Since I started writing for Funny Women, I’m sure many of you have come to know me through my writing. I’ve covered a fair few personal things. To date, you’ve discovered I made a half-hearted attempt at dating, hate making pasta, think my Dad is a spy, and said a fond farewell to my last surviving grandparent.
What you might not yet know about me… is that I’m a LARPer.
LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. It is not THAT ‘Fifty Shades’ kind of roleplay. We’ve had the occasional light-hearted giggle, but for some reason I say ‘roleplay’ these days and everyone assumes I own a whip. Ugh.
This is difficult to explain to people. If you’ve seen the film Role Models, it’s more or less that. If you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy game, it’s that but in a field for a whole weekend. If neither of those cultural references make any sense, congratulations on your successful career in watching paint dry.
Essentially, what I do three times a year is spend a few days running around a scout camp dressed as a skeleton. Or maybe as a zombie, or a tree, or a ball of sentient lightning. Carrying a large fake sword made of fibreglass and latex, and hitting everyone else with it as I go along.
Does that make sense so far? Good.
The group I LARP with always meets over the Easter weekend. It’s the longest event that we run, thanks to the added Bank Holidays. So I’m (sort of) freshly back from the most recent one.
You’d think the storms and near torrential rain would’ve given us all a good wash. For one of my friends, this substantial amount of water wasn’t nearly enough to cleanse me. He had other ideas on the amount of liquid I should be liberally covered in.
I was on the attack, latex sword brandished, and he wasn’t ready. The only thing he had to hand was a water bottle. As such, half the contents went straight in my face. I fell over in shock, onto some nice wet grass that made my butt as dew-dropped as my glasses.
‘Defending himself’, my butt. If I hadn’t been laughing with the absurdity of the whole thing… And it was absurd. There I was, dressed as an elemental burning fire hound, and he actually tried to put me out.
Some may argue that I’m lucky if that’s the most shocking thing that happens to me at a LARP event. I’ve seen a lot in my time, for sure. In 10 years of LARPing, I’ve watched a lizard pole dance around a spear, propositioned an ogre while dressed as a rat, and collapsed with summer heat exhaustion under four layers of fur. A little water should be nothing by now.
What gets me is the added insult to injury. If a woman can’t avoid being splashed in the face with Highland Spring when it’s already bucketing it down, what is she to do? Had my friend been driving and done a drive-by soaking, I could’ve had him arrested…
