Halloween is traditionally the night when the gates of hell are thrown asunder and Satan and his every fiend and fury are free to roam the face of God’s Earth and to taunt and terrify mortal men until the breaking dawn on the feast of All Saints’ Day banishes them back to the foul pit from whence they came.
In these more secular times it is however just an excuse to get dressed up in scary costumes and get sloshed.
The first horror that confronted us at the end of the short P trail form Balham station was the Pub, an over poncified gastro job, but they did look after our bags and gave us a few free pints so perhaps we can overlook the dreadful décor and excruciating karaoke that was taking place at one end of the pub.
The second horror was Blunder’s trail. Many of the pack had dressed for the occasion and one unkindly remarked to me that the trail also seemed to be in disguise, a City trail passing itself off as a West London one! If one can imagine cannot imagine anything more diabolical than that then I do not think we should know about it. Indeed the trail did seem to consist of a lot of pavement, much beloved of our City friends, and some did question why it was quite so long when one South London Street looks much the same as another, and what exactly a run through well-lit streets had to do with the spooky traditions of Halloween. These individuals had obviously not fathomed Blunder’s subtle cunning {note that this is the first time in the history of the English language that those last three words have ever appeared together in the same sentence}. The reason the trail was this length was because Blunder had carefully planned it to be exactly 6.66 miles long! His clever Halloween joke was possibly lost on those without an accurate GPS and a detailed knowledge of the Book of Revelations and so I am happy to reveal it now. Please be careful not to injure yourselves as you fall about laughing.
Anyway Blunder was kind enough to stop as getting bored on trail by entertaining us, once again, with his mobile sound system as we ran. This is such an amusing feature that I hope we are entertained with it again sometime, perhaps in two or three years’time. There was of course a drink stop with cheese and sweets all washed down with lashings of Bloody Mary (what else).
Back at the pub we had down downs but I am afraid I missed most of these as I became engrossed in an intelligent conversation with Rent Boy as they were taking place and this was such a rare, if not unique, experience that I was loathe to curtail it by joining the circle on the Pub’s overcrowded balcony but I am sure it was all very funny and you will no doubt see all the photographs of everyone’s spooky costumes when our new Hash Flash puts them on the web site.
On On
PF