FAIRBAIRNS!!!!

 My life for the past week or so has, to be honest, been really fucking weird. I've spent quite a lot of time

• Delivering mugs to different colleges.
• Asking porters very nicely to look after mugs as they never fit in pigeon holes.
• Designing mugs for people.
• Scanning said drawings of mugs.
• Swearing at my scanner for being fucking stupid and not giving me exactly what I wanted straight away (the fucker - you want me to EDIT stuff?!?!?).
• Building boxes to post mugs to people (actually quite fun - I've been sawing bits of corrogated cardboard with a bread knife then applying the "lots of packing tape wooooo!!!!" principle.)
• Going to the Post Office with barbarically packed parcels (amazingly it only costs about £2.20 to post a mug + cardboard + epic parcel tape parcel, which is pretty pleasing). 
• DREAMING ABOUT MUGS CHASING ME.

 It's alright though. I do genuinely like your emails and spreading the tea love :-) There's another lot on the way, including a few extras of these two if anyone wants them (drop me an email if keen):

 I'm also going to relegate future mug activity to the page at the top to avoid pissing people off with continual mug chat. It's going to have epic flowcharts in. Probably.

But yes. Anyway. Fairbairns.

For those non-boatie/non-Cambridge, Fairbairns is the big college race on the Cam last term (but was postponed due to ice to January). Me and 3 ex-CUWers decided it would be awesome to do a scratch coxed IV and to wear the most horrendously clashing best kit possible. So we did. And we looked like this:

 Or more precisely, this:

Now I feel this image deserves a little anaylsis.

In the stroke seat you see my good self wearing The Leggings underneath my lycra (for extra hotness), a London Underground shortsleeve (I think maps are awesome, especially on shortsleeves - can you image how fucking cool kit with, say, the map of Middle Earth on it would be? Or a Underground map onesie?!?!) and The Oakleys. Because I have spent quite a lot of time sculling you will observe my outstanding lack of rotation. The same applies to 3 and Bow. I also appear to be not in the slightest bit connected, which is a little worrying as everyone else is....

*Not shown* My complete lack of ability to get my blade out the water for any part of the race. (Either the rigging was a bit wrong or I am a complete retard. You decide.)

At 3 you see Chiara in a CUW onesie with giraffe print down the side, a purple, yellow and black shortsleeve and a rather nice orange visor. Good choice there.

At 2 you witness the only one of us who remembered what upper body rotation was and goddam yellow shiny leggings under blue boat lycra. And an Xchanging longsleeve. Best dressed award goes to Jane!

And at bow we have the revenge of The Leggings and an Oxford shortsleeve. Oh, and Sarah's The Fucking Sunglasses. Woo!

Our cox Chris (who none of us had meet before the race) was quite possibly completely terrified of the sight before him (but who did a stirling job nevertheless).

So, racing. Racing can be summed up thus:

 

The rate 28 thing was mainly because I COULDN'T GET MY FUCKING BLADE OUT THE WATER. But still, we chunked it along.

Excitement came from us very nearly crashing into a Caius IV who we were chasing. It turns out you're not allowed to overtake until a certain point so we ended up having to stop. Twice. Bad times! The problem is, when your racing, your mind only has this train of thought:

Therefore, all four of us rowers were like "We want to gooooooooooooooooooooooo" and Chris was like "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" and we swore a lot at nothing in particular.

The other excitement came from the last ~400m of the race when we were in sight of the Corpus Christi IV ahead of us.

Chris: They're seven lengths ahead!
Me: (Thinking)

Chris: SIX LENGTHS!
Me:

(I'm pretty certain I didn't say anything comprehensible at this point)

Chris: FIVE LENGTHS **beep** annnnd wind it down.
Me:

 Not enough river. Annoying that.

I <heart> racing.