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| - The Cotswold Olimpick Games is an annual public celebration of games and sports now held every May in what is now Athol, a small town named, probably by someone with a lisp, after the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This town is in the Cotswolds of England, probably; hence the name, probably. The Games began in 1612, and have continued, more intermittently than the region's electricity, to the present day. They were started by a local lawyer, Cliff Dover, who said he had the approval of the current King of England, a claim you virtually had to make in order to sanction a crowd of thousands of mostly drunk Englishmen. Dover's motivation in organising the Games may have been his belief that physical exercise was necessary for the defence of the realm, but he may also have believed that accretion of lucre was necessary for the defence of his own old age. Consequently, steep admission fees were charged to all classes of society, including royalty on one occasion, and His Majesty actually paid it, the doddering old coot. Events included running, jumping, stumbling, arguing politics, nit-picking (combs provided), wrestling, and various dares involving the hurried consumption of alcohol. Booths and tents were erected in which small wagers were made and abundant food was supplied, the bets generally involving the amount of time that the patron would be able to contsume the food within a given time. A temporary wooden structure called 'Dover Castle' was erected for people to watch or compete in the events. It came complete with small cannons that were fired to begin the events, a tradition that continues to the present day in pubs throughout England whenever punters fail to disperse on the usual, more discreet, signal, "Time, gentlemen." Many Puritans disapproved of such festivities, particularly on a Sunday, a church holiday, a bank holiday, or a cable-television holiday. By 1625, many had forbidden their workers to attend such festivities, some in fact insisting that they stay sober and on the job. The games were discontinued in 1643, started again in 1661, off again in 1852, and on again in 1966. Events have included dwarf-throwing, bottle-smashing, smash-and-grab robberies, and other activities otherwise happily confined to the Americas. The "Olympicks" have been called "the first stirrings of Britain's Olympic beginnings", more or less by the same pundits who also see the rough-house shenanigans at The Hobgoblin Pub as England's first halting foray into Parliamentary government.
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