Christine Currie

After a pretty bad night’s sleep I was never going to achieve a huge amount today and I felt that the afternoon would probably be most profitably spent doing some baking. The ulterior motive was to end up with something nice to eat and to continue my quest to cook more than one thing out of each recipe book I own. I’ve been buying a lot of bagels from Asda lately and thought I’d have a go at baking my own. Baking is good fun but it’s also a very visual way of seeing how healthy the food that you normally eat is - much clearer than a list of ingredients. So, thanks to Nigella Lawson and her How to be a Domestic Goddess book we now have some really delicious bagels, and they didn’t take me all afternoon to prepare either!
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I was a bit dubious at first about going out night orienteering while nearly 6 months pregnant but I love being out in the middle of nowhere in the dark and figured that I’d be fine if I stuck to the paths so we headed off to Ocknell on Saturday evening. I’m really glad I went as the going was really good, if not a bit wet, underfoot and it was a beautiful night. The highlight had to be having a herd of about thirty deer stop about ten metres away from me. I could see their eyes reflecting back my torch beam as they stood stock still and hoped I wouldn’t notice them. I think they’d been startled by another orienteer.

Despite the fact that I was going so slowly I managed to make a couple of mistakes as it was hard to distinguish between the rough open and the runnable open in the dark. I only missed out on one ten point control as a consequence so it wasn’t the end of the world. Although no where near Dave, who got all of the controls, I wasn’t last. Thanks to Bill, Roger, Charlie and Kevin who all seemed to be helping in some way on the night.

It won’t be long before excursions like this become a wee bit more difficult so we’re trying to make the most of our last few opportunities for freedom!

We were up early on Saturday as I was organising a morning of coaching for SOC, WIM and SARUM orienteering clubs. It was a gorgeous frosty morning and the views of the Forest as we drove over made it well worth getting up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday.

The technical exercises were planned by a few people from SOC who are trying to qualify as Level 2 coaches with British Orienteering - no mean feat since First For Sport came on board and the amount of paperwork needed increased dramatically. I then planned the final exercise - a caterpillar relay.* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *
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