The strange mixture of sensible northern eating habits and crazed PR stunts which is the World Pie Eating Championships transfixes Wigan in the morning, or at least that small part of the town which constitutes Harry's Bar.
Competitors, who tend to be a conservative group of familiar returnees, will be reunited at midday in front of a tasty and very pleasant smelling range of 12cm by 3.5cm pies with a maximum side angle of 15 degrees and at least 66 percent meat content excluding pastry.
The slurping and dripping is worth seeing and hearing, as they then try to wolf their 200 gram dinner in record time. The defending champion is Kevin Astle, 26 and a self-employed builder from Worsley Mesnes, who did the business last year in 29.19 seconds, very respectable but well below the stunning 23.91 set by civil servant and first-time contestant Neil Collier, 42, two years ago.
Controversy still surrounds that triumph, which knocked 12 seconds off the previous best, and 'sweepers' were employed to check the floor for 'covetly discarded material'. There was also a photo-check of the initial heats when Collier was accused of starting to grab his pie before the piemaster's yellow starting stick had fallen. Other rows in the contest's 21-year-old history include the making of competition pies in Adlington, Wigan's unmentionable neighbouring rival, and a 'slimmers' pie' which the more old-fashioned contestants and supporters treated with derision.
This year's stunt, predictably, is the renaming of the contest for 2012 only as the Pielympics, with a special six-ring symbol modelled on the Olympic one, but bigger. And made of pies. It caused some confusion when the oldest member of the organising team, Tony Callaghan of Harry's Bar which stands in Wallgate, mistook it for a connection with Audi cars. Assuming that they were this year's sponsors, he started negotiating to have one on display in the bar.
The contest is likely to see pie-related versions of the celebratory displays invented for the Olympics by runners Mo Farah and Usain Bolt. Callaghan says:
A few lads are getting ahead of themselves already and practicing the 'Pie-bot' which is like holding an invisible pie in two hands in front of your mouth.
Jape or not, encouraging pies is important to Wigan people whose nickname of 'pie-eaters' actually stems from the 1926 General Strike when some local miners returned to work early and were accused of eating metaphorical humble pie. The contest has made considerable progress at creating a counter-story about centuries of especially Wiganesque enjoyment of the real thing.
Celebrations start at Harry's Bar at 11.30am. All welcome.
Sorry, forgot to put in this clip of them thar chomping jaws. Enjoy...
And here's another one, with Neil Collier explaining what drives him on.
