He has indeed, forgotten his key.

There is, however, a more urgent problem. He’s forgotten Luke as well. And where is Luke, exactly?

“Have we got a ladder?” Dan seems to be a little bit excited.

Guddling around in the coal store, fumbling around the coal, wood, bicycles, lawnmower, saws, paint cans, hatchet and ninety miles of entangling hosepipe, it is established that yes, we do have a stepladder . . . which isn’t in the coal store at all, but in its proper place under the stairs. Out into the churchyard with said stepladder, where a horrible vision assaults our eyes. We have found Luke. And he is on the church roof.

And he is Stark. Bollock. Naked.

Apparently soloing the church naked seemed, for beer-related reasons, to be a really wizard idea. And now, of course, he can’t get down, and he’s stranded on the roof like some pale and hairy gargoyle.

The stepladder, needless to say, is far too short. We manage to coax him down as far as the guttering, where he nervously eyes up the rather dynamic move to the ladder and the probability of a groin-first landing onto a rather pointy grave.

“Get your hands on the gutter and swing!” The gutter bends alarmingly. No go. He retreats to the safety of the ridge-line.

“Can you throw me a rope?” No, not that far we can’t. That far would be a bit of a stretch even with some thin string and a weight, which in any case we don’t have. Time for plan B. Luke is to make his way along the ridge, slide down the far end onto the porch and we should be able to get him down from there. (Well, it seemed a good idea at the time.) Luke shuffles “a cheval” along the ridge, cursing far too loudly as the rough slates dig into his delicate bits. Dan and I cower behind the church, waiting for the rabidly Welsh-nationalist villagers of Pant-y-Gyrdl to realise that their church is being desecrated by a naked Englishman and come pouring forth with pitchforks and flaming torches.

Luke is above the porch.

“F*ck! That’s a well long way down!”

“Yep.”

“I’m not f*cking sliding down that.”

“We could always leave you up there.”

“Oh f*ck . . . I’m going to have to do this, aren’t I? Oh, f*ck. Oh, f*ck. Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”SlitherscrabblecrunchSPLAT! . . . as Luke slides down the roof, fingernails gouging uselessly at the wet slate, misses the porch completely and lands on first the stepladder and then Dan.

Silence.

Followed by a groan as Luke tries to disentangle himself from the ladder. Fortunately neither of them appeared to have broken anything, although the huge gouges on Luke’s bum needed substantial amounts of antiseptic cream and Dan’s shoulder was still sore the following day.

(He’s just lucky he didn’t slide front-down . . . I’m not rubbing cream into *that*.)

Still, to a climber, even the church must be climbed. Even when naked.

I was still laughing about it this morning, when I had to phone the elderly administrator of a local shooting league.

“Hello, can I speak to Mr A—, please?”

“Speaking.”

“I’ve got the list you asked for last night - got anything to write with?”

“Yes . . . and do you mind doing this phone call with your eyes shut?”

“Erm . . .?”

“You see, I was just about to get in the bath, and I’m naked!”

It’s like buses, isn’t it? You wait ages for a naked man, and then two come along at once.

Txt-spk iz gr8! It’s qix 2 typ, it’s EZ 2 rED, it sAvz b&width & U don’t evN hav 2 b abL 2 spL. It mAkz U L%k kewl & modern jst lIk aL d hip & hapNn ppl, n fact it mAkz U L%k so modern dat U do aL yor communic8ing by txt msg & nevr actually TLK 2 anybody. It’s gr8 cuz othRwIz U wud L%k lIk U wrte lIk letRz on lIk papR lIk wot dey Usd 2 do bak n olden dAz. Bsidez, it shOz evry1 dat U’ve got a mob fone & dat’s imprtnt cuz not havN a mob wud b jst so utterly unkewl. hA, Y R U guys trEtN me lIk som sort of illiter8 LUG kid?!

No, I didn’t understand it either. Thank God.

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.

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.

“>

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.

Health is important. This is, of course, why, in the event of illness or accident, many people would prefer to seek the advice of a group of strangers on the internet rather than do something so revolutionary as see a doctor. While the queue at the local casualty department may be so long that by the time you get to the head of it you will have either died or got better, an x-ray is still a better method of telling whether it was broken (as if having magically developed an extra knee was not a fairly obvious hint in itself) than asking someone who has never met the casualty or seen the injury and has no medical qualifications other than an auntie whose best friend was a midwife in the Great War. There is, however, the danger that a suitably qualified professional might suggest something totally unacceptable (such as “stop climbing and rest it for a few weeks”), and so a steady stream of the sickly and semi-crippled will continue to seek medical advice on the forum, where they will receive a bewildering variety of suggestions from leeches to magnets and feng shui and, of course, glucosamine. According to the forum, you can cure anything with glucosamine. Even death.

Just see a doctor. And while you’re waiting, here’s a garlic-and-horse-dropping poultice and some glucosamine.

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

The boulders stand in a typical urban park, hemmed in by Victorian terraces and the railway line. An old woman, well-wrapped against the rain, plods slowly along the path while her small hairy dog lifts its leg against the rusting goalposts. Hidden amongst the dripping trees, the boulders are new, as yet un-graffitied, the muddy scars their construction has gouged into the grass yet to heal.

You could almost imagine someone being murdered here, the scene immortalised in grainy newsprint monochrome, one abandoned trainer lying forlornly like a memorial to hope. But, then again, hope has led someone to construct – and pay for – five small concrete boulders, which are the whole reason for my being in this muddy wasteland on a wet Saturday afternoon.

We are in Northamptonshire, a county whose principal – and indeed only – entry in a climbing guide is the truly execrable Finedon Slabs. The only climbing walls date from the era when gluing bits of polished rock to the side of a sports hall was considered state-of-the-art. And now we have boulders. Not good boulders, not high boulders, not boulders with interesting features, not boulders with holds other than jugs – but they are, at least, better than nothing.

As a climber, I have a fascination with such things, and so I have sat through an hour-long bus journey and come squelching out into the park to investigate. An hour spent traversing around the boulders, hands numb with the cold, around and around and around like a zoo inmate pacing the cage, and it’s time to pack up and squelch off in search of a bus home.

Why do I do this? It isn’t real climbing. It’s of doubtful value as training. But it is a structure intended for climbing . . . and so, to a climber, this means that it Must Be Climbed.

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.