January sunshine brought the world and his wife to the park near the Cité de l’Espace, and amongst this crowd, the pack gathered for the first hash of the year. Some of us were there to run off some of the Christmas ballast and others to take a stroll and engage in intellectual discourse.

The hash horn was present for a change and signalled the off, or at least I assume it did as technically I wasn’t present at this stage of the proceedings, but when I did catch up with everyone I found them in a state of confusion as to the correct direction to take. This turned out to be the order of the day as our hares did a sterling job of scattering and confusing.

Coffee Bean ended up walking the long course, some followed our outward bound trail back to the beer, Whistling Two Lips, Sticky Mermaid and Nadia did a dastardly shortcut and the rest of us somehow came across the outward runners trail and followed that back. To my knowledge nobody found the intended trail.

All turned out well back at base camp as Dr Who and Dominatrix had cooked up some soup, oblivious to the chaos they’d caused. It must have started to dawn on them when the runners arrived back having literally been ‘led up the garden path’ at one stage the wrong path naturally, and the walkers returning from every conceivable direction.

The circle took a while to form due to seconds of soup but when it did it appeared our hares had been quite forgiven and scored lots of thumbs up and so downed their beers.

After the Dr had finished he pulled me in for the mild oversight of forgetting to toast the hash and so I was punished.

As far as I remember the Virgins were Céline, Jean, Eric and Jérôme: they were introduced and fared well with their first hash DD.

Our short-cutters, S.M and Wandering Tulips (in replacement for his absent wife W.T.L. ) were next up for sentencing. Dr Who unwisely followed this with an explanation of some of his more abstract trail markings and talked himself into a DD.

Amelia was talking all through this so had to follow their example and stepped into the circle.

Our virgin Jérôme was guilty of the heinous crime of competitiveness along with Kathy (her second hash and her second F.R.Bing offence, by the way) which left us with no choice but to punish.

To wrap things up I was a bit of a coward and only led one verse of the hash hymn as we had more than a few casual observers, perched on park benches surveying the weirdos with daft t-shirts.

Looking forward to ‘la fête’ on Saturday

ON ON

Scrubber