This was a very good trail indeed. Wholly unknown to most of us – Tosser used part of this park last year for a Weybridge trail – Nonsuch is densely wooded, so that runners cannot see where those in front have gone.  Miss Bean changed the direction of her trail so often that we could seldom guess where to go next; I look forward to seeing the map. Atalanta said the front runners were back some 10 minutes before those who took the short cut, so about 12.10 in her case.

  The short cut itself was laid by Stevie Blunder, and was mocked by Chunderos, who showed Dormouse how to cut short the short cut; Dr Death, Peay and I were more credulous, and followed flour naively.  Miss Bean told us at the start that there were no back checks, which is unusual for a Surrey trail, but her ingenuity more than made up for this curiosity.

  The latter part of the trail seemed to include every car park the local authority provided in Nonsuch, raising our hopes that were in on each occasion.  We were also puzzled to find that some of the area is known as Cheam Park; perhaps the area with laying fields and flower beds, while the rest of Nonsuch Park is fairly wild and wooded, most unusual for London.

  Petal seems as unpunctual as Atalanta these days [Ed: commitments, Dear Chap, & unconnected!]; we had not seen him at all until we found him taking photos of us.  A very welcome return was that of Port and Stilton, who brought with them a further pooch to add to Paddy, Bitsy, Spud, und so weiter.

  We had several visitors; a family, the mother having hashed before, and a virgin runner who went round with a friend who has been out with us previously.  Captain Webb told us he had helped with excavations in the park in 1958, assumably as a schoolboy; Bigfoot told us about Barbara Villiers and her improvident stewardship of the estate.  She was both Baroness Nonsuch and Duchess of Cleveland; it is believed all her 6 children were fathered by the king, Charles II, though he expressed doubts about the last.  Still, he ennobled them all.

  Bigfoot’s fat volume of sinners is in a funeral hymn – heard in Verdi’s Requiem – “The written book, all-containing, is brought forth to judge the world” All-containing is right for Bigfoot’s exordia.

  Can – should? – politicians use literature? Donne would have voted Remain; Hemingway made popular a quotation from Donne in the novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, which begins “No man is an island/ Entire of Itself;/Every man is a piece of the continent/A part of the main./If a clod be washed away by the sea/Europe is the less…..” My question is whether the Remain camp should have used this, or are voters put off by literature, quotations, poetry? When I was a boy very ordinary households would have a framed copy of Kipling’s poem “If” on the wall; I am sure this went out of fashion long ago. (Modern poetry has become inaccessible, enjoyed only by a tiny minority.) Certainly the Remain camp never came up with a catchy slogan like Take Back Control, which was immensely effective, even if in the upshot meaningless. (What control have we re-acquired?) Consider Europe if Trump wins in November; what will Britain, or Europe, do to save Ukraine? By then the Tories will have a new leader;

what line will he/she take over collaboration with Europe, given that the party has been taken over by those John Major called the bastards? [Ed: weren’t they the spawn of John Major and his Mistress, Maastricht?]

  On On, FRB