I always knew the Monmouth women were a fierce and fabulous bunch of women. What I didn’t realise, even after several years at the club, was quite how fierce and quite how fabulous. Until last week’s women’s squad Christmas party.
Fierce and fabulous Monmouth “ladies”
Nothing says Christmas like an erg covered in tinsel…
This is the event of the year for our ladies (some would say more important than the Women’s Head). And it’s notoriously … ah… lively. By which I mean violent. You see, not only is there a secret Santa that keeps us in laughs for a full 12 months. There are party games. And if you know anything about rowers you’ll know quite how dangerous that is. Rowers will stop at nothing – literally nothing – to win. There has been cheating. There have been stewards’ enquiries. And there is an awful lot of scuffling, pushing and shoving.
Don’t even ask…
By far the most dangerous game sounds pretty innocuous. All you have to do is blow an object – last year a ping pong ball, this year an M&M – across the floor and back using only a straw. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out. Last year I destroyed a brand new pair of trousers and boots, so vigorous was my passage across the club house floor in pursuit of the ping pong ball.
It gets congested around the pillar…
And this year… well, this year there was a bit of congestion around the pillar and I ended up with – not to put too fine a point of it – a boot in the face.
Ouch.
Not that I let it stop me. After a very brief pause to paint the air blue, I continued around the pillar, still doing my best to shove the offending boot out of my way, and completed the course in a respectable time. Only at that point was I prepared to apply a festive ice pack.
Festive ice pack
The impact has left me with a rather lovely black eye which looks exceptionally classy with my Secret Santa present – a Santa mini-dress (read into that gift what you will). Well, they don’t call me Trashy for nothing…
That unique air of quiet refinement…
So that’s the fierceness. But what about the fabulousness? Well, as part of the Secret Santa rules, each of us had to divulge to Santa a fact that nobody knew about them. And it emerged that, between us, the Monmouth ladies have snogged Adam Faith (yeah, OK, I had to look him up, too, but wait for it), Robbie Williams and… *faint*… Johnny Depp. In the Viper Room. As you do.
So the take home message from all of this is simple. Monmouth women are a force to be reckoned with. You mess with them at your peril. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.