Outdoor nonsense

On Friday we had an away day from work out at the Rufforth North of England Activity Centre (or whatever it is called). The morning wasn't huge fun (as it comprised lots of thinking about work stuff and I had a mild hangover) but the afternoon was much more interesting as it involved lots of team building outdoor things.

First up was clay pigeon shooting. The maddest thing about this is that they give you (and indeed me) an actual shotgun that you could easily use to kill someone. All it would take would be a single lapse of concentration and then Bam, dead person, intact clay pigeon. Luckily I didn't kill anybody. If I had, I suspect I would not be writing this here now - I'd be incarcerated in a dirty jail instead.

I fully expected to not hit a single one of the targets. I thought I might get lucky and get one or two, but that would be it. I was therefore quite pleasantly surprised to find myself hitting the first two pigeons with my first two shots. What madness was this?! The only people more surprised than me were... everyone else. It went a little downhill from there and I ended up with a final score of 6/15, and fourth place in our group of seven.

Whilst shooting is a fairly individual activity, the next things all required a bit more teamwork. We had to make a bridge over some fake water. And then do some walking around on big skis that take lots of people at once.

And then we had to make a raft to go over some actual (slightly smelly) water. Our raft design was frankly crap and this manifested itself by virtue of the thing falling apart pretty quickly, dumping its incumbents into the lake. I found that my natural role in the team was to stay away from the water and use my phone to video the whole sorry thing. It was very funny though.