Only 6 stalwart hashers turned up at the White Lion in Halton at 7pm on the highest moonlight night of the year.

Yes we were truly lunar ticks when we could have been enjoying early Christmas nosh or the glorious shopping frenzy of the weeks before Christmas.

There wasn't much moongazing as we plodded at snails pace through all the numerous backstreets of Halton. We thought it was a small village until tonight!

Slackbladder hared in absentio so there was a great risk of us going off trail and never returning to Halton, but Bubbles had an eerie sense of prescience and always seemed to know where the next blob of flour would be.

There was one fish-hook which made all 6 of us circle around ourselves for zero seconds as we were bunched together already to keep out the cold.

After hours of ins and outs between schools and houses, with arrows secretly chalked on the shady sides of lamp-posts we eventually broke out into real countryside and had to turn on our hi-tech head torches to fail to find any blobs of flour in 2 fields.

That was enough to make us head for the nearest road and surprise surprise - there was an arrow heading straight back to the pub.

It being a cold night we aborted the circle and repaired immediately to the pub, where down downs consisted of pints of Black Sheep and bowls of chips. All 6 hashers had the same sins and the same down downs.

And so back to the Christmas Shopping.