Rowers - a story about everyday rowers

"It was terrible, James", wept the blonde bombshell, "the waves were crashing about in an insane frenzy and the wind was howling about us like an evil space alien... we were powerless to resist!"

As the boat was driven mercilessly on towards the crashing torrent of the weir the crew all abandoned ship, leaving only Kirsty to defend the crippled shell against the storm and the waves.

"Luckily, " said the resourceful rower, wiping her nose with her sleeve, "I remembered my Brownies training and managed to tie the boat to the bank with a bowlin and half hitch, using just the eight sets of shoelaces. We managed to haul it back up to the boathouse eventually and hugged each other in exhaustion..."

Once there, Kirsty liberally berated the rest of the crew all the way back to college for being so wet, even though she herself was just as soaking, except in a literal rather than a figurative sense.

Moral from Episode 1: Don't go out on the river when it's windy and when you've been conned into subbing for someone else's crew.

Coming up in Episode 2: Kirsty gets horrendously drunk again and we all wonder whether perhaps she is the alcoholic-who-just-needs-loving subplot. Also we try desperately to work in some incest and a lesbian couple before Pembroke boathouse gets burned down in a sex-triangle revenge attack by a little known but amazingly attractive bloke from Jesus.

Episode 2 of Rowers

"We hate Osler!" shrieks their coach, Susan, frothing at the mouth.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" The crew all cry in unison, and turn in a frenzy towards the big pin-up of last year's Osler women's crew that they have stuck up at the back of the boathouse. Drawing out their lethally sharp hat-pins they rush as one at the already holey picture and stab it in an orgasm of desire, revenge, and lust...

...Meanwhile, several hundred yards down the river...

Paul Thomas takes a look around through the shimmering haze of steam that surrounds his boat after yet another chukka of squared blades supersonic rowing through the heaving nine foot swell, and waits for the hull to stop glowing.

"I'd better fix those heat-resistant tiles that NASA gave me" he muses pensively as he wipes a single bead of sweat from his magnificent visage.

And suddenly, through the clouds of steam, Paul sees an ominous shape bearing down on him...!

Oh No! It is the St Anthony's women's crew and their demon coach, being overtaken by a Somerville crew!

As the huge looming masses bear down upon him Paul manages to turn on a sixpence and speed off upriver, nimbly dodging the two spluttering and heaving crews.

They clash blades, the sound ringing out, and then the Somerville cox performs a handbrake turn with her custom built super-large rudder and charges off up the wrong side of the river in her rather tasty red and black crisp packet.

Will they manage to catch Paul before he reaches escape velocity? Will the wind ever go down? Will Catz women catch Osler, or will their anger consume them in a moral sort of way and mean that they sprain their muscles and have to wait until next year?...

I apologise that today's episode was rather dark and haunting, but I didn't get a very good night's sleep and dreamed that a man in red sunglasses was wiping my car windscreen with a dirty cloth and smearing the dirt around. The next episode is bound to be much happier, since apparently Sheen appears in the plot and offers to marry someone else, who also hasn't turned up yet (so you're safe, Kirsty).

Episode 3: The rowers go on an outing together, demonstrating bonding, community spirit, and fun.

"Why, big boy!", murmured Kirsty demurely, "What a way-out and excellent idea! Then we could all go drinking afterwards and I could fall over again!"

"Oh no", groaned everyone, "why do you always get so plastered, Thirsty? Don't you have any alcohol tolerance?"

James interjected maturely at this point. "Now, hang on, people. It is Shirsty's right to be floppy under the influence, you know. And anyway, alcohol isn't cool and grown-up - you _can_ actually have fun without drinking being involved!"

"RUBBISH!!" everyone else screamed. And James had to agree with them after a little consideration and everyone pouring liebfraumilch over him.

So the whole crew agreed to an evening of debauched twisting and grooving and supping and eyeballing...

Meanwhile, it emerges that Anu is having a lesbian affair with a mysterious stranger called "Time for a little something" and is in fact not at Catz after all, but at Jesus.

"Anu, you traitor!" groaned the Catz crew he was coaching, "so this is why we row so weirdly - you've been trying to put us off so we get bumped by the evil Jesus Army!"

"Oh drat," said Anu, "if it weren't for you pesky kids I would have got away with it! And now you've ruined my plan to burn down the Pembroke boathouse, thus denying world domination for Jesus who were hoping to bump to head as a result!" He hung his head in shame as the OURCs police took him off to the cells and sentenced him to umpire the women's 5th division forever, in the rain, with no radio, as a punishment.

Meanwhile, in far-flung icy Wallingford, at the Medicine Faculty gulag, also known as the Osler rowing camp, there were scenes of heaving flesh straining out of stretched skin-tight clothes, and groaning and panting. No, not another MedSoc orgy / dinner, it was the Osler women's (or was it the men's?) 300km outing for that evening. The gritted teeth and sticky-out jaws of the rowers symbolised their determination to row very fast and kill swans along the way...

Could Anu really be Jesus? Or is it all a dream that someone had and then they woke up and it wasn't true, like in Dallas? Will Osler row fast? Will Catz get pumped by everyone behind them?... Will everyone have to scrape Kirsty off her keyboard on Friday night?

e-mail Sean to find out... sean.taffler@keble.ox.ac.uk

Episode 4: In which "Fat Bloke" is revealed to be quite thin, and Sheen proposes to Anu.

"It's that bloke in the purple lycra", Thin Bloke wept as he collapsed in tears onto my shoulder, hugging me in a rather sad and pathetic unmanly way.

"Every time I feel like eating a cake or a pork pie I just see him there in his purple unwashed lycra, gloating, and I just can't do it. I used to weigh seventeen stone and people said I was almost heavy enough to join the OUWBC squad... but now look at me: I'm a shadow of my former self at only 10 stone 12 and a half pounds!"

I wrenched myself away, shocked and dismayed at the fate of this poor soul. But who could the bloke in the purple lycra who strokes the St Anne's 1st Torpid be?...

Meanwhile, in sunny St Catz bar, at 20 past 11, Shun was buying himself a malibu and pineapple (Catz bar stays open later than everywhere else, which is good, but you have to wear wellies due to the 6 inch layer of congealing beer and vomit on the floor, so I wouldn't go there if I were you).

"Ah, now that's a real man's drink" said a voice from behind Shine. He swept around, his big long hair flapping in the breeze. It was none other than Anu himself, in a lovely maroon and sky-blue frock. He had had his hair cut specially for the evening, too.

"Oh my God!" groaned Sheen, "I can hardly keep my clothes on, you sexy beast! How about I cook you fabulous pastries and then I marry you, honey?"

"Oh, Shine," gasped Anu, simpering ever so slightly, "I thought you'd never ask. But..."

"But what, my little love cabbage (with a redcurrant sauce, garnished with wild mushrooms)?"

"Well, you see, I'm not really in the willy business... in fact, I'm a lesbian."

"Pah! I knew that! You don't think a little detail like that would stop me, do you? No women can resist my attentions - I am irresistable, and a sex-God from the planet Zap!"

"I'm afraid this is one girl who's just going to have to refuse. And No means No..." said Anu firmly, pouting and putting his hands on the tight-fitting waistline of his rather fetching maroon and sky-blue lycra cat-suit cum ball gown.

After a failed grope and a quick slap round the chops, Anu flounced out gracefully, and Sheen was left by himself, almost, except luckily for him Kirsty rescued him, mistaking him in her alcohol-induced haze for her secret lover, whose name we don't yet know but who is the father of her as-yet unannounced child, and they left for her house to play Chocolate Charades. I won't explain the rules of this game to you all, since this is a family show, but you can all try to guess, if you have particularly dirty minds...

And the moral of today's story is: don't count your rowers before they've catched. Or something like that.

James

Episode 5: The Final Countdown

Even though the red flag flies above the sacred river like a rain cloud above Lord's cricket ground, sending the various crews scuttling for cover and peering out miserably from their crumbly old colleges (or crumbly new colleges in the case of Catz, where just the other day on high table there was this really nasty wet spot due to the roof leaking and they had to leave an empty space), the mighty Osler people continue to thrash and heave about in a desperate bid to retain the headship, and the almost as mighty Catz people sit around doing ergs and making voodoo dollies, whispering things which can't be repeated on a family newsgroup.

Meanwhile Anu has cast aside his funny frock and is limbering up in his stretchy leather spray-top and testing out his big hooter in what we now know as The Final Countdown...The Final Countdown to Torpids...

I spoke recently to a Christ Church 1st Torpid cox about her preparation for the Big Event of the year: was she dieting and going over diagrams of the river to work out optimum courses? Was she getting weather forecasts and sharpening her rudder to a razor edge?

"Oh, James, it's funny should ask about my preparation for the big event, because I've been looking forwards to this for ages. Well, I'm going home at the weekend, and after getting really pissed several times I'm going to put on my shortest dress and then hopefully if I get pissed enough again I can pull Jamiroquai and get to wear his hat! And maybe if I act stupidly enough I'll appear on the telly too!"

"er, Kirsty, I meant 'how are you preparing for Torpids', not 'how are you preparing for the Brit awards'", I said, getting slightly annoyed and jealous (of the big J, that is, for being pulled by Kirsty).

"oh... that. Well, Christ Church feel they're going so well at the moment that we don't need any outings. It'll be more frightening for the opposition, too."

At that moment, Mr Grumpy burst onto the scene. "Oh no!" he moaned, his head in his hands, and a small storm cloud raining steadily over his head.

"What's the matter, Nigel?" we cried in unison, worried that perhaps his dog had died or that the world might be about to end...

"It's torpids. It'll all end in tears, and the newsgroup never has any news in, and call me a grumpy old graduate git, but

"YOU'RE A GRUMPY OLD GRADUATE GIT!" everyone shouted.

Nigel paused. "I didn't mean that literally. I just meant that I needed cheering up somehow."

Suddenly, as if by magic, the senior umpire appeared. "But surely you've heard?" he exclaimed.

"Heard what?... More terrible news? Has one of my ex-girlfriends written a book detailing our sexual exploits and then posed naked in the Sun? Has one of my DPhil experiments gone drastically wrong and scarred a poor fluffy bunny rabbit?"

"No," said the senior umpire, "Didn't you know that, in a bizarre and unlikely twist that makes everyone feel good at home, that that old coxbox that you were having auctioned at Sotheby's turns out to be a priceless 16th century Cuthbert Nielsen original, worth 14 million pounds??"

So Nigel became suddenly ungrumpy, and left the set on a rapid holiday to sunny Nottingham (they have a 6-lane regatta course there, with all mod cons)...

Will Kirsty reveal what the big J wears under his hat (and his kilt)? Will Catz pop enough voodoo dolls to do the real thing? Will Susan's teeth ever recover from all the gnashing they've been getting recently? And where does RQ fit into all of this? Find out soon...

Moral: some people have all the luck. And some people have short hair-cuts. But there's two things they all can't avoid: death and taxation.

Episode 6: The Torpids Fairy Tale

Every day the wicked RQ would ask the mirror on her wall "Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the greatest cox of all?" and it would reply,

"You, o Queen, could cox with your eyes shut, even though once you crashed in the gut".

This went on for some time, but meanwhile little Snow Jud was getting better and better and started to have delusions of grandeur, like believing that organometallic compound research wasn't all that it's cracked up to be, that Wrexham would win the FA cup, and that she was OURCs secretary.

Then one day, when the queen sidled up to her mirror wearing her all-blue OUBC special leggings and baseball cap, and asked it the same question, "Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the greatest cox of all?"

The mirror replied, "In coxing you'r pretty much a trend-setter, but that Snow Jud organizes things much better..."

In her shock and dismay the Q cried out and smashed the mirror into a thousand little pieces. Cruel, really. And who's going to pick up that broken glass, then? No manners, royalty nowadays. Tsk tsk.

Well, it was pretty much curtains for poor old Snow Jud then. The wicked RQ organized a big meeting for all her subjects in the magnificent opulence of the Bernard Sunley room in her palace, and after lulling them to sleep with a cunningly devised hypnotic therapy based on strange diagrams and interminable lists of things to do, she pounced on Snow Jud and had her bundled off into the forest by her evil huntsman and secret lover Niggle (there's always a secret lover, isn't there? It seems to make the plot more exciting and realistic, I think.)

Niggle the evil huntsman was a strapping man with flowing blond locks, a chest like an anvil and hands like big plant pots, only smaller and not as orange. His voice was like the roar of thunder over a newly charged coxbox and his gaze like the flash of lightning on a field of turnips. So sexy was he that his last girlfriend died of alcohol poisoning after they broke up, snogged a bloke with nasty jewellry, and then ended up coxing for Christ Church in her despair.

Anyway, Niggle rushed off into the wilderness with Snow Jud, who didn't know what was going on and kept saying "But Niggle, I thought you liked me - didn't last night mean anything?" and other such rubbish that fairytale characters keep wittering.

When they reached the rickety old bridge that stretched over the rushing torrents of the river Isis below, Niggle decided he would throw Jud so that she would surely drown. But then in an attack of decency he realised how he was being used as a sexual pawn by the wicked RQ and gave Snow Jud one of those life jackets before throwing her in. He still tied up her arms and legs however, since you can't go too far with this niceness business or everyone starts thinking you're a new man and then you get no end of hassle with girls asking you to wash up and put the toilet seat down after you use it.

Luckily for Snow Jud, her pitiful screams were spotted by a group of seven dwarves out for a late night outing in their boat (all miners, so Lord knows what they were rowing for, unless maybe their mine was underwater or up the Cherwell cut or something). There used to be an eighth dwarf, Ollie, but he decided that he would rather join the lightweight dwarves and call himself "Major", instead of being a miner.

As they heaved very slowly along in their cute little red and black crisp-packet style tops, they spotted the poor little Snow Jud and picked her up from the icy roiling waters. After plonking her in the spare seat they rowed back to their cutesy little cottage on the river bank with the clock outside and the sliding doors and told her she could make herself at home and they'd bring her weetabix every day as long as she cleaned up the house, emptied all the bins left from last summer eights, and stayed on as their sex slave.

The deputy-head dwarf, Anu, was particularly keen on this arrangement.

"We've been looking for someone to keep the place clean for ages, since the last head dwarf we had, James Fitzdwarf, was so messy and kept leaving scraggy red lycra and toenails lying about everywhere. Luckily he's left us for another mine over in Wallingford" he said.

"In fact, you don't fancy being head dwarf, do you? You see, the great producer in the sky doesn't feel I'm cut out for the job, even though I've cut my hair as short as possible and appeared in earlier episodes dressed in a frock and a leather spray top, and apparently your organizational skills are quite good..."

"Oh, I'd love to," cried Snow Jud, "but I need to know one thing."

"What's that?" All the dwarves asked, their eyes sparkling.

"Can I have one of those tasty black and red crisp-packets to wear?"

"I'm afraid not," said Anu, shaking his head sorrowfully, "They're special issue, and you only get them if you go to a girls' college. But you can have this lovely maroon t-shirt, lumo jacket and big hooter if you like."

"Oh, super!" Snow Jud clapped her hands together. "The fashion statement of the decade!" and skipped off to busy herself with mop and hooter getting the house spick and span for anyone that might turn up and visit.

Moral: Don't go to meetings with women that wear blue clothes. And certainly don't wander off with anyone called Niggle, since he might snog you _and_ your sister before you can say "Spend a Penny"!

The Rowers: Episode 7

Prologue (this is the boring bit that no one reads, but it introduces everything and is in fact very important)

(Enter chorus (well, one chorus-person, anyway): who is, according to Kirsty, short, balding, with a tendency to lardiness and a propensity for wearing crotchless leopard-skin Ron Hills underneath his fetching toga - all choruses wear togas - and his St Johnsons' XXXL hooded top)

Two colleges, both alike in dignity,
On the fair Isis, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where rowers' blood makes rowers' zephyrs unclean.
From forth the boathouses of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their blades
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Show that in comparison their colleges' hatred fades.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their colleges' pains -
Which, but their rowers' end, naught could remove -
Is now the two hours' traffic of our screens;
The which if you with patient years attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.