Admittedly, we were fewer than ten thousand, but a respectable number, considering we were outside Surrey.  (Near Haslemere, three counties meet).  Certainly, we were marched to the top of a tall hill – it took us 25 minutes to reach the summit – and then came cascading down in open countryside, admirably rural.  I said early on that this was new territory for our hash;  No, said J. Arthur, First On and Low Profile set a trail here.  First On confirmed this, “Some time before Covid”, which sounds a little vague.  [Ed: for the historians, it was trail 2266 on 16 September 2018, and Mrs R and her “young graduate” set trail 1910 here in November 2011 marching to the same peak.]  Our numbers were enhanced by families with children, scampering along as youngsters should: it is not among outdoor families that overweight children are found.  In our case these families go in for dogs; today Raffles was the only animal whose name I knew, among many – mostly kept on leads, less than ideal for a hashing dog.

  We were offered 4.5 miles, which took me 1.5 hours; naturally the front runners had been long back before I arrived.  Heaven knows their names; certainly Atalanta was only a few minutes late for once.  The children were already in; they run well.

  Our GM is doubtless by now in the US of A, for her annual return with Hans der Schwanz, so Chunderos took charge.  Parking was less than easy; the Green in Fernhurst is it seems well used by the locals, and the home to their cricket club.  But hashers are imaginative about parking.  The trail began to the east of the Green, some 200 yards from the start, so the hares had to tell us where to go.

  They also warned us of a trip wire, said to be 40% of the way round.  At noon I expressed concern we had not seen it, to be re-assured it had been found much earlier, near a vineyard – I had simply failed to notice it.  Your editor will print a map of our route; it was not a simple matter of south from the top of that hill and then turn north, since we were later going south again, so congratulations to our hares on a varied and unfamiliar trail.  There must be many in Sussex, but given the ongoing hassle where the M25 meets the A3 (scheduled to last till the summer of 2025) and the perennial delays on the A3 through Guildford, our hares do well to remain in Surrey for the most part.

  Consider three pairs of words, visibly close in origin, widely different in use: pertinent, impertinent, agon, agony, dialects, dialectics.  You will notice that in each pair one word is much less widely used than the other (my spell-check does not even recognise “agon”).  As for dialectics, now that no Marxists or Leninists are left standing, the word is used only by students of Hegel; I suspect they are few and far between.  You will probably be able to find more such pairs for yourself; I imagine the same rule will apply.  (Well, not always: consider an even closer pair, the far from identical twins “entrance”, noun and “entrance”, verb).  There must be an advantage in owning a vocabulary extensive enough to include less usual words, but chiefly to understand, rather than use oneself and thus baffle those with smaller vocabularies.  A distinction is made between written and spoken usage – the comment, “She writes as she speaks” is usually a compliment, the reverse a rebuke.  The average vocabulary in English is said to be 40,000 words, with many people on half that; dictionaries typically offer some 170,000; which is food for thought!

  On On, FRB