Club summer party explores outdoor pursuits
The Club’s summer party on Saturday 1st July took the form of a school sports day, partly in recognition of the fact that there is no Chap Olympics this year. Moreover, in a daring break with tradition we decided to hold it not in the back room of some dingy watering hole, but out in the open, in Hyde Park.
This was not without its problems—although the risk of rain turned out not to be one of them, for which we are grateful. There is a particular spot by the Serpentine Bar and Grill where we have gathered for recent picnics, and the plan was to go there again, but we arrived to discover that a huge chunk of the park had been cordoned off behind a high fence, including the area we were heading to. (The compound turned out to be for a music festival called BST Hyde park. I assume “BST” stands for “bacon, spinach and tomato”, but don’t quote me on that.) We shunted on by a couple of hundred yards, but it did mean that a number of guests wandered around the park trying to find us. My original instruction that we would be “near the pagoda-shaped café” was not much use as (a) we weren’t that close to it any more, (b) it turns out there is an actual pagoda elsewhere in the park, and (c) the new compound fencing included yet another pagoda. But we managed, and picnics were scoffed and Champagne corks popped.
At our parties we always have a few silly games, and given the theme of this one we had programmed a fixture of five events. First off was the Fabergé Egg and Spoon, in commemoration of the time one boy stole treasures from the headmaster’s safe and managed a getaway of several miles before being caught by the school leopard. Our eggs were collection of decorative egg-shapes in various materials, originally forged by the master craftsmen of the Franklin Mint. The eggs varied a lot in size and weight (and oddly one of the smallest was the heaviest, made from some metal that Stuart Turner insisted was unobtanium). So to make for more sport, we brought a variety of spoons, from teaspoons to dessert spoons, and allowed players to choose their weapons. I have no idea what is best—a large egg in a large spoon, a large egg in a small spoon, a small egg in a large spoon, etc? But we had eight eggs, so we ran two heats followed by a play-off, with the ultimate winner being Mrs H.
Our next challenge was Toss the Olive into the Martini, a particular favourite of the Headmaster, who likes to make sure the senior prefects are well trained in cocktail husbandry. We decided that using real olives might get messy, so the role of the olives was played by small rubber balls. This game turned out to be quite tricky and, despite some near misses, only one person managed to score a direct hit, Robert Beckwith, though it was also an opportunity to get younger members of the club interested in these important life skills.
The third contest was Fire a Pea-Shooter at the Smoker Behind the Bike Sheds. The role of the smoker was played by the long-suffering Action Man, this time in school uniform. We had acquired a pea-shooter but while testing the game the night before we discovered that the pea sat pretty loosely in the shooter, so unless you were firing upwards, it just rolled out the end before you could fire it. Moreover, even a direct hit against Action Man just bounced off without knocking him over. Fortunately, James Rigby had brought a catapult, firing rubber balls that easily had enough heft to knock Action Man flying, and several direct hits were scored. However, the build quality of the catapult wasn’t that great and it increasingly started to fall apart, so when it came to the play-off to find the overall winner, we switched to a nerf gun, which Torquil had brought with him for personal protection. Of course nerf rounds are made out of foam, and in a high-wind outdoor environment it was tricky to hit anything, even though the shooters edged closer and closer to their target. This might have gone on all afternoon, but fortunately Ridade eventually scored a hit and was declared winner.
Our fourth game was scheduled to be a Founder’s Day Speech competition, where players have 60 seconds to impress the crowd with their oratory. But no one had carefully prepared a speech that they were desperate to deliver, so given the unexpected levels of noise coming from the pop concert going on behind the fence, we decided to abandon the idea, and went straight on to our final event, the Paper Aeroplane Fly-Past. Paper had been provided and a number of interesting aeronautical designs were on display. Minna just seems to have thrown a breadstick, and Stephen Myhill flung his boater, but the actual winner, judged by distance flown, was Stewart Lister Vickers.
Robert’s prize for Martini olive tossing was a copy of Health and Efficiency magazine from 1957, which Matron confiscated from the dorms, but which somehow found its way into the staff room. Ridade’s prize for shooting the illicit smoker by the bike sheds was a vintage Woodbines packet, now containing two sets of cigarette cards, one featuring famous movie scenes from the era (1930s and 1940s, if memory serves) and the other featuring everyday scenes from life in the navy. Stewart was awarded with a strange presentation pack of playing cards featuring Margaret Thatcher and some of her cronies, contributed by Miss Minna.
Of course you don’t have to exhibit sporting prowess to win a prize, as our parties always feature the famous Grand Raffle. There were subject prizes: the Maths prize was a geometry set and some log tables; the French prize was a French phrase book dating from WW1 and featuring handy phrases for life in the trenches; the English prize was a complete set of End Blyton’s schoolgirl Mallory Towers novels, won, appropriately enough by young Lizzie Beckwith, who will probably enjoy them. We had books including Billy Bunter, Sportsman, William the Conqueror from the Just William series, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Compleet Molesworth (all four Nigel Molesworth books) and a collection of St Trinian’s cartoons. We had DVDs of Grange Hill, Goodbye, Mr Chips (the Robert Donat version), The Happiest Days of Your Life, the complete Ripping Yarns, including Tomkinson’s Schooldays, the Jack Whitehall version of Decline and Fall and a DVD set of all the St Trinian’s films. We even had a box of chalks, a jar of mint humbugs and a leather satchel.
Many thanks to all who played up and played the game, and for all the efforts with costumes. You can see a full album of photos from the day at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720309505962.
