“What would you want to do that for, at your age?”
“I’ve never done it before.”
“It’s harder than it sounds…”
“Yeah well, so am I.”
“It’s the gas that gets you. Burping is your friend.”
“I love burping.”
This was the kind of dialogue that preceeded an attempt at the Centurion. A simple task really. Just drink a shot glass full of beer. Every minute. For 100 minutes. I honestly didn’t think it was going to be very difficult. On the way over to the venue, after being out for a warm-up pint, I was stuck on the tube for about 40 minutes. And then it struck me. You don’t really have much time to do things like empty your bladder, go to the fridge or move too much.
Five of us got settled down to the task, bin-liners ready. We’d heard projectile vomitting was quite likely, so it seemed sensible. It was around this time that I realised that all of the calculations I’d made about volumes of beer were out by a factor of two. It would be about six pints in the first hour. And as usual, I hadn’t done any kind of training. Conversation in the 58 seconds between each glass of beer was limited. Like being a goldfish, you get distracted every minute, and start a new conversation, more than likely on the same topic after each gulp.
After ten minutes, things didn’t seem too taxing. After about thirty minutes, people started to draw close to their bin-liners. The pressure of having about three pints in you starts to become overbearing. You start to curse your bladder for not keeping up with your throat. Burping at this stage was a high-risk affair, but when achieved, yielded applause and supportive cheers from the other contestants. After fifty shots, the group decided that it was actually quite an unpleasant activity, and thought that this was a reasonable time to declare, and quit, with a celebratory photograph.
But heck, if you can do fifty, you can squeeze in one more wafer thin shot. And sixty is also a reasonable number to stop at – after an hour of relentless drinking. Sixty three would be a bit too much though, so that’s when I stopped. I figure you could do the 100, as long as you could do that thing. You know people who open their throats to drink pints fast? Well if you could do the same with your bladder, and somehow staple it open, you’d be laughing.
One last thing. Er. Carol, if you ever see the pictures, thanks for lending us your flat while you were away in Amsterdam. Er. Possibly without knowing that you had…