Not only is Bigfoot faster than other Surrey hashers (well, Atalanta, S. Blunder when on form, give him a run for his money), we ordinary mortals finish his trails faster than anyone else’s.  This happened at Farley Heath; drawing a veil over the run at Deepcut, it happened again today. 8.5 Km, apparently; and even I, an elderly sluggard, was back in 75 minutes.  Even 30 years ago I never managed that on a hash.  Today’s trail was imaginative and ingenious; I felt sure after say a mile that this was to be a right-hander, and was proved entirely wrong, a left-hander using the railway as a boundary.  Whitmoor Common is not that extensive; Bigfoot is good at ensuring his trails are a complex shape, difficult to predict.  There were of course paths with soggy patches, but for a November trail this was dry.  Well, of course we have had no rain for weeks now.

  There was a curious spell in the middle when several of us – J. Arthur, Captain Webb, Bonn Bugle, for example – were going south on a road, for no obvious reason, with no flour in sight, and even the son and heir, acting enthusiastically as Checking Chicken without apparently being privy to the trail, was searching west (and wrongly).  J. Arthur and I came upon walkers who assured us that there was indeed flour, and when we got to the top we should turn right.  Top?  The terrain was flat.  Well, in due course we did come to a modest hill; but the trail turned left, as we pointedly remarked when coming upon the same walkers once more.  By then we had been joined by Veggie Queen, and soon came upon Petal and Belcher, with Peay and Chunderos in sight. Very re-assuring.

  We did not of course see the young people, some 5 of them, all brought to Whitmoor Common as part of the Bigfoot entourage (and some of them already well versed in hashing). They were fitter and faster than we, and back to the Jolly Farmer before us. The junior Bigfoot – we must give him a Surrey handle – had brought various good things to eat, including the curiously named Cherry Cake Seconds.  Body Shop had found a seat, and was earnestly eating his way through the spread.  Well, Lord Raleigh had his own chair, and his own good things to eat.

  De mortuis nil nisi bonum – “Speak well of the (recently) dead or not at all”. Newspaper obituaries scrupulously observe this rule in most cases, though notoriety may affect this occasionally. Holy Mother Church has recently insisted that eulogies have no place in a requiem mass; they must come before or after, outside the religious service proper. It is interesting to speculate what is said – if anything – at the funerals of drug dealers or mobsters; one would imagine a discreet silence, but perhaps the family are entitled to say what good fathers they were. The widow in this country of an (originally) Indian husband took his ashes, after cremation here, to the Ganges, where the priest scolded her: Hindu ritual pyres ensure burnt bones remain to be thrown in the sacred river, not the fine powder left in this country. (Well, you have all seen films where ashes are thrown to the winds.) There must be people still who prefer burial to cremation; true, this takes up much more space, but it does give the bereaved somewhere to visit and to mourn. Equally of course a neglected grave speaks eloquently of how the dead person has been forgotten.

  On On, FRB