With the season of cold and darkness and exams fast approaching, I would like to warm your hearts and soothe your essay-crazed minds with a tale of our adventures back in the warm and golden days of September.
On a fine Sunday morning, we embarked on a strenuous twenty-minute bus journey, bearing assorted tools and copious amounts of food. Our destination was the Hermitage of Braid, a lovely nature reserve tucked away between Braid Hills and the architectural beauty of King’s Buildings. Our task for the day was to rake the freshly cut wildflower meadow to allow next year’s wildflowers to grow. Since there were about 30 of us, this went a lot faster than expected and we completed the first round of raking in less than an hour. Several members of the committee began constructing a pyre for me which I find a bit excessive as they had only endured two weeks of my presidency at this point. I prefer to think of the pyre as a custom-made nest of hay. The concept of curling up in a hay pile found widespread approval and soon about a dozen people had found a nest of their own.
Lunch, as usual, was comprised of the constitutional sandwich and plenty of biscuits. Just as we began thinking about starting a round of traditional Dirties games, it began to rain and we sought shelter under the nearby trees (except Dan, who decided the river would be a better place to stand in). The rain eased up a bit and we proceeded to play ratchet screwdriver and bulldog on the soggy meadow for about an hour. We’d mostly finished our work at this point anyway, so it was a guilt-free hour of games.
The rest of the afternoon passed with a variety of activities, ranging from tidying the rest of the meadow while naming all our rakes to rolling down the hill, wheelbarrow-racing up the hill, chasing each other around the hill or simply enjoying the sun while sitting in a pile of hay at the foot of the hill. As you can see, the hill featured prominently in the day’s activities. Also on the hill, Cameron and I sock-wrestled (I won. Or did he let me win? We’ll never know). There is also photographic evidence of wheelbarrow races in actual wheelbarrows, but I’m not sure at what point during the day this happened as I somehow managed to miss it. It looks really fun though!
We collected our newly named rakes and began the journey home once the meadow was fully raked and everyone had reached just the right level of happiness combined with exhaustion from all the raking, running, racing and rolling.
Emma Grafalaf/Grafalafel/Grafalo/any other humorous permutation of my surname