DAY HASH

This is the day hash crossing the border,
travelling from Lancashire into North Yorkshire
hashing for the rich, hashing for the poor,
The hasher on the corner and the hasher next door.

Pulling up to Bentham, a steady climb:
The gradient's against us, but we’re on time (except Lurch).
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shouting swear words over our shoulders,
Snorting noisily as Baldbrick passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as hashers get near,
Stare from the bushes at their lurid gear.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn their course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm they pass and no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes (to Baldbrick’s horn).
Noon freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards the beer stop they descend
Towards the ale cans yelping down the glades of scenery,
Towards the fields of green, the pastures
Set on the sunlit plain like gigantic chessmen.
All North Yorkshire waits for them:
In the valleys, beside the Forest of Bowland
absent hashers long for news.

Write ups from Bitter, write ups from Twit (er),
write ups of joy from the girls and the boys,
Sir Tom Tom’s urgent invitations
To inspect new hash sites without hesitation,
And applications to set new trails
make them now to On Sec’ God Speed without fail.
And gossip, gossip from all the hashers,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Story’s with hash flash snaps to enlarge in,
Pictures with Dickhead scrawled in the margin,
Tales from Upperskirt, Morticia, and her aunts,
Dreaming of holidays in the South of France.

Tales of trail setting from ‘Trolley and Whitenoise
Scribes from Caton and Brookhouse
Written on paper with every rhetoric,
Bubbles, Forever’, Twot and Cyberseptic,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the hash’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Missing hashers are still asleep
Dreaming of Twisted or Antiseptic,
Or of friendly beer beside the Onn-Inn at Bentham
Asleep in working Lancaster, asleep in well-set Windermere,
Asleep in central Morecambe,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for more hashing,
And none will hear Sir Tom Tom’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to think of himself not hashing?