Run	Date	Hare(s)	Description	MapRef	1:50000	1:25000	1:10000	Aerial
700	2010-12-05	Pancsi & Mussolini - bring drinks & nibbles	Eartham Woods	SU938106

With a foot of snow nestling in the Downs and a temperature of minus two on Friday afternoon it looked like this run would be memorable for it's non occurrence. Then the wind did an about face and a blast of milder air from the south west defrosted the coastal strip and immersed the hares, TreeFeller and Spiderman in a round of phone calls and e-mails to the expectant masses regarding the venue.
With fingers crossed that no one had attempted to reach the still frozen Lord's Hill the pack assembled in Eartham wood with the temperature hovering around one degree Celsius.
After some early entertainment watching Flash pirouetting about on the snow in his sleek black chariot we had the call to order from Canman to learn all about the sad demise of W. A. Mozart from typhus while we all shivered and shook hoping not to follow him from hypothermia.

Then we headed off in a northerly direction after the expected nonsense from the hares about taking care not to slip on the icy bits. Initially there were no tricks as we headed into Ide's common and looped east in Mary's wood, and unusually there was no shortage of hashers eager to do the checking, Cath, Old Faithful, Flash, Jerry, Pink Flamingo, Dr Blood, The Ref etc all working well to keep us moving along nicely.
In retrospect it is clear that the sudden enthusiasm for sprinting all over the place was due to a desire to keep warm, less natter and more pitter patter was the order of the day.

A series of zigzags into North wood proved hard work but kept the pack together well and convinced the seasoned hashers that we must be heading for the seven way cross paths with the seat on Stane Street, we always go there when we run in Eartham don't we ?.
Well, the answer this time was NO, but that did not stop yours truly, Flash and OF from sniffing around the area for non existent flour while the rest headed into the small maze of paths south of Stane Street.
A spot of usual confusion here with a pair of eyes seeing a non existent falsie required some hare intervention to get straight and then we were on our way west and when we hit Stane Street again it was straight on to the On-In after a near perfect one hour and five minutes.

Miraculously no one had managed to slip to their doom on the snow, slush, leaves and slimy roots that had been underfoot all morning.
Soon a small feast started to appear on a picnic table after TreeFeller insisted on laying out a nice clean blue tablecloth on the damp wooden boards and all manner of good things, including beer, were unloaded from chariot boots.
Just in time Sinbad and The Gnu arrived to help us celebrate this seven hundredth run.
In the middle of all this our JM found time to thank the hares for an excellent run and to commend them for their dedication to the task of ensuring that we had a run despite the wintery conditions.
He also noted that Jerry had not carried the Hash-It and that Flash was the only hasher, except for Splasher but he was a hare so didn't count, who was exposing his knobby knees to the arctic blast.
Alas, yours truly was given the Hash-It for some trumped up charge which we do not need to go into in detail.

Bambi.