“I’m not sure I can do this.” 

Scrabbling desperately, he fumbles a quickdraw onto the bolt. 

“I think I’m coming off.” 

Weight all on hands, nothing for feet. He needs to get the rope into the quickdraw, but he can’t get a hand free. He’s tiring fast. 

“I’m gonna fall off!” 

He’s a big lad and he’s a fair way above the last bolt. He sounds more than a little stressed. 

“I’M COMING OFF!!” 

And suddenly, I am flying up to meet him.  

Loud laughter from all present. “Steve? You owe your belayer a pint, mate!” 

At the end of the meet, amid all the thanks for the beer/food/climbing and see-you-Wednesday, he grins. “Cheers for saving my life.” 

Funny, this sport of ours. We make regular attempts to get killed and our belayers perform ordinary, everyday miracles in stopping us dying. And we very rarely think anything of it.

 (Score so far:
Winter Routes (survived): 3
Sport Routes (seconded): 34
Sport Routes (led): 5
Trad Routes (seconded): 44.5
Trad Routes (led): 7.5
Trad routes (solo: 1)

3^rd weekend, so informal meet time again. Where one of the first people I walked into was one of my colleagues. It would appear that Adam is romantically attached to the niece of one of the club movers and shakers.

I hate work. I hate having a long commute to a remote office when I live five minutes’ walk from my base office. I hate having nothing to do when I get there. I hate it that on the very rare occasions when I do have something to do that something can be summarised as “Press refresh a lot. When it stops working, phone
Newcastle” which could quite frankly be done by a trained baboon. I hate my team leader’s “I want to be your friend” act and if I have to listen to much more drivel about his pet chinchilla I am going to break into his house and strangle the thing. The building reminds me of a prison, the canteen has been known to serve cheese-and-worm sandwiches and it’s in Telford, where most of the locals seem to be slack-jawed boss-eyed knuckle-dragging morons.

So it was, therefore, quite refreshing to discover that one of the co-irkers who I had previously filed under “twunts, miscellaneous, self for the annoyance of” is actually quite a nice bloke. But of course he is . . . he’s another climber, and they mostly are!

(And yes, I am actively job-hunting elsewhere!)

No climbing due to rain. Squelchy walk. As usual.

“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.

“

It snowed yesterday. Big fat flakes of the stuff swirling past the office window, soaking the shivering smokers and putting pretty white caps on the dustbins.

So, I reasoned, winter has arrived. And when I got home, I had a quick rummage in the kit cupboard, and equipped the car with, in addition to the usual scrapers and de-icer, several cans of self-heating coffee, a blizzard bag and a spade.

I think the spade may be overkill. I commute to work along some of the busiest stretches of motorway in the country and the chances of encountering an impassable snowdrift on the way to work are on the small side. Still, in the event that four feet of snow does suddenly materialise in the middle of the M42 . . . I have a spade.

 For similar reasons, I posess a folding snow shovel. This has seen frequent use . . . for making snowmen (just as no stately home is complete without a pair of stone lions guarding the driveway, no tent is complete without a pair of ice-tool-armed snowmen) and as an improvised cricket bat. (Top tip: Playing cricket with snowballs doesn’t work very well, although I *still* think that would have been a six had the ball not disintegrated when hit.) The one thing it has never been used for is its intended purpose, which is for making snowholes and digging people out of avalanches. 

There is, however, something pleasantly warm and fuzzy about knowing that if things did suddenly turn horribly gnarly, one is equipped to deal with the situation - not so much fearing what might happen, but secretly half-hoping that it will.

And if you should somehow manage to get avalanched in the middle of Spaghetti Junction, I have a spade.

I spent most of this summer under threat of redundancy. We lost a major project (nothing to do with the software, which the customer’s staff on the ground were as happy with as anyone ever is, but quite a lot to do with politics), and as a consequence those of us working on it found ourselves with a deadline of mid-September to find another assignment or get the boot.

I should have been far more stressed about it. I had a brief whinge at the start of the whole process and then settled down to a routine of turning up late, looking at the internal vacancies list, and then spending the rest of the day drinking coffee, writing rubbish*, browsing UKC and playing random Flash games before buggering off early to go home/geocaching/to the pub/away early for the weekend.

Then, with less than a week until the official Order of the Boot, I found another assignment - out of the firing line, as it were. And that was where the stress began. I am assigned to a horribly claustrophobic office an hour’s commute away, doing something I know absolutely nothing about. Even a mad comedy moment involving gritstone, a huge overhanging grass cornice and an ice-axe didn’t really help.

Fortunately, when I rocked up on Monday - suit pressed, boots polished, car de-littered (I daren’t wash it, I think some of the mud is structural) - all that happened was an amazing amount of form-filling and the conclusion that I can’t actually do anything until the security boffins have scrutinised said forms and confirmed that I am not, in fact, a terrorist. The solution: “You have how much leave left? Would you like to take some of it? Good - see you in a fortnight.”

So, I have been ordered to go away and have fun. I spent today happily geocaching in a local wood, will be up early tomorrow for a few days in North Wales, will hit a club meet in Llangollen on the way back, and then aim to spend the following week bouldering and letterboxing on Dartmoor.

But, a nasty little voice keeps telling me, “You have volunteered for a job you don’t want to do. Why didn’t you take the redundancy and climb for a year?”

Child of my times that I am, I can’t bring myself to do that. And so, I am under orders to go and have fun.

(*IE random verbal doodling, some of it in verse . . . and quite a bit of this blog!)

Apparently the club hut was 50 at the weekend. Or possibly it was the hut warden. Or possibly the hut warden’s dog. But, whatever it was we were supposed to be celebrating, it was a good excuse for a marquee in the garden, several barrels of beer, music, dancing, general revelry, and a pig looking somewhat surprised to find that someone had not only gutted it but impaled it on a spit as well.

This also meant that, as well as various newbies enticed along by the prospect of beer and pig sandwiches, members of the club who hadn’t been seen for years came crawling out of the woodwork - all those, ahem, ‘mature’ members widely assumed to have long since died, emigrated, or stopped climbing and taken up morris-dancing. The hut was packed to the point where late-comers found their choice of sleeping spots limited to the toilets, the coal-shed or sharing a bench with the beer-barrels, and for once I wasn’t the last person out of bed.

It also meant that, rather than being the fat weak punter tagging along behind the fit and talented, I actually found myself in demand, due to having brought ropes, rack, and enthusiasm and hence being the ideal partner for  people who don’t lead yet, people who last led twenty years ago, people who can’t read maps, and people who can no longer see well enough to read maps. I had a very pleasant amble up a two-pitch Diff - the top pitch being a glorious slab with just enough gear - abbed off another route in pouring rain, persuaded someone to do his first lead in absolutely ages, and went for a long walk round a reservoir with superb views and endless seas of purple heather while explaining the difference between a footpath and a bridleway to two new members whose acquaintence with the delights of OS maps was only minutes old.

And I really wasn’t trying. Normally I tend towards the view that getting off the hill without recourse to a headlamp feels like a waste of daylight, that climbing in the rain is perfectly possible and that there is always time for one more route, but, on this occasion, I was happy to come off the hill early for tea and buns. There was no pressure at all to perform, which just made it all the more relaxing.

So yes, I got virtually nothing done. But it was still - in a relaxed, ambling sort of way - fun.

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.

I love climbing. I love the physical poetry of movement over rock, the craftsman’s satisfaction at seating a well-placed nut, the lazy camaraderie of people who choose to label themselves climbers. I love sunsets at the top of Stanage. I love looking down on trees. I love doing something that is still, to many people, a little bit “different”.

I hate climbing. I hate being cold. I hate training incessantly in an echoing chalky bus garage and achieving precisely bugger all. I hate failing miserably on routes well within my ability and I hate being the rubbish one in any given group of climbers. I hate being scared.

Love and hate, like many extremes, are simply two sides of the same coin.