Run 1287 Monday 3rd November 2551
An Anglo-Australian Collaboration
Three-fifteen and it’s tipping down in my part of deepest Banglamung. Here come Drippy & Ratcatcher. Mad dash to the car. We arrive via the tradesmen’s entrance (i.e. the 331), and spend an intriguing ten minutes watching Are You Sure manoeuvering his car aimlessly between the rubber trees. Bam Bam is working overtime directing traffic, but wisely seems to have given up on Are You Sure. No rain at the A-site (good), and no nicotine gum (panic). Somehow I resist Bottomless Pit’s proferred Marlboros for the next three hours. Get thee behind me, Satan!
Mutual rejoicing with Free Willy over Leyton Orient’s 33% increment to their season’s points tally. A shame there aren’t any monkey-hangers from Hartlepool to taunt.
Spaghetti Head is suffering silently but gamely at the sign-up with what Sir Chicken identifies as a contagious malady. Reminds me of Roger McGough’s shortest poem: “She contracted with ease…a social disease…notwithstanding”.
Two hares from Queensland, Australia, otherwise known as the West Island of New Zealand, as Zeal Zucker informs me. Brisbane city slicker Bam Bam and rustic hick Sheik Meme - the man from Coolangatta, which is appropriately named after a wreck. Certainly Meme appears to have aged ten years during his current stay. Meme is, however, a man of many parts, most of them faulty. Mouton noir, bon viveur, roue, raconteur (as our Gallic friend V.V. would say) - just get him to tell you his near-disaster pilot story, if you’ve got a spare two days. And then there’s Running Dick, the necessary organising Brit and odd-hare-out from Cambridge (the hash, not the university, as he modestly points out), sporting a wicked new haircut which looks like he’s recently been trepanned.
Doncha love Ozzies? Last time I was there, Immigration asked me if I had a police record. I said I didn’t realise it was still necessary.
Of course, Gay Wolf is an archetypal Ozzie – gay and lupine. Amazing what you learn on the Hash. Lord Lucan, whose status has recently been upgraded from “informed source” to “official spokesman”, tells me that after several tough years battling everything in a tough Queensland wheat-growing district, Gay Wolf decides to pack it all in and drive down to Sydney to get a job. “What route will you take?”, his mates ask innocently. Gay Wolf has to think before he replies. “Probably the wife. After all, she stuck with me during the drought”. (Americans will not understand this, given that they can’t pronounce “route” properly – or, indeed, anything else in English).
On on! Cut diagonally across the rubber plantation and follow the FRBs into Pineapple City. Trademark Pattaya landscape of rubber, pineapple and tapioca. But it’s mature tapioca – the kind you can have an intelligent conversation with – which is just as well as I’m on my own for much of the first part of the run till I find the whole pack spread across an open landscape of ploughed field. Must be good checks.
Alone again till I meet up with visiting Farmer John, who provides the entertainment by swallowing a fly and then trying to hoick it back up. As I manage to inhale some nostril-high grass seed at the same time, we’re in for several noisy minutes. Our asthmatic gasping brings company. Familiar and not-so-familiar figures arrive: Arseaholic, Banka Blower, Stinky Sloppy, Bam the Virgin & a couple of others. An incorrectly-broken check keeps us guessing. GI Joe is rushing around like a headless chicken, but eventually he cracks it.
The hour mark passes, and we’re still miles from home. It’s getting dark now, and the hares appear to be running out of paper. Green & grassy, soft underfoot, comfortable running & ambling. Champagne hashing – thanks hares.
At last there’s the On In, barely visible in the fading light. I come in with Arseaholic again. I sometimes wonder if we share the same DNA, as whatever the run – Monday, Jungle, Bush – we always seem to run at the same (lack of) pace.
Back among the rubber trees & mozzies, Teeny Weeny hands me a glass of Australian Vino Collapso Rosso, and Uncle Pervy follows it up with some of his excellent homebrew. Stumbling around in the dark, trying to improvise a shower, it dawns on me that I’m pissed before the circle. Fowl Fucker points this out when I tip my San Mig over my head rather than the water bottle in my other hand.
So I miss the start, but can hear Chicken icing Ratcatcher, who reputedly will be dancing naked at next week’s Loy Krathong run. As I take my place alongside the beer police, Banka Blower is awarding Chicken a Philippines Cup. Despite some disappointment that it’s plastic, not china, Chicken is delighted and the two remain inseparable for the duration.
Some heavyweight aniversaries: awards for Fuck the Truth (250) in absentio, The Queen (300), Drippy & Fowl Fucker (350 each). Some interesting visitors including Black Justice from Vanuatu. All I know about Vanuatu is that they produce marathon runners who arrive in the stadium several hours after the Commonwealth Games have finished. And my old friend Pear Shaped who is, well, still pear-shaped. And of course Alcoholiday from the Betty Ford Rehab Hash, who later regales us with a fine rendition of the Masturbation Song.
The dark side of Meme is to the fore today. Sporting his Black Sheep militia cap, he’s telling all and sundry to “shut the fuck up!”, so frequently and so loudly as to defeat his purpose. But then, Bottomless Pit starts berating the Hares: “Ve have 500 runs vorking viz zis system. Every time someone breaks ze system, ve have ze fuck-up”! I have no idea what they have done, but even the irrepressible Meme is cowed. Speaking of which, Mad Cow the beer policeman kindly ensures a steady stream of San Mig for the scribe, despite his colleague Testicles grumbling about my being “the wrong side of the truck”.
Mad Cow once came up with one of my favourite hashing lines. “How long are you here for?” I asked him. “Oh, about a hundred thousand baht”, he replies. Never one to dress conventionally, Mad Cow appears to have a small furry mammal, possibly an otter, attached to his head. He tells me it isn’t, but he’s got a water otter at home. He calls it a kettle, because it makes the water ‘otter (don’t call us Mad Cow, we’ll call you).
It all gets a bit hazy now. I remember Alfie, Karamba’s athletically-honed personal trainer. Oh, and Sir Chicken Fucker parading around with That Cup reputedly containing a pina colada topped by an entire pineapple. Really Sadistic is iced as the cocktail expert, and Bottomless Pit for having no straws on his booze-only 7/11 piss-wagon. GI Joe is in there for being a Vietnam Vet, which presumably means he performs surgery on barking deer.
This leads inconsequentially to some discussion of the forthcoming American election, at my end of the piss table. Inevitably, there’s the odd gibe at Obama’s forebears from the Redneck section (there had to be some way to get Jellobutt in, even if he wasn’t there). I argue that McCain should stick to making Oven Chips – another reference wasted on the Americans.
Meme takes the circle. “Time to go”, says Drippy, so I have to rely on my imagination for the rest of the circle. So let’s assume a UFO lands amidst the rubber trees and Meme is whisked away by the Orgons of Planet Varg for a messy and painful rectal probe, while all the rest enjoy TQ2’s excellent hospitality. Yes, that works.
As I fall out of the car, Ratcatcher announces she’s found the missing nicotine gum in some deep recess of the floorpan. I’m pissed, knackered and happy. It must be Monday.
ONION
Ringworm