Fanhouse boosts our brutal foreign culture quotient for the day by inuring us to the bizarre savagery that is the British sport of shin kicking, in which combatants are paired off to try to throw each other to the ground, but only after punting each other in the shins, which they're hardened using hammers. Awesome.

As the sun began to set on Dover’s Hill near Chipping Campden, a band of white-coat-clad competitors began stuffing straw down their trousers like their lives depended on it. To the uninitiated this might have looked like a Worzel Gummidge convention, but for the hundreds of spectators crowding the hill’s banks, it marked the beginning of The British Shin Kicking Championship 2008 – an annual highlight of The Cotswold Olimpick Games.

I understood precisely 20 percent of that excerpt. Worzel Gummidge? Cotswold Olimpick? Simmelwick Coppington Worstershire? Wuzzle Wozzle? All's I know is that it involves some awkward looking violence. If only it could be interpreted more figuratively and the event could involve repeatedly kicking the band The Shins. Twee little cunts.