Larry, The Downing Street Cat - My first Sports report!

So here I am, embarking on my very first shift as a sports reporter for CNN. The editor, displaying either admirable trust or a worrying lack of judgement, had given me complete freedom to cover any sport I thought might interest Viewers. Naturally, I did what any serious journalist would do: I spent ten minutes on the internet. It was during this exhaustive period of research that I stumbled across a sport so gloriously absurd that I initially assumed it was the result of a typing error. Extreme Ironing. Now, I have spent much of my life observing human beings, and I can confidently report that they are capable of taking almost any activity and making it unnecessarily complicated. Walking becomes mountain climbing. Running becomes ultra-marathons across deserts. Swimming becomes crossing the English Channel while being stung by jellyfish. But ironing? Ironing was supposed to be safe. Boring, certainly. A mild punishment handed down by civilisation. Yet somehow mankind looked at a pile of crumpled shirts and thought, "This would be far more exciting if we were hanging off a cliff." The sport emerged in Leicester in 1997, a city with a proud textile heritage and, apparently, too much spare time. A man named Phil Shaw, who adopted the rather splendid nickname "Steam", returned home after work and found himself faced with an ironing pile. Most people would have sighed heavily and ignored it for another week. Steam chose a different path. He picked up an ironing board and took it outdoors. Before long, he was ironing shirts on mountainsides, riverbanks and precarious ledges where a misplaced step would result in becoming a cautionary tale in the local newspaper. It was either a moment of inspired genius or a cry for help. Historians remain divided. The basic concept is deceptively simple. Participants take an ironing board to a remote or dangerous location and then iron clothing. That's it. No goals. No points. No tactical analysis from former professionals explaining where it all went wrong in the third quarter. Just a person, an iron and an alarming disregard for personal safety. As the sport gathered followers, enthusiasts began ironing while skiing down mountains, scaling cliffs, kayaking through rapids and scuba diving beneath the ocean. One particularly ambitious soul even ironed during a skydive. This raises several important questions. Firstly, who packs a shirt before jumping out of an aircraft? Secondly, who notices creases at 12,000 feet? And thirdly, what sort of person lands safely on the ground and thinks, "Thank goodness. At least my trousers are presentable." The remarkable thing is that there are very few rules. There is no governing body issuing stern warnings about ironing technique. There are no transfer windows, salary caps or controversial VAR replays. All you need is an iron, an ironing board and a willingness to make poor decisions in spectacular locations. The sport reached its competitive peak in 2002 when the first World Championships were held in Germany. Team Great Britain emerged victorious, proving once again that if there is a completely unnecessary activity involving both danger and household chores, the British will probably excel at it. As for me, I remain unconvinced. I have spent thousands of years perfecting the art of finding warm places to sleep. I have never once looked at an ironing board and thought, "This would be improved by taking it up a mountain." Then again, perhaps that's why humans invented Extreme Ironing, and cats invented lounging. One of these species clearly has the better idea. Larry the Cat, reporting for CNN, from the airing cupboard, London. #cats #cutecats #pets #animals #sports