I was just eyeing up a nice piece of Brie when the lights went out. To be fair, it was at a time when one would normally expect the lights to be out, being so late as to be early. Then again, it *was* a UKC bunkhouse meet. The emergency lights came on - dimly - we had a poke at the fire alarm to try to shut it up, and then we just got on with the meet. The wine flowed, the cheese hummed gently to itself, and we ate, drank and were merry.

The following morning, the power was still off. So we broke out a camping stove, and got on with the meet.

Then it emerged that the water supply had failed. So we scrounged drinking water from the campsite next door, flushed the bogs with a bucket dipped out of the river, and got on with the meet.

It was so wet that friction was just another word in the dictionary, so a fellow UKCer and I decided that geocaching was the order of the day. Armoured in huge boots, swaddled in layers of goretex and paramo, we looked at the pouring rain, shrugged . . . and squelched out to get on with the meet.

I think it’s something to do with the mindset that goes with being a climber.

“Pint of Idle Sod, please.”

“Coming up, love. Not seen you in a while?”

“Only camp at North Lees in winter . . . you have to pre-book years in advance in summer.”

“You’re CAMPING? In THIS weather?”

“Umm . . . yep.”

Pause. Headshake. “You must be bloody mad.”

The following morning I unzipped the tent in a shower of ice crystals, prodded curiously with a spoon at the thin skin of ice that formed on a pan of water in the few seconds between pouring it and finding a lighter for the stove, and then went to Stanage. Where, predictably, the friction was great and the climbing conditions were absolutely lovely so long as you didn’t want to do anything that involved being able to feel your hands.

Freezing fingers. Ice on the inside of the tent. The barman was right, we are bloody mad.

But, in a climbing sense, only for a given value of mad.

“