The Gunfight at The Cane End Corral!
On Sunday 21st October, the assembled would be Outlaws and Gunslingers of the Goldteam Recruitment Posse participated in a paintball shoot-out event at the Weekend Warriors Forest Encampment, near Cane End in Oxfordshire. It was a really great day out, with us alternately attacking and defending our team’s and the enemy’s - assigned territories, ramshackle buildings, captured flags, contested oil drums, etc, with ruthless determination, dedication and panache.
The amount of rule bending, cheating, arguing with, or against the Marshals, was prodigious. And just how aggressive and homicidal some of our smaller, younger, or quieter colleagues turned out to be in action, was quite astonishing! We now believe it would be very easy to raise a brigade of storm troopers out of such people!
19 of our originally handpicked 24 members, (we assume enemy snipers got the rest on the way there!), eventually assembled on site, kitted up, armed and loaded our weapons, ready for the forthcoming fray. The battles that followed were so intense that we never really got to learn who our enemies actually were, although they certainly gave as good as they got, in the close quarter battles! In fact some of them were little more than kids, but with attitude!
We can really recommend this as a leisure activity to anyone who has never participated in it, or who has always wanted to have a go, but hasn’t yet got round to it. For a moderate outlay it is an exciting, safe and entertaining day’s activity, just so long as you don’t go mad on the sound of rapid or semi-automatic gunfire and incur the rapidly escalating cost, of a never ending stream of paintball ammo!
So many people gave a surprisingly good account, or otherwise, of themselves that it would not be fair to pick out just a handful of individuals for comment. Well they all know who they are! However one individual who clearly stood out, was the Game Marshall, known as Cliff, who stoically strove to maintain a regime of good order, discipline and sanity, and who amazingly contrived in the final outcome, to ensure that the day’s results came out, against all expectations on both sides, to be a conclusive DRAW? And if you believe that you’ll believe anything!
