Ever been to a birthday party where the host takes £2 from you and makes you walk around muddy fields in the wind and rain for two and a half hours (or until you die of pneumonia, whichever comes first)? No, me neither, at least until today. For this was Upperskirt's Birthday R*n, and, in addition to the usual Sunday morning masochists, our beloved Hash Cash had chosen to surround herself with several of her nearest and dearest, some of whom had hashed before, others (was it Wayne and Elayne, or Waine and Elaine? ; I'm not sure but I know they came as a matched rhyming pair) who had not - welcome to the lunatic fringe, folks!

Hare Baldbrick had splashed out nearly 60p on flour for the occasion (cheap prezzie or what?), but in the end realised he'd been over-profligate and decided to save half for next time. Like every wet-weather hare since time immemorial, he warned us that the rain might have removed most of his floury deposits. Don't really know why they do that - why can't they just 'fess up and admit that they couldn't be a***d laying a trail?

Before setting the pack loose, Baldbrick took numbers for lunch. He wrote down 20 on a piece of paper then, once we had set off, quickly altered it to 10, assuming that half of us would be mown down by the traffic before we even reached the crossroads.

The first mile or so (which duplicated a trail I set three years ago, Baldbrick taking a gamble that my king-size flour mountains would still be there so he wouldn't have to do anything) was dominated by the inevitable speculation regarding Upperskirt's age. We haven't believed a word she says for years - after all, how many mothers do you know who are younger than their daughters? Most of the guesses were centred around the mid-fifties, but these were obviously well short of the mark. Seriously, though, the woman does seem to have mastered the secret of eternal youth, looking barely a day older than she had twenty-four hours previously.

The wet weather seemed to awaken the urge to urinate (but, thankfully, not to defecate) in quite a few people. Minor Tw*t was spotted relieving himself (at least, that's what we think he was doing) by a wall quite early in the r*n. Someone seemed to think that it was his second comfort break of the morning. Who knows, maybe he's just a bit, what's the word I'm looking for, "intercontinental". Later on, Morticia set up a fifty-yard exclusion zone around the fish-hook, declaring it an official LVH3 "pit stop", if you catch my drift.

At the beer stop, we were greeted by the sight of two cakes in the back of Baldbrick's car, one of which was a birthday cake sporting a solitary candle. If this was another attempt by Upperskirt to lie about her age, it failed. We hung around for a few minutes, hoping that the candle would set fire to the car interior and that the resulting blaze would dry out our clothes. It didn't, and we moved on, bitterly disappointed.

Eventually we made it back to the pub (wet and bedraggled, so no circle), and any hopes we may have been harbouring that the Birthday Girl would pay for all our meals were quickly dashed. Ah well, maybe her husband will make up for this omission next time we have a r*n on his birthday.

Well done to Baldbrick for doing a splendid job in adverse weather conditions, and for finding us a field full of cows with acute diarrhoea to admire.

On on,

STT.