Mother Theresa Lemming Hashgate Motox Baldrick The Tremblers Foghorn Chopstix C5 Dolly Spot AWOL GBH CircuitBreaker Shep Ladybird Puddleduck 2Bob Ms.Whiplash Julia Daisy Glittertits Pissquick Cloggs Lonely and Beaver Anne-Marie Bob Greenfly Zebedee Florence Cheating Whinge Dumper drexel and Maggie the dog …and very much later, Wally who had gone to next week’s venue (quel plonker!)

Ohhhhh myyyy Gaaaaard! We thought Premature and Neil’s Maidensgrove half marathon was long. It was nothing to this Hash. It can best be described in terms of the characters of the Hares. On the Lemming side it was devious, twisting, dirty, difficult, awkward, an uphill struggle. On Mother Theresa’s it was attractive if wayward, alternately beguiling and confusing, full of surprises and ultimately made your legs ache. Mother and Lemming’s day had begun badly with a non-starting car at Shep’s house where they had stayed overnight resulting in them having to run to the pub to start the trail. This obviously put them in a fearsome bate which they took out on BH³. There were flour blobs smashed down upon the ground, impatient checks drawn all over the damn place and F’s aplenty – standing for what I dare not conjecture. Surprisingly, they were still talking as we On Outed after welcoming Lonely’s companion Ann-Marie (one to watch – she has all the hallmarks of a good Hasher).

Greenfly made the basic mistake of turning left. We never saw him again. This says a lot about the quality of the trail. I had gone right (in both ways), initially with Daisy and then Cloggs. Ah to be at the front, fresh of leg and bright of eye. A check? Let’s have a look around for the trail. Can’t be far. Unfortunately, the chickens had been counted well before hatching time so Cloggs and I became even more confused than usual as the various trails petered out to nothing and we had to backtrack fast to catch up. On reaching Lemming and politely requesting an explanation he replied, "Oops. I must have forgotten to lay the falses." An easy mistake to make of course and I hastened to reassure the little fellow that we understood perfectly how such a thing might happen. It’s very refreshing these days to have someone own up to one’s minor failings. Lemming is surely to be applauded for his honesty. (Students of irony may wish to examine this passage in some depth. In fact I think Lemming should have his passage examined in depth by a large, gay Samoan wielding a particularly rough pineapple dipped in piri-piri sauce.)

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the forest until Cheating, of all people, finally found the trail. We trotted on for a few yards and hit an ‘F’ mere yards from a check. Followed by another check. Urk! Cheating fulminated against the Hares. Trembler circled dizzily, trying to figure it out. Zebedee flitted about, bouncing off trees, eyeballs staring glassily. (He was completely strung out after laying the Full Moon marathon with Florence and Handful the night before. May I take this opportunity to congratulate Handful on not only having a fine pair of buns but laying on a terrific meal, decorating her dining room with stars and moons and keeping thirty or so soaked moonlighters very happy.) The pack congregated in the forested valley. Zebedee, Glittertits and I found a false after four blobs. Ladybird came back from another false. Eventually, Motox and Shep (with Gnarler’s help) hoofed it up the steep, sapling and bramble littered hill via a parallel trail to Ladybird’s false. Sadly, we hadn’t realised that this was the trend at various points – we could have saved ourselves a lot of mileage. Loads of checks in the following swamplike forest led Cloggs and me to a rare sight, that of GBH running – in front of us – calling "On". He and Julia hung a swift right over a stile that had a flour arrow pointing to it. "Let’s take ‘em out." I said to Cloggs in a rash moment, and we streamed ever nearer to them. They stopped just before the next stile. GBH beamed at us while he strapped on an oxygen cylinder and mask. Then we saw why. A sneaky bar-3 glared up at us whitely. Of course, GBH had altered the check to be an arrow. Fair enough. We beamed back at GBH and Julia, then turned to the following posse. "Regroup." We yelled. "Beer stop." "On on." Well, GBH had caught us out nicely and the least we could do was to let everyone else in on the joke. Lonely arrived. And Trembler. And Florence. And… well, loadsapeople. Finally, CircuitBreaker popped over the first stile. GBH hailed his true love, "Sprint yer bitch!" He encouraged her and she very nearly did, greeting her hero with an only just missed roundhouse kick to his love spuds. We plotted and whispered as Motox strode ever nearer. Then, just as he was almost upon us, we flew past him with trouser-filling yells and screams of "On back!" The look on his face was something to treasure. Like a great moustachioed puppy whose bone had been taken away, he turned and trudged wearily back the way he had come. Sorry Motox. It just had to be done.

We splashed our way through rain, muck and mire feeling perhaps a twinge of race memory. Hadn’t we crawled out of this stuff a few million years ago? I followed C5 up the narrow bog path by the golf course, both of us slipping and sliding on the protozoic slime as if we were rather keen to crawl back in. Fortunately, we managed to ignore the devolutionary compulsion and reached the gate at the end where Ladybird stood looking perplexed. There was no obvious trail from this check and we firkled around for ages before it dawned on someone that the damn thing doubled back, parallel to the trail up what we had come! Bugger! We all staggered and sloshed back through the curtains of rain indulging in a spot of Hare Cursing while secretly admiring the sheer deviousness of their trail. We were all getting truly knackered. Passing Chopstix, Daisy and Pissquick I noted the same forward-leaning, round-shouldered gait. The graveyard coughs. The desperate need for alcohol. The… all right; a slight exaggeration, but you catch my drift. At various points we caught up with the short cutters which gave them a chance to jeer at our pathetic, drooping figures. We hurtled down a one in three hill, the sodden grass clods pocked with water-filled hoof marks – then crawled our way up the other side. You had to hand it to Lemming and Mother T. Being Hares of course they had run even more trail than us! I could tell it was getting to Ladybird since he stopped by a field and attempted to chat up a horse. "You’re a nice looking fellow." He started. Not surprisingly the horse started too. It raced away after giving Ladybird a look of distinct equine disapproval that said "You’re not getting any oats from me matey". Immediately after this episode Shep admitted that a large barking dog that he was berating had "had me last year". No shame at all these people have they?

RA Motox presented the following :-