BH³ and NW³ (reduced group – about three)

Yankit Wet Connection Donut Hashgate Lemming Mother Theresa Slippery Iceman Foghorn Bomber Posh Nutty Potty Snowballs Ms Whiplash Spot Loudon Tasteless Laura Poppy Spex Motox Twanky Blowjob Horny Slippery Dick Booby Heavy Petting and dog Barney Tinopener Lilo and pooch Minx Nappyrash Old Dog Dumper Slapper NoSole Whinge TC Glittertits Pissquick SkinnyDipper Charlotte Marion John Anna Hazel Wendy Swallow Slowsucker Bumwipe and dog Ebony BillyBullshit Cloggs Nonstick Bogbrush Fannybag Handful Anorak Trainspotter Zebedee Florence Gita Paul

A Booby In A Ford

The picture today is of Scarlet Pimpernel (Steve Lee) and Mrs. Pimp (Ros). Two of the nicest people your could ever meet. And now Steve is no longer with us. After being diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2007 and being told he would probably not last a year he fought the disease and raised thousands of pounds for charity - £40,000 in 2008 for the June Hancock Mesothelioma charity with the help of Reading Roadrunners. I was very lucky to bump into him and Ros about a month ago in Waitrose, Twyford. Steve’s sense of humour was as twinkly-eyed and wicked as ever and the content of our conversation can’t possibly be reported for fear of causing severe embarrassment and extreme laughter. We have all run races and/or Hashed with Steve, enjoyed his lively company and his conversation. We were enriched because we knew him and will miss him very much. Our thoughts are with Ros and we look forward to welcoming her again to the Hash.

This was a truly large gathering of Hashers, our numbers swollen by both of the North Wilts members who joined the Gather Round, Yankit and Wet Connection who had flown over from New York specially and virgins Charlotte and Marion. No doubt all were eager to enjoy the Trail Caboose had laid. Pity he wasn’t actually there. Cerberus and Desperate had kindly plugged the Hare gap and laid us a Trail of wriggling complexity, tantalisingly tortuous, exotic and exciting (think a little hyperbole may be creeping in here). Whatever. It was a great Trail. Here’s some stuff about it.

Bogbrush was wearing yet another of those natty neckscarves that make him look more camp than Gok Wan in a kimono. NappyRash and I looked at him, then each other, then joined Sh*tfor and ran off down the road as rapidly as possible. There was a another reason for our eagerness. Driving up the road earlier we had spottted a couple of Checks. Sneaky, huh? We thought so until we found ourselves miles in front and not a clue where to go after the second Check. We were founder members of muddled.disorg and there were zero hits on our website. Much of the rest of this Trail was similar. One would hurtle onwards, convinced the route was right. Then, blow me if we didn’t shoot off in a different direction all together. Our arrival at Land’s End ford was a prime example. Everyone was certain we would be wading through the thing including Ebony, Bumwipe’s eager little black and white spaniel who spotted the water and lurched off towards it breathlessly, dragging her startled mistress behind her on the end of her lead. Even more certain was Booby who leapt in with all the enthusiasm of the aquatically acrobatic Whinge. He waded all the way to the other side… before realising that all the rest of the Pack had veered off and nipped round the path that went by the side of the pub. This caused the lad to act very much like his namesake: the blue footed booby. He uttered raucous, polysyllabic grunts and thin whistle noises, then splashed back, whacking his big feet down into the cold water. As an example of realistic ornithological mimicry it was without equal.

We stamped our way up that long country road that led from the pub fetching up at the Regroup just the other side of a stile. Our panting group were eyed suspiciously by two large dogs in the large garden of the house by which we chatted. One was big and brown. The other was chubby and white. Their guard dog instincts were obviously aroused even though they were fully thirty yards away. They stood up menacingly and looked in our direction. We braced ourselves for a cacophany of barking from leaping jaws and paws. The dogs yawned, stretched and lay down. This either meant they were the laziest damn dogs in Lands End or our group was so deficient of any form of threat that there was absolutely no point in territorial defence. I favour the latter. We’re generally fairly harmless when clustered though with certain prominent exceptions - Lemming comes to mind.

The Long and Short Split led from here and most of us seemed to opt for the Long. Which meant a fair bit more confusion and a lot of long, straight yomps. The former was helped by Hare Desperate who kindly laid flour arrows when we lost the Trail. Those one-blob Checks in fields were just impossible to find but kept us together, ready for another tiring tramp along rather pleasant tracks by various water features. You could tell we were getting tired. Zebedee failed to tell the difference between the high pitched whine of a model aeroplane and Cerberus calling ‘Onnnn Onnnn’. Oops. I do hope I don’t get him into trouble by writing that…

The topics of conversation during the Hash are myriad and catholic. Spex and I chatted about the poem ‘The Listeners’ by Walter de la Mare (though we could not for the life of us remember the author at the time). The lines start, ““Is anybody there?” Said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door;” This beautiful, eerie, slightly unsettling peom describes the actions of The Hash during a Trail in many ways – albeit we are out on the “forest’s ferny floor” during daylight. Like the Traveller, we too are seeking, usually for flour. We metaphorically ask, “Is there anybody there?” by looking for the Trail from Checks and we often stand “perplexed and still”. And after our noisy troop have left the spot the silence surges softly backward, when the plunging feet have gone…

Nice Trail ladies. Thank you.

On On. Hashgate.

Down Downs

RA Sh*tfor presented the following :-

4 straws. 1 half

Up and Coming