You'll have heard of Maldon salt. Thanks to Delia, everyone's crumbling the crunchy white flakes over their sun-dried parsnips. But Maldon mud? Did anyone mention the mud?
The Blackwater didn't get its name for nothing. Half the mud in Essex finds its way into that river, and the other half is picked up by the Chelmer. The two rivers meet not half a mile from my birthplace, and that's where they dump their mud (thanks guys), in a great slurping estuary that's so deep and sticky you could lose a car in it, roof rack and all.
So what do the people of Maldon do? Scotchguard their Hush Puppies and shun the water's edge? Quite the contrary, I'm afraid. Come January 1, when the mud has much in common with iced axle grease, they don waders, scuttle down the river bank like crabs in fetish gear and race each other to the opposite side (a gruelling 200 yards away).
Imagine how my chest swelled with pride on discovering that the Maldon Mud Race is the very first event to be listed in a new book called Eccentric Britain.
And the local lunacy doesn't end there. Chaucer mentioned the Dunmow Flitch - a side of bacon awarded in June (or July) to the married couple who could best convince a special court that not a cross word had passed between them in a twelvemonth.
With things like that going on all over the country (it began in 1104), who needs beefeaters and theme parks? "Strike out," says le Vay, "to discover the surprising, the downright peculiar or the simply rather curious (not to mention the real and the mostly free as opposed to the fake and the rip-off)."
From Orkney to Cornwall, people sing to apple trees, address statues and embrace churches. They throw eggs, toss pancakes, roll cheeses, bowl puddings and eat nettles and docks by the plateful.
And when nothing else will do, they set fire to things. Everything that can be burnt is burnt, from 10ft puppets to Viking boats to the gruesome straw bear that is paraded through the streets of Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, on the first Monday after Twelfth Night.
Why do we do it? Le Vay quotes John Stuart Mill, who reckoned that "the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage which it contained".
Stirring stuff. But then Mill had never met Ed China, the man who has motorised an armchair so that it would go at 79mph while still looking like nothing so much as an armchair; or Phil Vincent, who has turned a Morris Minor into a giant pink lobster whose claws snap open and shut as it drives past you.
China and Vincent turn up in le Vay's section on Britain's eccentric pastimes, proving that pastimes can be just as peculiar as past times.
And if Britain is the home of the eccentric, there's nothing more eccentric than an eccentric's own home. In Oxford, there's a terraced house with a 25ft glassfibre shark embedded in its roof, and other additions to Britain's suburban roofscape include a Spitfire, a tank and a giant V-sign.
Most eccentric homes are private property, warns the author. But access may be had to enough follies and monuments (including one to carrier pigeons who lost their lives in the second world war), pubs, graves, gates, stones, statues, pyramids and museums (try the Electric Shock Machine Museum at Salcombe, Devon) to satisfy the most dedicated follower of foible.
• Eccentric Britain, by Benedict le Vay, is published today by Bradt at £11.95
