Monday, June 20, 2005

Suicide Sunday

Went up to Cambridge over the weekend to catch some of the rowing but mainly to celebrate what looked like the start of Summer. Caught the train up with Romit, who's just finished his student days and had a good chat about random diseases and injuries while on the train up to Cam. Also managed to bump into Becky, who I used to go out with which was quite random. Unfortunately didn't see her again for the rest of the day. I'll have to remember to catch up with her at some point. Bumped into Mike Garnett and Chris Dale wandering back from Robinson ball at Cambridge train station.

The bumps course was absolutely packed with people, the weather was amazing and the usual crowd of friends and parents were sat on the towpath watching the poor boaties exert themselves to the full along the four mile stretch of Cam. There was, surprisingly, a horde of people I hadn't seen for ages up there. Amy Coker from Downing, Alex Petrovic from Clare, Tom Fry from Catz, Emily Trace, Kat Gillham, Linds Hoyle, Hannah Berriman and probably some others that I've forgotten. Ben, Dominic and Cj were about, having been to the CUAS may ball the night before.

Conveniently, Alex mentioned that they were having trouble filling their punt for the race on Sunday. I happily volunteered to fill the gap.

Selwyn seemed to be having a good year, the second mens missed out on blades by a very small margin and I didn't see any Selwyn boats being hit (though I didn't see any bumping either!). Photos to follow. I got in a bit of trouble for taking a photo of a girl who was crying on the side after being bumped, but it was a good photo!!

Went for a meal with Emily Trace and all the Newnham girlies, giving my my first chance to get to know Emily's boyfriend. She's been successfully hiding him from me over the last year, but it was good to find out who she's been talking about all this time. After the meal we popped to the Maypole, which was a welcome reminder of how good some of the bits of Cambridge can be. Also a reminder of how different your perceptions of cocktails are after having been exposed to the fancy ones in Soho!!

The next morning I headed down to the rollers to start the puint race. The weather was absolutely glorious and I was a bit worried about the fact that I had forgotten to put any sun protection of any kind on. Luckily a couple of glasses of wine stopped me from worrying about that, and somehow protected me from being burned. The start of the race went well, with Will Leyland punting extremely efficiently and keeping us in contact with the leading punt of Freija's.

Our problems began at the turn. Freija's punt was murderously well organised - they hadn't brought super soakers, they'd brought buckets. This was a bad development and meant we got absolutely soaked. This didn't deter us from the chase, but made punting slightly slippery. Mike Marshall and Alex Petrovic were doing sterling jobs of paddling and punting. Myself and Sarah Cooper were attempting to get through as much of the wine as possible. This state of affairs didn't last long.

We caught up with Freija's punt, about halfway on the return trip, but were met with merciless bucketing. This was excruciatingly effective and we sunk, the punt itself managed to touch the bottom of the Cam. This wasn't a good thing! This being a fun event, Freija's punt stopped to help us recover the punt and to bail it out before we continued. But they did steal our paddle. By now, we'd all been in the water a number of times, so it didn't matter any more! We eventually managed to finish third out of four, soaking but happy to have had a very good day out in the sun.

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