On Day 1 of May bumps, I don’t think anybody really knew what to expect, (especially not P. Carey, who had only started rowing this term, and had never experienced bumps before.) The crewmembers all went their separate ways after our practice bung starts on the Tuesday night. Some of us prepared for the big day by watching Mulan in the JCR with several hearty renditions of “I’ll Make a Man out of you” for motivation. Other, more unfortunate people had to revise for a Maths exam the following day. We arrived at the boathouse in good time and relaxed in the sun for a while, enjoying coach Nick’s jokes. Armed with our new favourite coxing call, “Power, Poise and Pizzazz”, and Biondini’s bright red Ferrari baseball cap, we set off to marshal. After some bants with Wolfson (“Robinson, why have you stolen our kit?”) on the row up, we arrived on station just past the railway bridge. The 4-minute and 1-minute cannons were fired, we sent a handshake up and down the boat, and Henryk pushed us out to wait for the start cannon. Our start wasn’t awful, but disappointingly not as good as the practice starts we’d done on the way to the start. (The cox was happy just because she didn’t drop the bung). After “quite a tussle” with Girton M2 (in the words of the Cam FM commentators), we just couldn’t hold them off any longer and were bumped. Sadly, we didn’t even make it as far as any of our adoring fans who’d come to cheer us on, all the way from Buckinghamshire in the case of Peter Lacey’s lovely girlfriend. After shouting out “three cheers to Girton”, and watching the rest of the division row past, we began a long and fairly dejected row home.