(Courtesy Brown Finger)
Ah, yes, that’s it. Simply the best . Yes, yes, the Tina Turner classic anthem. Better than all the rest . . . Right, that’s the song that my brain has been trying to connect with Frozen Dick ever since he was circle-splashed some while ago for being over-effusive about anything he has ever done or anyone he has ever met, and in particular about the runs that he hares. You may well have heard him say at one of his hare briefs, “You know what? The flowers on my trail are the best, the most beautiful you will ever see.” Or perhaps, “You know what? The dogs are the best looking, best
behaved in Thailand, maybe even the best in the whole darn world.” And he never fails to tell you, of course, “You know what, the run today will be the best that you have ever experienced.”
So when we arrived at the A, I asked a rather wilted looking Frozen about the run he had set for us today, what we could expect, and was he happy with it. He wilted some more, sighed, and said simply “no, not at all happy”. Oh crap, I thought, and asked him why. He explained that it had been so hot and his legs got so tired that he had to amend his scouted plans and had cut a couple of k off the length of the trail, and he wasn’t at all happy about it. Oh, bloody crap, crap, crap! What on Earth were we going to find up there, I was thinking as my wary gaze traced the waterfall all the way up . . . and up. Frozen’s “best” runs aren’t always the best, so what was one of his “unhappiest” runs
going to be like. And before you assume that I am making this all up, you can ask Mr Poo, because I found out during the circle that Frozen had said something similar to him before the run and he was as equally, if not more, how shall I say it . . . concerned.
And so, with the hare’s rather ominous and nervously delivered instructions, “only circle checks and skiddy checks and not a very long run,” still echoing “unhappily” in my mind, we were off. Rather aptly, it was Skiddy who found the skiddy sticks, which happened to be painted, according to Skiddy, in the wrong shade of orange, and they had been kicked or run over so that what paint there was, was now obscured on the bottom of the sticks rather than radiating brightly on the top.
And then the trail went up, and we came upon a circle check. Gravy and I checked left and the Chucky-Doo-Poo-two checked right, and both dynamic duos miraculously found trail and called on- on at precisely the same time. Was this a new and nasty type of Frozen Dick check that he had failed to warn us about, deviously devised to completely screw the FRBs? But wait, what was this? After about a hundred or so meters of upward slog, Gravy and I ran out of the well-powdered trail and began to scratch the thinning hair on our ever-more-shiny scalps, pondering what could possibly
have happened. Looking back down the trail, and a way off to our left, we saw something we knew should not really be there, something powdery and white, presented like a thick line of cocaine. Oh my god, it was a check back. Shit, was this the new Frozen Dick secret weapon, an amalgamation of a V and a Circle check?
Thankfully, Gravy had scouted – but I hasten to add not set – this run with Frozen and suggested to me that by going the other way off of the Circle, the true trail was going to be a very short one. So armed with Gravy’s knowledge of the terrain and the intended trail, we decided to make our own run, a little bit of a longer run. So we did some bushwhacking, which involved a pretty precarious leap across the waterfall where Gravy was teetering on the edge of a sheer drop for a scary instant, and found some good trails further up the hill. And when we came down off the really best of the day’s trails, we hit true trail and ran unhindered back to the A, as all of the checks had already been
kicked out by those in front.
Following a longer-than-usual period of social drinking, Mr Poo summoned the circle. The virgin David took more than his share of the ice, as did the hare, who was splashed for setting precisely the same run that had been set here last time, only much shorter. And Suckity Suck was back to entertain us with gory tails of his recent pineapple-scarred operation. And Frozen took the circle for two separate T-shirt splashes that he had done before – more than once as I recall.
In the end, as it seems is ever more the case these days, we had a lot of fun in our own peculiar ways. Well I did anyway. Gravy and I had great fun running by ourselves, leaping over chasms, sniffing our own way back to the true trail, even though his GPS recorded only a 2.9k run, and with the additional off-trail trek, too! And the circle was a load of fun as well, with Mr Poo’s delicate touch and witty splashes . . . One more year . . . one more year . . . Whoops, sorry, that’s a different hash and a different GM.
So here’s to the heat-wilted Frozen Dick. He puts it back into the freezer when it starts to melt. That’s what it’s all about. Man, he’s an ageing hippy . . .