Punting

Earlier this week while at Oxford for a day with the Catholic society students from the university, we spend sometime in the afternoon on the river punting.  I had heard of it but never knew what exactly it meant.  So on Tuesday had a first hand experience of it.  We were fourteen of us, but one declined because he was physically challenged and he said, he'd not be able to sit on a boat.  So we had three boats.  Each boat was to collect four cushions, a paddle and the punt  (a long metal pole) from the boat house.  I was on the final boat.  Each boat for oneself.  No one to paddle or help.  We were four of us on our boat.  The other two boats had someone who had punted earlier.  Ours had none.  And even before we alighted the flat boat, two of them declared that they're not going to punt at all!!  That left me with the punt. 

Anyhow after about 30 minutes of going round and round, hitting the banks at regular intervals, scraping through the overarching tree branches, almost falling in the water a couple of times, I was slowing getting a hang of it.  However the best thing was the two who had declared that they would not punt, (I gather they were really frightened to), reading out instructions from the internet as to how to punt!! 

On the whole, it was a wonderful experience - an hour of pure fun! 

At Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
L to R: Fr John, Josh, Fr Thomas (Oxford Catholic chaplain), DK, Arthur, Dominic, Callum, Alessandria, Christian, Adele, myself, Sam, Gabriela, ..., Levinas, ... (a member of the Oxford chaplaincy team)