GUMSC Scatter – Car of Milk, Light and Chocolate
Driver: Tasha George
Navigator: Leslie Mabon
Administrator: Neil Anderson
Runner: W. Scott Douglas IV
Car: Ford Ka, alias Kolin
Event: GUMSC Star Wars Scatter
Have you seen the nosecone the Williams has been using this year? And what about the new engine cover Ferrari are developing? It’s really similar to the ones BMW and McLaren have been using this season to great effect.
But the Catalunya track has been ruined because they’ve put a new chicane in at the end of the lap and it means the drivers don’t get up to top speed on the straights. Oh and by the way have you seen the new F1 game for the PS3? The water effects are just amazing. The water does exactly what water would do if it hit your visor at 200 mph and the graphics are awesome. It’s like watching it on TV. But they have ruined Spa by flattening out the Bus Stop. And the first hairpin has been widened and the grid has been straightened. There’s no challenge any more.
This was at 12.25 in the morning. Neil and Tasha had had this for six and a half hours. Scatter Class Lesson 1: Scott and Leslie are hard work on road trips.
The Star Wars Scatter marked the latest instalment of the blossoming relationship between Edinburgh University MSC and our counterparts at Glasgow University. With Edinburgh exams looming on the horizon, the EUMSC squad was greatly depleted, and with all of my usual navigators unavailable, I took the decision to leave Juliette at home and jump into the Car of Milk, Light and Chocolate with Tasha, Neil and Scott. There were, however, several problems with this:
(a) The Car of Milk, Light and Chocolate was a Ford Ka;
(b) there were four of us;
(c) I am a fat bastard, which did wonders for the Ka’s handling and acceleration;
(d) Scott barfs if he either sits in the back or navigates, so Neil and I had to run the operation from the back of the car whilst Tasha drove.
It was also the first time I had picked up the maps in almost eight months, so I had forgotten that whilst the driver gets to have a ball for three and a half hours, the navigator has to go through a maths and geography exam if the car is to get anywhere. Fortunately, an efficient point plotting process quickly developed: I plotted the points on the map, using the Ka’s wee bonnet as a map board, Neil checked my plotting and read out the points, Tasha got the car warmed up and ready to go, and Scott sat in the passenger seat and drank milk. The efficient process came aground, however, when I was two-thirds of the way through the plotting. As I glanced up from the map, an electro-magnetic solar pulse surged out from inside the car and blinded me, turning my vision to a mass of green and purple blobs for the next two minutes. Once I had stopped squealing like a stuffed pig and began to regain vision, a voice from inside the Ka called out: “Sorry Les! Did I blind you?”
“YES, you buffoon!” I answered.
“Good. That means the torch is working,” replied Scott. This was going to be a long night.
But it quickly transpired Scott was the least of my worries. After a few miles, it became apparent that the geography of Ayrshire does not follow the standard and widely accepted system of Cartesian coordinates. Just a couple of miles east of Kilmarnock, we passed a sign that told us we were three miles from Moscow. I kid you not. Moscow? Moscow? If I’d known that, I would have brought my Lokomotiv scarf and gone to see a Russian football match. And then, five minutes later, the helpful road signs informed us that if we turned left, we would reach Potterrow in a mile and a half. With this being Friday night, I instructed Tasha to slow down in case we hit any drunk lassies wearing skirts that may once have been handkerchiefs. Now, the OS map did not show either the Russian capital or Edinburgh University’s favourite den of inequity, so given the directions we’d just seen, I figured we must have either been in Norway or that Tasha was really wringing the neck of the Ford.
After a few events, we were starting to get to grips with GUMSC’s scatter system. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Glasgow tend to go with far fewer points that we do, but compensate for this by making the clues bleeding impossible and solvable only with the aid of military precision. Thanks largely to the work of Neil in making sure I’d double checked my plotting at each location, and with our awareness of the GUMSC trademark negative marking, we were able to get more points than usual, and would have done even better if I hadn’t left my glasses in the car when I went out to get a particularly tough clue…
…which leads me nicely onto Scatter Class Lesson 2. There is a girl in GUMSC who, under the cover of darkness, looks alarmingly like Tasha. Whilst the other three members of the Car of Milk, Light and Chocolate were poking about in the bushes, I had managed to deduce that the postcode we were asked for was on the back of a road sign 400 metres up the road (those of you who know me well will know that after the castle incident, I am very adept at running medium-to-long distances on country lanes in complete darkness). Having left the specs in the back of the Ka lest they fall off in deepest, darkest Weegie-land, I sprinted up to the sign, scrawled the answer in biro on the back of my hand, charged back down the road through the fog in the direction of my team-mates and yelled “GOT IT!” into the face of a complete random who had just arrived on the scene.
With an excellent combination of teamwork we dispatched point after point with ruthless efficiency. The only thing that halted our progress was the presence of average speed cameras on the A77 that restricted us to a Blair-pleasing 49mph for fifteen agonising miles. That is the sole reason I didn’t vote Labour the day before. And who says local knowledge doesn’t help on scatters?
Our team effort brought us in a highly respectable sixth overall out of fourteen, but the biggest trial of the night was still to come. At the finish venue, Scott and Neil found themselves accosted by some of the local talent – a posse of intoxicated 45 year-old women who had a pressing desire to know who had won the booby prize. Enforcing Leslie’s Harthill Services Rule, we made a hasty exit and began the journey homewards, where, fuelled by Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut and Wiseman’s finest semi-skimmed, the two rear passengers began their non-stop commentary on everything under the sun that was related to either F1 or football. And that, children, leads us to the final lesson of the evening: when you’re playing a sports game on the computer, remember that the guy whose picture is on the box is always brilliant. It’s true. It was that sort of evening.
