Farewell, RAG Dash - a eulogy to tradition
Oliver Gale-Grant
Guest Writer
I imagine that most people reading this have at some point or another found themselves in their union bar engaging in some form of tribal activity, almost undoubtedly of mediocre entertainment value, probably engendering considerable risk to their physical and mental wellbeing, for the sole reason that it is a tradition.
Doing something just because your predecessors did it is, if you pause to think, a bizarre reason for continuing. Nobody amputates infected limbs out of respect for tradition, nor do you find GPs handing out vibrators to cure female hysteria. Well, not in London anyway. Who knows what goes on outside the M25?
Speaking of things that may or may not happen outside the M25, this weekend past was ICSM RAG Dash. This is one of the most frequently touted traditions in these parts. Nothing can stand in the way of RAG Dash’s status as a unique part of our identity as medics and a corner stone of medical education in west London – not the fact that nobody actually knows how long it’s been going on, which of our historical medical schools it originated in, or the fact that a huge number of UK universities also have RAG Dashes.
What is for sure is that it used to be a lot more fun. A recap of RAG Dash 1990 in the ‘St Mary’s Gazette’ reports with great gusto the prank played on the fresher contingent in which their passports were stolen as they slept waiting for their ferry home at Calais, forcing them to sneak past the port authorities and enter the ferry as stowaways. Several, it seems, failed to do this and were left in the hands of the French authorities as the boat sailed away. As there is no further mention of them in the report, one can only assume that they are still there.
Coming back to the present, all is not so rosy for RAG Dash this year. In fact, following a truly bizarre poster campaign that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a SAGA Holidays catalogue, only 13 people bought tickets, a roughly 90% decrease on the year before. This led to the Dash being cancelled. The popular response to this travesty amongst the organisers of RAG Dash is to blame the freshers, citing their lack of general merriment. Somehow the facts that there are five other years, that this same group of freshers have managed to turn out in record numbers to other events, and that the same group of freshers have so far raised a record total for RAG are all overlooked.
Whilst RAG Dash will probably not be sorely missed, the loss of another tradition, however questionable, can only be viewed as another nail in the coffin of medical student identity. After all, on what other trip can one hit a member of public with a coin filled bucket, whilst accusing all around you of wanting children to die, and then be thanked for doing so?
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