Today we learned several valuable lessons. One is that Stevie Blunder will always be caught when laying a live trail unless he has a longer start, say 15 minutes. He will argue when caught that hashers must have crossed a bar, which they will deny. We also found the hard way that parking at Newlands Corner on a sunny Sunday morning – and today was most beautiful – is almost impossible, and certainly very slow. If Atalanta was not among those, such as Bigfoot, who certainly did catch the hare, it is for once that her excuse for a late start was not unpunctuality, but the impossibility of finding a parking slot.

  I myself, delayed throughout my journey by roadworks, arrived at exactly 11 o’clock, but took 5 minutes to find anywhere to park (and that reserved for disabled drivers….) The first people I met on the trail were Twinkletoes and Captain Webb; then Atalanta came tearing past. Later I overtook Body Shop all on his own, rather sadly, and then Tosser and CL. Teq, next week’s hare, was gallantly holding up barbed wire for us to crawl under. The trail then entered woodland, like last week’s, though on the opposite slope of the hill, and twisted and turned. In the woods Mother Brown came running the other way, convinced that I was going the wrong way; I am not sure what happened to him after that, but I did stumble upon the main group of short cutters following the main path back to the car park. These included Sister Anna, Peay, and also to my surprise Ever-Ready, who later at the beer proposed an ultimate in hashing, a centenarian live hare. He may have to wait rather a while. Live hares are not really part of our Surrey tradition, and indeed it is difficult to see the advantages.

  Today Simple was first back to the car park, with Bigfoot not far behind. Stevie Blunder and Miss Bean came in before other front runners, such as J. Arthur.

  My columns in the past have been critical of politicians, mostly Johnson, Starmer, and Sunak; the jokes section never ventured into politics until this year, when we have seen feeble anti-Starmer jokes in abundance. This runsheet should be even-handed about politics, not biased. Mock them all or not at all. I can have no part in a down-market Daily Mail.

  60 or 70 years ago three words were much used, now rarely heard: highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow. All three were derogatory; all three referred to tastes in the arts – books, paintings, music, theatre – and not, for example, to work, politics, or sport. When I say books I mean primarily fiction; it is interesting to list non-fiction works to which these words did not apply. Travel guides, technical manuals, sports annuals….. Then came U and non-U, also absent now from our discourse. How surprised some people were to learn that U speakers said napkin, not serviette, pudding, not dessert!

  My mother, who believed she was part of the “upper-middle classes”, would describe other people as “common”, unaware that this word condemned her as hopelessly non-U. The English use “intellectual” as an insult, especially in U-circles, whereas in France it is deeply complimentary. We no longer really speak of classes at all, though Monty Python made fun of “upper class twits”, and you do hear occasionally of the white working class, usually when some prejudice is under discussion. In America there are only the rich and the “middle classes”; poverty is not explored. Few films feature manual labour: On the Waterfront, The Deer-Hunters?

  On On, FRB