Whitmoor Common is an excellent venue for a trail, especially for those less keen on hills; it is surprising we have hashed here so seldom.  Birthing Blanket laid a very good trail, if a touch short, and which of our modern Surrey Hash will complain of that?  Road works affected access from the north; I asked Hans der Schwanz, who lives in Woking, how to get back there. He had no idea.

  I did not see Atalanta anywhere on this trail, and assumed she had arrived too late to run it: how wrong can you be? She had shot into the lead while I fetched a bonnet from my car, and was never seen again, running with Stevie Blunder and a young visitor.  So I was part of a larger group, based on Le Pro as Checking Chicken (he was most conscientious), with another visitor, Petal, No Nookie, J. Arthur, Belcher, CL – oh, the usual suspects.  (This well worn expression comes from the film Casablanca). From time to time we had Miss Bean with us, the co-hare doing an alternative Checking Chicken job, both hares slightly embarrassed by the loop (a complete loop, right back to the very point where it started) which their trail included.

  The weather remained dry: it seems to be many years now since we got seriously wet on a trail.  But it was colder than usual.  Veggie Queen was so wrapped up I hardly recognised her: she seemed to have thrown in her lot with Uncle Gerry, today’s RA.  (How is it that I can remember most of what happens on a trail and so little of the witticisms of the Circle?)

  Birthing Blanket had dreamed up a great many checks, mostly solved with some ease: I have to say the three front runners, whom we never saw, had done a sterling job in marking the solutions.  There was a good loop branching off from the offer of a short cut: it was striking how many accepted the short cut, even for this short trail.  The hash bar was busy by the time our group landed, with little need to worry about the landlord: the pub is closed. “Temporarily”, said a hand-written notice on the door.  Pubs which do not benefit from the trade of hashers must be struggling these days.

  Anything “everyone knows” is usually wrong.  Take the “Ten Commandments”; all agree on Ten, but Catholics and Lutherans have one set of ten, Jews and most other Protestants a different set, so the real number is either nine or eleven.  (The differences are at start and finish, with either false gods or coveting split or telescoped).  People often suppose they all begin “Thou shalt not…”, forgetting Honour thy father and thy mother, and also keeping holy the Sabbath Day, while of course the first begins I am the Lord thy God.  Surrey hashers score highly for treating Sunday seriously.  You will have noticed how little correspondence there is between the Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins, medieval categories of bad behaviour.  Gula, Avaricia Superbia, Invidia, Ira (Greed for food, or wealth, Pride, Envy, Wrath): where do you find those in the tablets Moses brought back?  One of the most interesting is Acedia, usually – and wrongly – translated as Sloth.  It refers to a languid torpor afflicting chiefly monks, and corresponds to what we would today call depression.  Only Luxuria corresponds to sexual appetite misplaced, which is in the Commandments.  Naturally our own society prefers not to think of sin at all, though in the popular press it is indeed confined to hanky-panky.

  On On, FRB