Ayatollah Shares a Date at North Ryde
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As always dependable and always assured Ayatollah laid on a great joint run for the athletic, the infirmed the Sheilas, also loved by their true name the Harriettes, and a few sundry. There are number of options starting out from North Ryde RSL, and of course being a lovely warm evening Ayatollah led them gently down to the Lane Cove River passing under the Epping road and quickly by the local flour and starch factory, and thence besides and tranquil waters. If you didn’t recognise the Lane Cove National Park trail, then where the hell have you been for the last 30 years?!!
But that’s not the point. The real point was to keep the loving runners and walkers, boys and girls, all together in loving proximity…some going forwards and some backwards …all of course, in complete unison. So the greater gathering of smaller spotted and greater striped hashing “persons” wound their happy way up stream, initially along the boardwalks and foreshores of the river and later just past the golf course where mysterious death of Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler in 1971, who having stripped their kit off off to have a passionate and loving “encounter” had unwittingly lain in a hollow after the event where hydrogen sulfide, arising from the estuarine sediments, and being heavier than air, had accumulated. Now, if one is going to ‘pass away’ without warning, what nicer way to do it than whilst dreaming and fondling after a damn good bonk with your best mate’s wife.
But our heroic and loving hash persons didn’t stop for anything of that kind of exercise, but kept on going. , Doing a “Uey” under Fullers Bridge and returned along the other side of the picturesque river in the fading autumnal light.
Returning home to the car park Ayatollah (a true ladies man and romantic at heart …as you read in a moment) had lots of cold beer and Champers ready and waiting, but the best of it…he had procured from somewhere crystal goblets for the ladies (aka Harrietts) from which to sip their beloved champers and intoxicating bubbles. Romance took him a step further …….as the daylight slipped into full darkness he flicked the soft lights on from his trusty old Land Cruiser and there the group of 65 plus imbibed in the fading headlights as the battery slowly run flat.
Thereafter he led them like a good shepherd ( a skill he learned from the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Middle East..also read more later ) into the RSL dining room where for an amazing $15-00 per head there was a choice of 3 types of lasagna followed by more Pavlovas than XXXX can dream of.
T’was a top night for the 65 hashers or more who made the effort and were duly rewarded with another of Ayatollah’s hospitality and full consideration for the POSH and other visitors.
But stand up if anyone actually knows about the real Ayatollah? I mean really know him and where he came from? I doubt it.
He likes to call himself the “Date Trader” which harks back to the time when he made regular sojourns to the Middle East, donned his turban and kaftan and played the Middle Eastern trader role to a ‘T’. Or so I’m told.
And as one learns more about this quiet hashing enigma, the more one learns about his secretive trading past. About his savory nuts and dried fruit, palm dates, camel racing, hubble-bubbles, Turkish delight, and a 101 Arabian Nights in and finely woven Bedouin tents full of indulgence with intoxicating and perfumed harems to keep him company during the long mystic, starlit desert nights. But most of all about his refined palette for exotic nibbles and spices.
A well lubricated evening (red wine is usually involved…lots of it) with Ayatollah is nothing less than a revelation of another distant fading world. A world of sumptuous plates of tantalizing morsels, of exotic aphrodisiacs of time immemorial success, again, all from his personal experience when mixing a little business with pleasure on his trading sojourns around Asia Minor, Turkey and Persia.
A 101 Arabian Nights with intoxicating perfumed harems during the long cold nights in the desert
Among many things Ayatollah can also tell you the difference between Old Ginger and Young Ginger. Now there’s a claim! Old Ginger, it seems, is to his preference but if we look closer at the pros and cons of this claim, I wonder if the rest of the hash will concur?
For example Old Ginger has a stronger more acrid bite to the taste. It is definitely more expensive in many ways, not least in taxes and GST etc.
“This may very well be the case so I put it to you, M’Lud, and fellow hashmen by way of the following circumstantial evidence and we shall let you decide whether Old Ginger is to be preferred to Young Ginger”
Now….would you prefer Old Ginger OR………..
Young Ginger ? ….this is the question ……and I’ll leave you to decide
Your Hash Journo
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