Extreme Aunt Sally

The 1967 V8 Chevrolet Bel-Air Utah State Trooper’s saloon roared down it’s straight-through exhausts. Sticks in the trunk, Ratty at the wheel, and me riding shotgun. We pulled out onto a wet A34 with rain lashing at the screen, heading due south. It was the second game of the season for the Eight Bells Aunt Sally team and we were late. Ratty floored the beast to try and make some headway but this car was built for cruising not performance. It was engineered in the Chevrolet Automobile factory in 1967, the summer of love, pre Internet and before mobile phones. It’s sole reason for existing was to ferry fat police officers around the two lane black tops of the state of Utah looking for long-hairs to beat. Now some 39 years later Ratty was giving it maximum gas on the A34 on the way to an Aunt Sally game.

I can’t get into what Aunt Sally is about now, maybe another time, so those of you who don’t know look it up. To help with the concept a little: it is a pub game that is only played in Oxfordshire; it’s played outdoors and involves throwing sticks at a lump of wood called a Dolly. Nuff said. It is a summer game and really designed for those long hot summer evenings in English pub gardens, supping beer and the smell of wild flowers drifting on a gentle breeze.

The rain lashed down harder and as luck would have it, due a quirky electrical idiosyncrasy, the faster we drove the faster the wipers worked. Well, they moved across the windshield, wiping clear my side but skipping over Rat’s viewing area without any impact at all. The rubber seals leaked a little and my job was to squeegee the inside of the screen every so often to remove any excess water and demist at the same time.

We found the place where we were supposed to be playing and pulled into the car park, that is the front half of the Bel-Air pulled and there was no room for the rest so we left it hanging out in the street. It was a wet night, little traffic and no pedestrians. No problem. In fact the rain hadn’t eased up at all, if anything it had got heavier. The rest of the team were huddled under a makeshift gazebo trying to keep dry. We were first in and sailed to victory in the first leg. Ditto the second leg, which meant we had won the game, but the other team scraped through to win the last leg, which we had nominated to double as the beer leg. As if to compensate though, it was the cheapest beer I have drunk for years!

Our second win in the second game of the season. An extreme Aunt Sally team feeling at home in extreme conditions. We didn’t stay for food. Rat fired up the V8 engine and we roared off into the blackest of nights, aquaplaning our way back to the Rock, in time for last orders. Rock ‘n roll!