The long & the short of it
Arriving in the nick of time, having been delayed by the late appearance of a certain miscalculating accountant, we listened intently to Sam's detailed instructions. From my past few weeks of rubbing shoulders with the short cutters, I could tell that the mutinous crew had been lobbying hard during the preceding week & had forced Sam to set a number of short options for the night to make up for my meagre offerings last week, either that or Sam was trying to get the miles under his belt in preparation for the London marathon.
Anyway, off we trundled into the night & I soon lucked out by finding the first blob of the white stuff, but as is the norm with my kind of luck soon came across what turned out to be the second on back - a car had parked on top of the first - we were still in sight of the pub & on our second on back! it was easy to see that a long trawl was brewing that night. On to Wheeler End Common and the first of the long short medium slightly shorter but longer than the intermediate extra long was called - a pint in the Brickmakers would have been easier to take in.
Expert in these matters Sam had planned the longer route round the common to perfection & soon had us all back in one large pack of grumbles just beyond Laurel Farm. A wee waddle down into the valley provided an ideal opportunity for said hare to once again display his expert herding skills & directed the medium short expanded route up over the hill to Barn Wood with an unexpected new member - yes Twist still intoxicated from the smells of fresh lamb at Laurel Farm & clearly with his mind on other things, lost his master and slipped away with the shorts.
On towards the low point (both physically & mentally) of the night's meanderings, we came close to Fillingdon Farm and discovering that said hound was missing Whipping Boy fell to the floor sobbing & howling, eventually we got him to carry on without Twist and after turning into the woods we were once again rejoined by the lengthy medium short tall cutters & Twist of course.
Into Leygrove's Wood where I ran out of mental capacity as I tried to record the number of short long medium hot cuttings, in this slightly reduced mental function a decision to stay with the hot long tall cutters forced me into an uphill struggle with gravity as Audrey & I faded on the ascent of mount Leygrove, however having reached the summit Audrey obviously thought she had gained some super powers and tried to push over some trees - I later discovered that this was something called "stretching" that all proper marathon runners do - still looks like tree pushing to me.
As another potential to stray from the path of doing the full distance was offered, the complaints of feeling the heat were soon swallowed up by the big chill of the valley up too Pound Wood as we approached the motorways edge, eeeee it were reet chilly I can tell thee. Zig zagging our way up the hill & under the motorway we finally managed to offload Roger into the wooded darkness, but kind heated Sam insisted we go back & retrieve him before our lap round Cadmore End, over the M40 once again and onto Cadmore End Common proper.
What happened next is quite remarkable and even though I was a witness to the sordid event I'm still not sure that I can believe my eyes, maybe my mind is deceiving me but according to the old sages Sam & Wolf (alias Moose) I am reliably informed that it is all true. In her defence I can confirm that the sheer quantity of deviations from the full circuit could perhaps had got her as confused as the rest of us and that she did try to make amends by doing the whole nights hash a second time round but the grim reality is that ...... HELEN WENT SHORT.......!