The Afternoon Run of 3rd June was the day of the Great Rip Off! It shows just what mugs cyclists can be. If you are enormously rich and are looking for ways of spending your wealth - and also enjoy queueing for ten minutes just in order to purchase a large sticky cake which knocks a hold in your appetite the size of a microchip - then look no further than the restaurant near the craft centre at Dartington.

After a most enjoyable ride to Staverton via Red Post and then down to Dartington for a walk around the immaculate gardens, we had this mad urge to have a cup of tea with perhaps the odd cake! Well, human psychology being what it is, it seems that when one queues for a long time, during which period one spends much time wondering if it is worth queueing at all, that when one finally arrives at the front of the queue one feels obliged to purchase what one has been queueing for, irrespective of whether one now thinks that what he/she has been queueing for is at all worth the wait (that’s my theory anyway!!). I think this was the situation which we found ourselves in because we ended up forking out vast sums of money for an extremely mild blend of tea and some exceedingly gooey cakes.

So it was that with slightly dented morale (and appetite) we wandered through Totnes and Berry Pomeroy to Marldon and then home for some real tea!

(Graham Brodie)

[We have been unable to find attendance records for this period, so the attendance list for this event is incomplete]