Churchill’s remark “All great men make mistakes” could be applied to our own dear Gnome Alone tonight.  He neglected to let the hares in on the secret that he had a cake and drink stop somewhere on the route to celebrate his birthday.  So, as it was getting late and very dark, Scrumptious pointed the walkers on a short cut to the pub.  Cheap Date followed her direction and didn’t think about the cake stop either.  Then Scrumptious did it again and took the rest of the pub on a direct route to the hostelry.  So it fell to Toby (Gnome’s son) to collect the car and bring the goodies to the pub.  The cake was lovely as always, the fizzy tasty.  We took the candles, planted on the top slice of watermelon, into the pub to sing Hashy Birthday. 

Anyway, back to the trail.  It was an interesting drive through the country lanes to the pub.  But well worth it.  We went out to Nodmore then turned off towards Leckhamstead.  The trail skirted the woods and turned right along the lane before following the footpath on the left and cutting off at an angle across the field.  We then turned north and cut through the edge of the village and onwards until a path led us east to Leckhampstead Thicket.  Northwards again to Brightwaldon Holt before turning back west and a long, straight run, back to Chaddleworth.  Here the walkers continued straight to the pub but the runners turned off right, out towards Chaddleworth House and back to the pub.  Somewhere on the last few legs Ben Dovr Slowly strained his hamstring.  But he made it back to the pub and managed to motorbike home (we assume – we didn’t see him the next week though!) 

There were lots of runbacks to keep the pack together, and they worked very well.  Dipstick was not impressed though.  He couldn’t see the point of visiting bits of the countryside more than once.  The blobs of flour were delicate but we found them.    

The pub were brilliant and produced masses of chips for a very small amount of money.

It was Pressganger and Eric’s last hash as regular members, which was rather sad.  But Pressganger had found an old hash T Shirt while clearing out the house.  This was awarded to Epic Fail for forgetting the Yellow Shirt!  There were other contenders – Out to Lunch for leaving some of his muscle support tape on a style and Scrumptious for reading out loud from one of Wainwright’s walking routes during Hash Words!  Pressganger also produced a bugle – the original “blow job”.  I’m not sure what happened to this!

On On

Hares:  Hutch and Scrumptious

Hounds:  Big Stiffy, Hotlips, Wimpey, Lemony Snickett, Dipstick, Ratatouille, Epic Fail, Ben Dover Slowly, Out to Lunch, Professional Peach, Gnome Alone, Cheap Date, Pressganger, Eric, Zorro, Ringer and Toby

Date:  29 August 2017

Distance:  4.8 miles