01/08/12 Thame pub landlady digs deep ‘for gold’

WHILST cyclist, Bradley Wiggins and rowers, Heather Stanning and Helen Glover have been winning gold medal for Great Britain today, a pub in Thame revealed tonight the winner of its very own Olympic event.

After the final round of its weekly pub quiz, appropriately themed around the Olympics, the landlord of the Cross Keys in Thame, the town’s deputy Mayor, Peter Lambert, announced the winner of the ‘Elephant garlic Olympics’.

The origins of this somewhat idiosyncratic ‘battle of the bulbs’ began back in the Spring when one of the pub regulars broke a bulb of Elephant garlic he had grown into separate cloves, and challenged fellow gardening enthusiasts in the pub to a contest to see whose piece would grow into the biggest new garlic bulb.

And the winner was – the pub’s landlady, Trudi Lambert, who grew her Elephant garlic bulb on her plot at the Stone’s Close allotments in Thame. Trudi insisted that she hadn’t fed her garlic with ‘Mrs Tipple’ beer slops or anything else but attributed her win to all the rain we’ve been having and the good soil up at Stones Close.

Growing Elephant garlic is unlikely to become an Olympic sport any time soon, but who knows? May be the next Thame Show, in 2013, could see the introduction of a new Class in the Domestic section, or may be an inter-pub challenge cup for giant vegetables? Watch this space!