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.

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A while back, I did something a little bit silly.

Alpkit were running a design competition under the catchy title of “CoLab08″. This looked interesting, but the conditions of entry were draconian to say the least and I decided that it would be far more sensible to steer clear and keep my large collection of home-made bodges (most involving gaffer tape) to myself. In any case, the general aim of the competition appeared to be “innovation in the outdoors” and, having failed dismally to invent the world’s first self-stirring mess-tin, I was feeling a little short on inspiration.

So, I decided I wasn’t going to enter, but I kept dipping into the Alpkit site and reading the entries. As you do.

 The early entries were, in general, less than wonderfully inspiring - that is, they had either been done before, solved non-existent problems or required a fundamental re-write of the laws of physics.

Then Alpkit changed the conditions of entry to remove most of the nasty bits.

This seemed a good time to submit a couple of the more practical home-made bodges - ie the ones that actually worked as opposed to proving hazardous to the user, any passing sheep and low-flying aircraft, spontaneously disintegrating, or turning out to be so heavy as to require a dedicated team of sherpas.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, it was at this point that beer became involved. As did a wolf costume.

Yes, a wolf costume.

 Really.

It didn’t work and, yes, it involved large amounts of gaffer tape. But the teeth on the ghastly effort were made out of a plastic with the useful property of becoming soft enough to mould easily at temperatures cool enough to handle.

I’d been thinking about getting new ice tools for a while. I’d had a good fondle in various gear shops and admired numerous funky spiky things with numerous different handles - none of them a particularly wonderful fit for my rather small hands.

Then, on the bus back from the usual climbing club pub session, I started wondering whether that interesting plastic would make a good custom handle. It turned out that it did. So, on the last day of the design comp, I submitted a strange plastic object, built and photographed at 1am while less than entirely sober, that resembled the offspring of a ice-axe and a sex-aid.

Worryingly, it made the final cut. I can only conclude that those responsible for the decision were themselves a little drunk, or possibly just in possession of a very warped sense of humour.

Then the full horror of the situation dawned. I was going to have to actually build the thing.

That was a while ago. Since then, my entire flat - and it isn’t a big flat - has filled up with prototype axe handles, I keep finding bits of plastic moulding in strange places and I’ve managed some impressively bloody self-inflicted injuries with a wide range of tools. (It’s actually quite hard to injure yourself with a tape-measure . . . I still managed it.)

In the unlikely event that I win the comp - which I very much doubt, as it’s too specialist a product to have much mass appeal - I still won’t make a profit on this. The to-do list gets longer every time I look at it and it’s been much, much harder work than anything the company I work for has ever required.

Next week I get to take the tweaked axes off to the UKC Glencoe meet to play with for real. The injury potential looks impressive. I can hardly wait!

But, assuming I don’t get avalanched, fatally choke on haggis, or get strangled by the rest of the meet for snoring, I will be at the NEC for the Outdoors Show, and, if anyone reading this is intending coming, I have one very simple request:

Find me and beat me savagely with a cucumber, malt loaf,  or ice-axe-with-a-custom-handle until I finally get the following important principle into my thick skull:

“1% inspiration . . . 99% perspiration.”

http://www.alpkit.com/colab08/entry/configurable-ice-tool-handles