Saturday. Gloriously sunny weather. Climbing on lovely rough gritstone. No polish. No midges. No crowds. Cake. And, just to cap it all, we did a new route as well.

Yes, we were in the 21st-century Peak District, and no, I wasn’t dreaming.

We were at the Rollick Stones, a shapely little gritstone edge stuck in the side of a hill just outside Glossop. Martin and I were the only team on the crag, primarily there for the purposes of guidebook checking (”bright clothes and big butties, please”) but taking time to not so much savour as revel in gritstone as it used to be.

I bet Froggatt was heaving. Not to mention sweaty, midge-ridden and polished to death. Meanwhile, we had an entire crag to ourselves, and did I mention that we did a new route?

Nothing esoteric, just a pair of twin cracks that no-one seemed to have bothered to climb yet, which, once Martin had walked round the top and booted a couple of loose bits off the top-out, yielded a nice VDiff with a traditional stick-your-foot-in-your-ear-and-stand-up awkward finish.

We celebrated with cake.

We also struggled with, swore at and fell off some clear candidates for an upgrade, did a little cleaning and gardening, and found a gloriously photogenic leaning tower which I soloed, silhouetted on the skyline, smiling happily as the jugs just kept coming.

So, in short, Saturday was glorious. And then, on Sunday, we went to Crowden Great Quarry, which provided something of a contrast. The routes were steep, knackering, longer than usual for gritstone and needed a little care in places, adventure climbing boiled down and condensed into a single pitch, climbers launching themselves skywards to escape the depths of the quarry bottom. Routes were started with a cautious undercurrent of excitement, the eventual outcome still in doubt, and finished with a sense of having done something a little out of the ordinary. Once again, traditional crowded polished grit it wasn’t.

To avoid the polish and sweaty hordes, all we had to do was go a very little off the beaten track, look at a different book and accept a slightly longer walk-in and the exciting possibility of a bit of an adventure. And it really was worth it.

Try it sometime. You might like it. I may even bring cake.

Went to a club meet at the weekend. In Borrowdale, where, despite it being apparently one of the wettest places in the UK, the weather stayed dry. All the usual things happened: everybody went climbing, nobody got hurt, I had a minor wobbler on something I should have cruised, our pet novice seconded lots of routes and did his first abseil, food was eaten, beers were drunk, and once the pub shut everybody congregated on the campsite for one very quiet beer before bed.

The post-pub session (and indeed, the post-crag tea, the pre-climbing tea, the bacon butties, and the ohmigodwhydidigetoutofbed coffee) happened, as usual, in Mike’s tent: one of those three-lobed mothership jobs that looks like it’s about to spawn lots of little tents and take off in the general direction of Pluto. Mike and his wife sleep in one of the lobes and the rest of the club party in the rest of the tent, which gradually fills up with empty beer cans, pringle tubes, bacon wrappers and used tea bags. Nice bloke, Mike.

This time, however, we had a splinter group. In the car park.

Yep, in the car park

Two scruffy little white campers giggling happily to each other like two little boys doing something awful at the far end of the playground. Very much a family resemblance between the two - I think they were brothers. You could almost imagine them swapping marbles, comparing farts and cribbing each other’s homework.

I was lucky enough to get a lift up to the meet in one of them. The noise level in the back was far too high to hold a sensible conversation (the classic phrase “skeleton having a wa*k in a dustbin” springs to mind . . . apparently sound insulation is for wimps) and I spent most of the journey trying to take my mind off the near-puke-inducing boingyness of the suspension by studying the interior. The tidy, no-space-wasted, everything-fitting-exactly-together interior. There was even a fridge for the milk and a little cupboard for the cups. And then we got to the campsite where, being a wannabe-hardcore little nut, I pitched my very small, very cramped, proof-against-several-inches-of-snow-howling-winds-and-pouring-rain tent and spent the rest of the weekend sleeping in a pile of ropes, dirty clothes and escaping metalwork while drinking increasingly cheesy milk and trying to keep slugs out of the bacon.

And I lusted after white vans.

Now don’t get me wrong here - I’m well aware that I *could* acquire a much larger tent, some deckchairs and a folding sideboard (and a much bigger car to put it all in) and camp in luxury . . . until the weather started to turn nasty. Trying to dry a small tent in a very small flat is a pain, but trying to dry a large one would probably be more easily achieved by putting the flat inside the tent. Large tents feel colder than small ones, take longer to pitch - which means you get a lot wetter when it’s raining - and have far more surface area to catch the wind.

White van man, of course, doesn’t have to pitch anything. He just puts the handbrake on and nips into the back for a cuppa.

Just as there are tents and there are tents, there are white vans and there are white vans. There are some absolute monsters about - the motherships of the white van world, big enough to intimidate HGVs, equipped with a fully fitted kitchen, an onboard toilet (into which we do not pass solids), a TV dish, four bikes, an inflatable boat, a paddling pool and, given the execrable fuel economy, a Nissan micra clinging grimly to the back to avoid being left behind. I keep expecting to see one with a spare car on the roof. Watching the owners trying to get them down narrow country lanes is always amusing and they never fit under car park height restrictions. At the other end of the scale, we have the Daihatsu Bambino, somewhat akin to a bivvy bag with wheels. (I have a friend who sleeps in his but finds it a bit cramped . . . he’s five foot one.)

The quasar of the white van world, however, has to be the VW transporter. Just big enough without being so big as to be totally impractical, just adequately equipped without being fussy. And we had two of them, sunning themselves smugly on the campsite. So yes, I lusted.

I am not getting a white van. I can’t afford a white van. I don’t have anywhere to store a white van.

But, as a confirmed gadget-lover, I am still suffering from a classic case of white van envy. Mmmm, white vans.

“>

Earlier this year, I had a sudden and painful attack of social responsibility, and so I did two things – I wrote to my MP about the ongoing situation at Longstone Edge, and I went to a work meet at Horseshoe Quarry. Both of these were entertaining, in their own way – the MP (who I would suspect divides her time between London and her constituency on the outskirts of Birmingham) appeared to be having some trouble with the concept of a park containing any plant larger than a stinging-nettle or serving any function other than that of a receptacle for litter, fighting youths and canine bowel movements, while the Horseshoe bash was enlivened by free cakes and various people being shouted at by the Safety Lady for going too near the Dangerous Rocks (5+), picking up litter the wrong way, and being within 90ft of the chainsaw man without having attended an official chainsaw-watching course. All good fun, and the sort of thing that leaves one with a warm fuzzy glow of Doing The Right Thing.

So, to summarise – I spent a day making a quarry nicer to climb in, and I complained about the expansion of another quarry.

I went for a walk past the huge quarry at Longstone Edge recently. It’s got bigger since the last time I was there. Quite a lot bigger, actually.

But I am ashamed to admit that my first response was not “Omigawwd! It’s an outrage! Our national parks are being KILLED TO DEATH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” but “Hmm, looks like a nice line over there, wonder what grade it’d get?”

I’d suspect I’m not the only passing climber to have had that reaction.

Before anyone gets the flamethrower out, I certainly don’t think we need any more quarrying at Longstone Edge, and I don’t think that the Peak National Park, or indeed any other National Park, needs any more huge muddy holes in the ground.

But, in many years time, when the dust has finally settled and quarrying on Longstone Edge has long since finished, I can see the climbers colonising, the bolts appearing (Gary Gibson will probably be awfully old by then, but I’m sure it’s possible to invent a zimmer-frame-mounted bolt gun), and then parties of 22nd-century volunteers turning up to eat cakes, pick up litter and be shouted at by the Safety Lady. There may even be chainsaws.

I wasn’t around when it happened, so I don’t know for sure, but I do sometimes wonder how much fuss people made about Furness, aka Horseshoe, Quarry when the hole first started being dug? Come to that, I wonder how much fuss was made about the quarried areas of Froggatt at the time?

I think it will be interesting to see how the Great Longstone Edge Row looks in many years time – as a great environmental crime (which, from today’s point of view, it is), or as the creation of a new venue.

However, speaking from today’s point of view . . . the sooner they stop digging, the better.