Our fastest runners by chance have handles at the start of the alphabet: Action, Atalanta, Bean, Bigfoot, Blunder.  They found flour all the way, they said, and were back long before such stumbling incompetents as RHUM, myself, and two newcomers, sisters, named Helena and Trudi till they acquire handles.  We found the flour spasmodic, incoherent, and frustrating, and came back to Oxshott by a direct route which occasionally included flour, or rather the weird substitute Captain Webb used after during his recce he found other people’s flour.  (Recce? Did he need one? The terrain has been used so often, chiefly by himself, that it must be well known to him).

  Now the hare took a dim view of our failure to follow his trail, and expressed his scorn at our ineptitude.  It took us – and at that stage “us” meant everyone but the speed merchants – half an hour to reach the great basin which is such a feature of the Common…  All I can say is that such worthies as Bonn Bugle, Veggie Queen and J. Arthur were having just as much difficulty as we did, and indeed were still somewhere out there on the trail when I finished my beer (yes, a can in my boot; without our Biermeister those back at the car park were still thirsty).

  Basically the trail was a repeat of Captain Webb’s last offering here, but anti-clockwise instead of clockwise.  Yes, there were variants, plunging into the undergrowth rather than following obvious paths but basically cauld kale het up again.  It is time to move on from Oxshott.  You may put the blame at the door of Flash Gordon, meant to be today’s main hare [Ed. I do!], but inexplicably AWOL; Alfold, apparently his preferred venue, is almost in Sussex…

  One attractive feature of the morning was that the rain stopped punctually at 11 am, as often happens; clearly we have friends in high places.  A few drops fell thereafter, but not enough to justify rain gear.  And Surrey hashers show great tolerance; I heard no whisper of complaint when we should have been drinking, whether from the athletes who finished so soon, nor the non-runners who now feature so prominently at our Sundays.

  My thanks and appreciation to all who have asked about Solange’s fall.  She has only minimal need now of a frame or stick, and has pain in only one part of her back.

  Much has been written about dreams, yet one is seldom told that the dreamer is always part of the dreamed action.  Also, the action is always incomplete; no dream has a finale or a conclusion.  Comment is obsessed with Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams.  He maintained that all dreams, without exception, have a sexual theme, usually deeply disguised; most other writers disagree, pointing in particular to anxiety dreams. An irritating number of people not only remember their dreams, they insist on recounting them, which is worse than being shown holiday photos.  (I never remember anything of my dreams, though fully aware that I did dream).  The word “Dream” is often used (as an adjective) to describe something desirable – a wish, an aspiration; this may be vaguely true of daydreams, but never of real dreams, which have little sense of time, past, present or future.  Well, maybe a continuous present.  In any case, nothing good ever happens in a dream; it is always an unsatisfactory tangle. It is true that the way people report dreams may be different, but that is because people embroider and embellish their accounts, unreliable witnesses.

  On On, FRB