Your Hares were locals
Crossing The Great Ouse towards grey skies
"Pretty Picture = get your moby out"
Marrow Rustling: Blow Felt makes case for defence
Depth Charge, Rapid and Underlay: guilty of Optingism
Anchored on the river
Shagpile: always happy to do a false trail
Depth Charge tries one of these new fangled checks
Marrow Rustling: guilty as charged
The Count's Knitting Circle Elimination Machine takes aim
Funny Hash; but then aren't they all?
This one rather crept up on us: no sooner had Monday runs started than Underlay was saying "What's the location for the run you're haring next week?". The answer had to be The Anchor, a full 58 seconds walk from our front gate. As we're the only hares to have laid from this end of Great Barford, a new trail was required to prevent repetition so we did not hesitate to deviate, and crossed the footbridge to the parish of Blunham. At this point the skies looked dark but the righteous were to be shined upon as the evening sun was soon picking out rainbows and giving The Hash beautiful light.
At the Asphalt Recycling Centre, where else, we had our first, perhaps only, brace of haring successes. The innovation known as the HO Check was proved to be "a pretty good idea Count well done for that" nobody said. An antidote to the Count's brilliant Number Check Exemption Certificate (sadly a victim of extensive envy crime in recent weeks), this check combines H for Held with O for Option to Back Check. Five took the option at the first time of asking. HO HO.
At the same check two of three trail alternatives were heavily checked by Ringer, Shagpile, Rapid and many more before the third was found to be On (hares like that). This would not have worked quite so well if Double Entry – in a move she managed to keep from the RA – had received a trail-text-tipoff just a couple of minutes earlier.
It was good to see Five Baah return (with a story about a broken leg accounting for his lengthy absence), Semi on a periodic visit (with mutt Ida and an ad for Cambridge run 2017 next year – we thought he was an apologist for MKH3, not for our arch enemies?), another occasional Eva (with Atomic in thinking they were in a garden when they were actually on trail) and ankle biting Lily (with Knotch in playing a duet for matching mobis).
Yes indeed, it was a Funny Hash yet we almost managed to herd the mixed bag back to Barford without incident – until Marrowgate. Blow Felt claimed it was a "faller" but many believed it was a clear case of Marrow Rustling as the nimble-fingered octogenarian walked away from a field of overgrown courgettes with something very suspicious stuffed down his strides.
Back at the pub Lady P's savoury muffins were on offer. In the circle Atomic was, Pongo-style, glowing in her praise for the run before the RA failed to find Five Baah in time to award him a drink and then turned upon the three most enthusiastic optional back-checkers (HOers) and found them guilty of practising an obscure ism. Next he quite rightly hauled Lily and Knotch over the coals for over-reliance on technology and settled Marrowgate in favour of the prosecution: as well as exceeding his budget.
ON ON TO WOOLMER GREEN AND HO HO
The Count and Lady P