Pink Paintballs Don’t Taste Like Strawberry

Yesterday was Phil H’s 21st and his parents generously paid for a bunch of us to go paintballing and then have dinner in London. It was a Skirmish in Dormansland, near East Grinstead. In teams of 9 we played about 12 games which were suitably varied although my only complaint would be that several of the fields could do with being more balanced. The first hit I took was a nasty finger shot that broke the skin, but fortunately that was the sum total of drawn blood for the day (well, from me at least). My favourite shot was a long one from atop the Mexican fortress, hitting a very startled Ben H on the top of the head (he’d wrongly assumed he was totally safe behind cover and some distance away).

Zaki would probably like to warn you that, despite appearances, the inside of pink paintballs tase absolutely nothing like strawberry yoghurt. I would have though that was self-explanatory, it being paint and all, but other people are apparantly more thorough in their tests.

With a few hours to kill before dinner at TGI Fridays, a few of us headed back to Phil’s flat in Vauxhall. For those who haven’t seen it, he basically has the bachelor pad you would dream of, a few rooms filled with expensive electronics in a swanky apartment complex with a balcony overlooking MI6. His proudest new acquisition is one of those professional metal dance mats for Dance Dance Revolution on the PS2. I realised once again why I loathe DDR. It’s not that I don’t accept that it does require a high level of skill and coordination, and can on occassion look pretty cool, merely that it also rots your immortal soul. The trade-off is, I suppose, the individual’s decision.