So, Many of My Seminal Experiences Within The Past Month Will Involve Sweat-Soaked Red Knitted Socks

---

Well, I can finally add something besides "Playing two recorders at once in harmony while hula hooping" to the Special Skills section of my c.v....I can now pitch a tent by myself in 9 minutes and 12 seconds, and I can traverse the CAVRA wall in pointy-toe suede flats. It turns out that the entire focus of August period is in fact the four hours of service which we now have every afternoon. At least, it's supposed to be four hours of service - bettering the community, making a difference, companionship with our fellow man, right? Does a plastic barrel full of tent poles and a huge sheet of wet canvas with the scrawled note "See if you can put it up. We lost the instruction manual anyway. There's a tray of biscuits in the hut if you want them." count? This is how I ended up accidentally rolling down the hill between the academics blocks flailing around inside the sheet of wet canvas, after I lost my balance on top of the barrel where I was holding up the top pole. Sadly, it did take us almost the full four hours, until we realised that we didn't even need half the poles in the barrel. It does seem sometimes that they give us the most mundane and frustratingly tedious (sorting the enormous crate clinking with loose crusty silverware into neat and clean piles of knives, forks, and spoons, anyone?) to make our hikes seem even more spectacular. We're all loading on to the minibuses with our five extra pairs of socks and our dry shampoo - or maybe that's just me. Here is when I choose again to play the Three Cheers For Femininity card which seems to work so well when there's an especially heavy bag to be carried or spiders to be brushed off the CAVRA hut ceiling. Or shall we just call it...terrible pun alert...my Ace Of Hearts - to head off to Snowdonia for a four-day trek. I can only hope that it will be worth all the endless route planning and futile tent-pitching in the sports field, which is especially embarrassing when the lifeguards show up to finish their 450-mile run and then finish their final set of 6,000 one-handed pushups while we sweat and struggle to fit the blue peg in the blue hole. There's more to life than thighs like twin asparagus stalks. After standing in the cow field and looking out over the turquoise and cobalt blue stripes of the Bristol Channel, the brilliant whitecaps and England on the other side looking as if outlined in black ink pen in the bright spotlight of the sun through the sheets of rain

---