is British, he lives in Bath, and he’s a lecherer!’

            ‘Lecturer!’ I hissed, reaching for the microphone. He swung his body around, elbow out, to keep it out of my reach.

            ‘A lecherer! So watch yourselves tonight ladies!’ Finally he surrendered the microphone and I was alone on the stage feeling more nervous than I could remember being for years. This wasn’t because I was worried about standing up and speaking in front of the crowd. Public speaking is a major part of my job. Indeed, I had given a lecture to about a hundred people that morning before we set off for Cumbria. No, there are two differences between lecturing at a university and speaking in this competition. The first is that in a lecture, only a relatively small proportion of the audience is really listening. The second is that in a lecture I usually have some idea what I’m going to say.

            I honestly had meant to plan my lie. Perhaps even to write it, like a short story, so that I could memorize it. This was a world championship, after all, so clearly everybody else would be engaging in the proper preparation (and, as it turned out, they clearly had). But for some reason I just hadn’t done it. For the last three weeks several part-formed ideas had floated around inside my head, but in the absence of any effort from me they remained disconnected. Together, they might have formed a good, entertaining five-minute lie, but I had not put them together. They were like loose threads waving in the breeze and I had not, for reasons known only to my subconscious self, gathered them into a strong rope of falsehood.

            But then suddenly, miraculously, as I stood there with the microphone in my hand, a crowd of people in front of me and a knot in my stomach, I felt those threads begin to move of their own accord, as if whipped by a wind that came from nowhere. Within a second the various loose strands had formed themselves from a disorganized mass, not unlike this metaphor, into a coherent whole and suddenly – yes! – the lie was there, fully formed, in my mind. All the disconnected little ideas that had occurred to me over the previous weeks had somehow slotted together and in that moment, wonderfully, I knew what I was going to say. And with that realization, all nervousness fell from me. I faced the crowd and began to speak.

            ‘I’m not here tonight to enter your competition,’ I lied.

***

How did I lie to them? Let me count the ways. For three and a half minutes I managed to spin a lie within a lie. A meta-lie, if you will. I began by explaining that I was not entering the competition [one lie], but rather, knowing that it was a massive international event [two] with blanket media coverage [three], I had decided to hijack the occasion for publicity purposes [four]. I made the crowd tell me, with a show of hands, how many of them had drunk a cup of tea that day and how many had used tea bags to make these. Satisfied that over half the people in the room had handled a tea bag that day (we were in the north, after all), I explained that I was there because I was a professional tea bag weaver [five], which was a natural choice of profession for me, given that this was my family’s trade [six] and had been for generations [seven]. Indeed, it was my great-great-grandfather, Obadiah Walker [eight], who in 1427 [nine] revolutionized the tea-bag world [ten] with the invention of the double-felled cross-lapped bag [eleven] that we all know today.

            I paused for a moment, putting a hand to my face as if I were in danger of being overcome with emotion, and then announced that before going on I would like to share something personal with the audience. That week, I told them, was a particularly proud one for me, as I had just finished my tea bag weaver’s apprenticeship [twelve], which had taken me all of 65 years to complete [thirteen – much laughter from the crowd]. No, you might mock, I told the audience, but 65 years was the standard period of indenture for tea bag weavers [fourteen]. Indeed, if they wanted proof then they need only look in the works of Shakespeare. In As You Like It, the character of Touchstone says the line, “I was for my five-and-sixty years a bag-weaver’s lad,” which shows just how long-established the tradition of the 65-year apprenticeship is [fifteen, and may I just say how enormously proud I still am of this one?].

Of course, the reason for such a long apprenticeship, I went on, is that tea bag weaving is so tremendously complex and difficult [sixteen]. A lot of people think that tea bags are simply made out of pieces of paper with holes punched in them [seventeen – all people think this] but bags made this way don’t work [eighteen]. Instead, tea bags are woven and the holes are left in during this process [nineteen], like in lace-making [twenty – it’s a little-known fact that lace makers just prick holes into sheets of cloth].

The problem now, I explained, and the reason I had hijacked the competition that night, is that there is a crisis in the tea bag weaving world [twenty-one]. British tea bags are, of course, the best in the world [cheers from the crowd – perhaps this was inadvertently true], but there is a problem [twenty-two] with the silk [twenty-three] we weave them from [twenty-four!]. This silk comes from British silkworms [twenty-five], which are both better and worse than the more familiar Chinese silk worms [twenty-six]. British silkworms are better in that they are eight metres long [twenty-seven – I looked over to see Sarah hiding her face in her hands at this point], but worse in that they only produce three centimetres of silk each year [twenty-eight]. Therefore it takes eight hundred British silkworms a year to produce a single tea bag [twenty-nine], and in recent years their population has been declining for reasons that nobody really understands [thirty]. But, I announced, as if suddenly invigorated by the thought, there was something that people could do to help the bag weavers! [thirty-one]. British silkworms, which live under the eaves of houses [thirty-two], behind housemartins’ nests [thirty-three], are very fond of music [thirty-four], and in particular they love Frank Sinatra songs [thirty-five – where the hell did those last few come from?]. Tea bag weavers had discovered that if the silkworms heard Frank Sinatra songs, the amount of silk they produced each year went from three centimetres to perhaps as much as – incredibly – three-and-a-half centimetres [big laugh. Thirty-six].

I had almost finished now, I told the crowd, and in a moment they could go back to having their competition [thirty-seven]. But first, from my heart [thirty-eight], I implored each of them, and all the people watching this on television around the country [thirty-nine], to stand under the eaves of their houses whenever they could and sing a bit of Old Blue Eyes’ music. Because it was only if we all pulled together and each played our part that the proud and ancient industry of tea bag weaving might survive through the twenty-first century [forty]. And with a small sincere [forty-one] bow and an earnest [forty-two] expression, I left the stage.

***

So there it was. Forty-two lies in just over three minutes. I actually felt  a rush of pride as I sat back down to the crowd’s applause. What a relief. Now I could relax and enjoy the rest of the competition. And, I suddenly realized, I had my world ranking! By completing my entry I had officially become one of the best liars in the world. In fact, I might even be in the world’s top ten. I felt a frisson of excitement at the thought.

            I was still feeling satisfied when the next competitor, a Cumbrian man in a black waistcoat called John Graham (a.k.a. Johnny Liar), was called up. The MC announced that John had won this competition several times before and he was clearly known to the crowd, who welcomed him enthusiastically onto the stage.

            When John began to speak I could see at once that I was in the presence of a master. He addressed the audience with an engaging, self-effacing style, but I could see that beneath this there was clear confidence and ambition. This was a man who had more than once been a world champion and he carried himself with an appropriate air. His lie had a title – ‘two for the price of one’ – and was skilfully constructed. It had everything that one could ask of a great tall tale – humour, narrative, implausibility, and a twist at the end. And all in four minutes. It was magnificent to watch.

            Two more liars spoke before the interval, but I found myself thinking back to the experience of being on the stage. The audience had been so good, so appreciative. I had felt a real pang of satisfaction – no, let’s be honest here; it was a feeling of power – standing there and having a room full of people listen to me and laugh at my jokes. I could see why comedians love it so much. ‘I can’t believe how good this audience is,’ I said to Sarah in the pause between competitors.

During the half-time interval several people complemented my entry. A handsome young man sat at my back said that his table had decided I was the best so far, and a woman at the bar said that my talk had been excellent. Were these people really putting me in the same league as a world champion like John Graham? This was a dangerous avenue of thought. I wasn’t there to do well; I was just there to get my world ranking.

The competition resumed with some more excellent performances, mostly by people from the local area. Howard Christie, the pub landlord, was one. His speech, based on the local recycling system, went down particularly well with the Cumbrians who obviously made up most of the audience. What was it, I wondered, that made this corner of the country such a rich bed of Munchausens and such connoisseurs of falsehood? Indeed, there were only two speakers in the second half who were not local. The first was Joe Latham, one of the late entrants. Joe was a young man in a black T-shirt and brown jacket who had been sitting on the media table. He started off by sensibly admitting up front all the traits that the crowd might object to. ‘I’m a student, a southerner, and a lager drinker,’ he announced to a chorus of mock gasps, ‘but I hope you’ll forgive me these things tonight.’ He was the youngest competitor but managed also to turn this round to his advantage. He told a tale about how his family had a rare genetic disorder that caused the men to age backwards so that he was, in effect, claiming to be older than everybody else there. He told several anecdotes from ‘earlier’ parts of his life when he was, of course, somewhat older than he looked that night. He explained that he was now 22 and, thanks to the inexorable process of regressive ageing, would soon be passing through his teenage years. Backwards. Finally – and I was coming to see that this is the mark of a good competition liar – he wrapped it all up with a funny and apt punchline.

            ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. ‘As I mentioned, my father also suffers from the same condition as me. I was born when he was eighty and we’ve been getting younger at the same rate ever since. He’s now regressed to the age of two, so I’ve got to go – his nappy needs changing! Honestly, parents are so embarrassing!’ He sat down with the crowd’s evident approval.

            The other speakers came and did their thing. The bearded man in the brown waistcoat whom I had spotted earlier was indeed a competitor, and he had come with a good crowd-pleaser of a tale. Another man effectively used the opportunity to tell a series of jokes, which went down well, although I noticed that as the crowd applauded they were muttering to one another that he wasn’t going to win.

The final speaker of the competition was the other non-Cumbrian in the second half, and he proved not to be a proper competitor anyway. He was a tall young South African called Abrie Kruger, who took to the stage wearing a kilt and accompanied by a young woman in what seemed to be some sort of Central European traditional outfit. A spectator on my table said that Kruger was working in the area and was known to most of the people in the room. I just wanted this novelty act to be over and the results announced so that I could glory in my world ranking. But to be fair, Kruger wrapped the proceedings up in a jovial enough way by pulling out a script and reading from it as if it were a royal proclamation. He announced that he had researched his family history and had discovered that he was the hereditary King of Wasdale. He had now decided to take charge, and went on to list all sorts of new rules that he would be imposing on the people of the area. The young woman looked round his shoulder to read her lines off the script. His speech ended with a long announcement in Afrikaans, which frankly went down less well than the first bit. We all clapped anyway as they had been such good sports, and the judges retired to consider their verdict.

            ‘So that’s it. I’ve got to be in the top ten,’ I said to Sarah. One of the other competitors had left the platform with stagefright almost as soon as he had gone up, and with the first competitor overrunning I knew that I couldn’t be below the tenth place. ‘One of the top ten liars in the world. It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ I had achieved exactly what I had set out for. Sarah shook her head in what I presumed at the time was awe. Looking back, it might have been pity.

            The judges were out for a long time, which suggested they were working hard to choose the winner. I got talking to the four men who filled the remainder of our table. We all agreed that the crowd had been wonderfully good-natured and had been supportive towards all the entrants.

‘They were really good towards that chap who got stage fright,’ said one of the men.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I thought that too. And he coped really well with it as well. A lot of people would have just panicked, but he did well to get off the stage with good grace like that.’ We agreed that it had been a nice night out and everybody in the room seemed to have enjoyed it.

Finally, the judges returned and the MC began the announcements. The student Joe Latham came third and the crowd cheered as he went up to collect his prizes. John Graham came second, and the crowd cheered even louder as he was presented with his tie and cheque. We waited anxiously to see who the World Championship liar would be. The MC made us wait… and then announced that Abrie Kruger had won. The crowd didn’t cheer.

In a moment the audience which, as I had just commented to my neighbour, had been so generous and appreciative of all the entrants that night, erupted in fury. People leapt to their feet to condemn the judges’ decision.

‘Rubbish!’

‘He read it!’

‘There’s no way that should win!’

‘He was reading it!’

I looked around, half suspecting that this was some further joke, but the people were serious. There was a steady booing and hissing from around the room and the angry shouts continued.

‘Outrageous!’ boomed a voice from the back of the room.

‘This is a bloody travesty! He was reading it all from a piece of paper!’

‘He’s not even a Cumbrian!’ somebody shouted. ‘Shhhh!’ hissed all his friends at once.

            The judges and the MC looked shocked, Kruger looked mortified, and still the abuse came. The crowd – it was more of a mob by now – were on their feet, furious that somebody who had woodenly read their entry off a sheet of paper had won the contest. I honestly feared violence. After perhaps a minute of shouting and booing the mayor took to the stage. He looked livid.

            ‘Calm down!’ he bellowed into the microphone. ‘Calm down! This competition has been fairly competed and the judges have made their decision. This is a world championship, and is open to anyone in the world; not just Cumbrians.’ He directed a glare towards the man who had shouted earlier. ‘ Now please! Can we have some order here?’

The Mayor’s plea calmed most of the crowd to an extent but still the muttering continued and two large groups of men climbed onto their chairs and continued to shout abuse towards the stage. They kept this up whilst the shocked winners were being photographed and interviewed by a TV crew. Amidst the noise, Howard Christie sat down in Sarah’s seat whilst she was at the bar.

‘That was a good entry tonight,’ he said.

‘Thanks, I enjoyed yours too.’ He had been a witty speaker, and I noticed that his tie marked him out as a past world champion. ‘This is quite a performance,’ I said, gesturing to the crowd. The two groups of men were now shouting patriotic slogans to nobody in particular.

Howard looked embarrassed. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I wrote that speech for him. I didn’t expect him to go and win.’

As a competitor, I had been obliged to nod and smile and applaud in agreement with the judges’ decision, as to do otherwise would look like a case of sour grapes. But like the other members of the crowd, I had felt cheated by the result. Reading from a script was acting, not lying. And even if we were to ignore this violation of the event’s spirit, Kruger had clearly broken Rule 3 of the competition: Any overseas competitors not speaking English must provide their own interpreters.

There was only one hope of partial redemption. If Kruger had written his own speech then the outcome might not have been so bad. But Howard had confirmed that this wasn’t the case. The winner of the World Lying Championship had been an actor and not a liar. The crowd were justified in their anger, it appeared, but it was still an ugly thing to see. Sarah and I left the room as five men in white shirts raised their voices to sing Rule Britannia.

***

This was Cumbria in November, and so the next morning was quite literally the cold light of day. But when Sarah and I came down for breakfast we found that it had done little to make people reappraise their feelings.

            ‘It was a bit outrageous last night, wasn’t it?’ said Lesley, the landlady, as she brought our food.

            ‘A travesty!’ called a voice from behind me. I looked round to see two of the angriest men from the night before. They had been in the group of shouters that hadn’t ended the evening in song. These weren’t young men who had been showing off (they were in their forties), and nor had their shouts been the result of drunkenness (they were still upset in the sober morning). Like many of the audience at the contest, they felt genuinely cheated by what had happened. My lawyer friend David, when I later described the events of world championship to him, said, ‘People are always quick to become angered at a perceived injustice,’ and I think that the people in Cumbria showed he was right.

            ‘They were a new bunch of judges who hadn’t done it before,’ Lesley explained.

            ‘I couldn’t help noticing that they were all…,’ I chose my words carefully, ‘…women of a certain age. Do you think they might have been swayed a bit by the fact he was a handsome young man with his legs showing?’

            ‘Yeah, could be,’ said Lesley. ‘Will you be entering next year?’

            It was a good question.

***

That morning, after breakfast, I fulfilled a minor ambition by driving along Eskdale and up the beautiful road over the Hardknott Pass and the Wrynose Pass. There was an inversion, and so as the car peaked on Wrynose, Sarah and I were treated to a genuinely awe-inspiring sight as we found ourselves suspended above a country-wide blanket of clouds with only the occasionally peak of a Cumbrian mountain poking through. We were on top of the world.

            But for me, I was only on top of the world in a physical sense. Inside I was feeling all sorts of unexpected emotions after the previous night’s events. Although only the top three contestants were named at the end of the contest, Howard Christie had spoken to the judges for me and found that I had come fifth. I had my first world ranking: I was officially the fifth best liar in the world. On the night of the competition I had felt thrilled. In fact, I had been surprised to discover just how much this news delighted me. But the next day I found myself feeling unsatisfied. Being fifth had initially been wonderful, but now it gave me a nagging dissatisfaction. It was like eating a big tub of popcorn: At first it tasted delicious, but after a while I began to feel a craving for something more nourishing.

            I’d offered to show Sarah my home county of Lancashire on our way back to Bath, and as we drove through the Forest of Bowland towards Dunsop Bridge my feeling of dissatisfaction grew. And I was feeling puzzled about these world championships. How could I continue to think of a contest like the World’s Biggest Liar as a bit of a joke when it was clearly capable of evoking such passion amongst people?

But for the rest of that day, I didn’t dwell on these issues too much. In Dunsop Bridge there’s a telephone box that marks the very centre of the British Isles, and I wanted to stand in it again.