Many years ago Timbo (I think) set a trail in eastern Surrey, which he or another hare then echoed a week or two later with an identical trail run in reverse. The editor of this sheet reprinted the initial report with exactly the same words but in reverse order (heaven knows how he typed it!).  Master Bates today sent us round his previous trail from this industrial estate, exactly reversing the last one, set only a year or so ago.  Our Uncle Gerry commented gloomily that there is no other countryside here in Addlestone.  Certainly it made predicting solutions to checks quite simple.

  Well, as before Master Bates kindly provided a sip stop chez lui.  I re-arranged his plastic dinosaurs and then thought of resuming the trail; J. Arthur told me I would then miss the food.  Do I want food half way round a trail?  At first my companions were Dormouse, ‘Arfur Pint, and Mrs G; later we came upon Veggie Queen and Belcher, and spotted Peay short-cutting down a canal bank.  Back at base there was Clever Trevor taking a walk, so in all perhaps we were one-third of those present at the start.  I sank a beer (always have a can in reserve for these occasions!), saw no-one new come back, and went home.  I could understand that eaters of good grub should await its preparation, but what mystified me was that front runners, who evidently had eschewed the sip stop (a Puritan lot, these front runners!) had marked through a number of the checks, but had either then got lost or had gone home even before our group got back.  They did include some visitors, who must have acquired strange ideas of how Surrey run their trails.

  Now at the start Master Bates had told us of locked gates frustrating his thoughts of a variant to his trail, marked in flour by an X.  [Ed: it foiled Uncle Gerry & Tosser.] Our group found no such X, but we did find, shortly before the swamp behind a garage memorable from the last trail, flour in all directions, variously three blobs and single blobs, in a most mysterious tangle.  Well, we came through this maze successfully enough, without even much use of smartphones, but remained puzzled.  And wet-footed; the trail around there was rich in water, though Belcher decried our squeamishness.  We reminded him of his recent foolhardy immersion.  [Ed: the solution was through the car wash again!]

  Our academic daughter has a friend whose son lost his fellowship at an Oxford college for asserting black people are less intelligent than white people.  This idea, once prevalent, has been much less usual since we learned that youngsters here from Chinese or Indian stock out-perform white pupils, and that girls do better academically than boys.  Of course the difference is cultural; Chinese families require intense diligence of their young people, at school or college, girls see nothing wrong with serious application to their lessons, escaping the laddish ethos of not shining in class.  Families of Pakistani origin do less well at school than white children, boys of West Indian backgrounds do even worse.  (Those from Africa have no such problem; the two brightest boys I have ever taught were Ghanaian).  All a question of family traditions and expectations, nothing to do with innate intelligence.  But racial prejudice dies hard; the young man outed at Oxford had ties with the British far-right, the hotbed of ancient wrong ideas.

In southern USA poor whites were reconciled to being exploited by thinking themselves superior to their black neighbours. 

Afrikaners console themselves from isolation by dwelling on being better than the Africans around them.

  On On, FRB