For more years than I cared to count, I'd been sneaking away on weekends and spending precious holiday time in the backwaters of Britain, living a double life as a weekday wage-slave and a weekend shin kicker.
Only my family and a few friends knew my terrible secret.
It wasn't the kind of thing you talked about in polite company; not in professional North London, at least.
It would be like confessing to a Marmite-related fetish. People would stop inviting us to dinner. They wouldn't let our daughter play with their children. They would cross the street for fear that my madness was contagious.
Anyway, once I had enough material, I quit the day job, remortgaged the flat and took a year off to finish my book.
"That's a brave move," an ex-colleague said, "especially for someone with a child."
The subtext was clear—by "brave" he meant "stupid" and possibly "irresponsible".
More than a year later, I was facing disaster, desperately trying to sell a book about gurning and Pope burning to publishers—mostly middle-class Londoners—who couldn't care less about hicks in the sticks and their strange an-tics.
In my mind, I had wandered into shin kicking and stumbled onto The Big Book of Britain.
In reality, it looked like my work was going to end up buried among other misfiled titles at the library, somewhere between The Wacky World of Welding and Great Bison I Have Known.
And that was if I was lucky! I was facing disgrace!—Financial ruin!—Public ridicule! "See that guy?" people would jeer, "He bet his house on bog snorkelling!"
No matter how many tales of rejection-to-victory I heard, they weren't enough to lift the depression, not even the one about the publisher who told JK Rowling, "You'll never make any money out of children's books, Jo."
No doubt she cackled like Voldemort now as she threw another fifty-pound note on the fire.
Things had worked out for her… but what about me?
All that was the mental distortion, the hissing white noise warping my perceptions, when I first saw Haxey and the Hood.
On the rare occasions that it is mentioned by the media, they typically hype Haxey Hood as being ultraviolent.
But it isn't so much violent as… ultrasurreal—gloriously, profoundly absurd: a bizarre crush with no apparent reason for being; a seemingly meaningless struggle.
Dozens of men risk hypothermia to push and shove each other, arging and barging, hurling and burling, hubbing and bubbing in the mud and manure, emitting primal noises as they try to herd the slow-moving stampede, the hundred-footed elephant, across the field.
The thing is, you can't even see the Hood, the object of all the grunting and shunting.
In rugby and football, at least the ball is regularly passed and kicked.
Not so the Hood. A leather cylinder, it quickly disappears in the crush only to resurface again at the end.
In fact, some years it has disappeared altogether—in the chaos of the Sway, the men didn't realise until some time afterwards that the Hood had been stolen.
Rather than a piece of leather, it looks like the men are tussling over a boiling cauldron or a block of dry ice, judging from the clouds of steam billowing up from the centre, their combined body heat vapourising in the freezing cold.
It takes nearly two hours for the writhing mass of humanity to cover 200 yards, mainly because it keeps keeling over in the mud.
And when the Sway collapses, it can take a while for the officials to untangle the limbs and unpick the carnage.
You'd get a similar effect if you shoved the men into a dumpster, lifted them 50 feet into the air, and then tipped them onto the ground.
©J.R. Daeschner
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