Hash 1452

The run had a very, very strange beginning that left hashers looking bemused, disoriented and, frankly, lost. The hare was Jo. Then why weren’t we in The Crown’s car park? Jo always runs from the Crown. But the car park felt wrong. Hashers were mulling around like lost souls bewailing the fact that the universe wasn’t behaving itself properly and was probably hurtling towards its doom.

The GM was heard muttering to himself that the pub felt like The Beech Tree – but that was dismissed as utterly ridiculous. The hare was Jo and so we were at The Crown. Someone else suggested we could all be hallucinating and wondered about funny little red-and-white-spotted mushrooms – but no, the season was wrong.

Eventually, being hashers, we gave up wondering what was wrong and hoped that things would turn out all right in the end, preferably before Trump pressed the big red button.

The run was announced as not being too hilly, about five and a half miles long with a three and a half miles short. Surprisingly that’s how it turned out – Aside: this was probably a cosmic error caused by Jo’s application of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to the quantum nature of the two pubs.

Aside no. two: I wonder what is the record number of mooses a hasher has made in a single hash? I open the bidding with my total of two and a half, a bashed-up shoulder and a bruise on my leg the size of Belgium. But more of that later.

So, starting off from The Crown/Non-Crown (uncertainty=1) we left through the fence via an exit that doesn’t exist, circled around the car park (perhaps in some form of quantum ritual?) and emerged, as if through a rift in the space-time continuum, in front of The Beech Tree.

With the world returned to normal we crossed the road and headed to the recreation ground before getting somewhat confused and heading back roughly the way we came but more towards Kingshill Road. We soon lost one of the shorts, Mike C. Being of another universe anyway he took his own path through his somewhat nebulous reality and returned to the pub.

Crossing over we, unexpectedly, took the path back towards Terriers, rather than the one past Brand’s House to Four Ashes and the inevitable and dastardly hill straight down to Hughenden. Instead a right turn at the next check took us down and up a few not-too-terrible contour lines and along to Millfield Wood. Another right and we ended up where we would have been if we had gone straight passed Brand’s House, repeating the option of the aforesaid hill down to Hughenden.

Well if we did go down the hill I missed it (a fine example of quantum tunnelling for which our hare should be much praised as considerable energy was conserved by the process). A little while later we arrived at Church Lane, whereupon Andy announced to the Hash in general but nobody in particular that he “knew where he was.” It seems that this is a rare thing in Andy’s life and I am undecided if he should be pitied or envied for this ongoing attempt to escape reality.

Overheard: First hasher “Yesterday evening I cleared out my attic. Among the rubbish I found a Rembrandt and a Stradivarius”. Second Hasher “You must be very happy about that?
First hasher “Not really. Rembrandt's violins were awful and Stradivarius was a terrible painter.”

Arriving at a stile I had my half-moose. It would have been a full moose but the gate fortunately/unfortunately (a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, this is undecided) got in my way. The GM later told me that for no readily explained reason Tim bounced off a bag of rubbish and jumped over one of the two gates here.

A short while later Ant told me, Tim let Jess know that it was his 42nd birthday, (overtones of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy here). However, instead of the normal response of congratulations, Jess’s response was instantly to ask if there was cake. Putting Marie Antoinette aside – (though look what happened to her when “let them eat cake” went to her head) – we headed on up to Widmer End, around to Hazelmere and back to The Crown and according to the hare “The last 0.8 miles unless you want to go short.” Hashers being by nature foolish, nobody did.

Down the treacherous and very hard-floored path I gave my first demonstration of the more complex side of physics by becoming entangled with a stone and falling rapidly to a lower energy state flat on my face via a banged knee, a cut hand and a smashing blow to the shoulder.

If I had been sensible that would have been enough tumbles for the night but just a few hundred yards later and still a bit wobbly I did the same thing over again - just in case anyone had missed it the first time around. Another bash to the same shoulder, knee and hand and I bled gently all the way back to the pub.  To drown my sorrows and pains I partook of a particularly good pint plus a random nibble of the few chips that Mike had missed. (Now we know why he went back to the pub early.)

Roger gave a speech thanking Jo and her absent other half who, it seems, was too busy drinking bubbly in Italy to attend. A rousing and multi-key version of Happy Birthday was performed at Tim – though to my mind this punishment far outweighed any crime.

As to the other things Roger spoke of I am, like the beginning of the run, uncertain.