Santon Bridge, UK – The Biggest Liar Contest, an annual celebration of deceit, has revealed the most fabulous fibbers of 2012.
The Biggest Liar Contest is held each year at the Bridge Inn at Santon Bridge, near Gosforth in the UK. This year, competitors gathered to tell tall tales in a contest held in honor of famous liar Will Ritson of Wasdale, a 19th century publican who concocted cons about turnips so big that people lived in them.
The 2012 Biggest Liar Contest saw eleven men and one woman competing for the quirky title. Jack Harvey, Jimmy Mason and John “Johnny Liar” Graham came first, second, and third respectively.
Their tall tales included claims that the average Cumbrian is genetically two per cent badger, that a runaway kitten got the bus to Egremont because he’d heard everything in Whitehaven was shut, and that the Romans sent Christians to the badgers (badgers being a favored theme, it seems).
Speaking of his triumph at the Biggest Liar Contest, 25-year-old champ Jack Harvey fretted:
“I don’t know if this is real or if it’s all part of the lie.”
He added that he was “astounded” that he had won in what was his first entry in the Biggest Liar Contest.
It was Harvey who came up with the tale of badgers being “deadlier than cobras or crocodiles… the Romans sent Christians to the badgers,” and also the claim that descendants of the Emperor Hadrian’s IXth Badger Cohort had settled in Cumbria, therefore making the population part-badger.
Runner-up Jimmy Mason told of a local fish and chip shop to which owner Joss Naylor “runs 15 miles a night and 15 miles back, and his fish supper’s still hot when he gets home.” He also fibbed about a St Bernard rescue dog that carried hot mushy peas in a barrel around its neck, and told how human lightning bolt Usain Bolt modelled his pose on the man from the Scotts Porage Oats box:
