Lament to lost activities: Rock Climbing

Alternative title: Life Turns 4 Grounded

I hadn't intended to do another one of these following a jibe from one of my colleagues that I haven't got anything better to do with my time than concoct these life.turns entries.

Reflecting on this, the whole point of these blips is that there are other things that I would rather be doing, only that there are obstacles that get in the way of pursuing them. We have had decrepitude for caving and inadequacy of equipment for mountain biking. In this case, the absence of a climbing partner is the problem.

My long time climbing companion became a father two years ago, and paternal duties and responsibilities have prevented him from getting out on the crags. Wifie shows no interest in becoming a crag bunny, and well, it is difficult to find people of sufficient competence (to make up for my lack of it) to entrust one's life to on the end of a rope.

Climbing generally takes two people. Yes, there are those who solo routes, even very hard routes, but I'm not one of them. There is also the house of sweat and resin, otherwise known as the Kendal Climbing Wall. This is not a desirable place to go if it can be avoided, it's worse than a gym for posing, muscle bound hulks with personal hygiene issues. The smell of perspiration tends to rise and it hangs in the air about 30 feet off the ground, not pleasant. We usually go there once a week in the winter to help maintain strength for the real thing, but on my own I can't summon up the resolve.

So here I am all geared up and three feet off the ground. I'm wearing my full rack of gear, which perhaps looks impressive to the uninitiated, but is quite inadequate by comparison with most climbers' collections. One of the points of climbing is to appear macho, big and strong, and as a bowerbird adorns his bower with colourful flowers and trinkets, so the climber adorns himself with an amazing collection of shiny metal gadgets that rattle and chink with every movement. Men also generally like to have all of the latest gear, and climbing is perfect for the gear collector with a huge range of highly coloured nuts, cams, hexes and friends to hang off your harness.

Note that I am also wearing my UN peacekeeper's helmet. I first bought this for caving, and when I replaced it with a nice new Petzl colander helmet (see the caving blip), I started using this for climbing. Its detracting feature is that one of the leather straps now leaves a brown welt across the forehead, which I'm told is not very cool when we are hanging out in the pub boasting about the hard routes we have climbed.

Anyway, in the absence of climbing, blipping is a better substitute than watching TV. It is very satisfying in its own way, but it does alas lack the adrenaline buzz of climbing. One day when the little lad is a bit bigger and fancies going climbing with real men, I'll get to combine the two activities.


The tree from which the rope is suspended, by the way, is our pride and joy. It's a dawn redwood, a deciduous conifer from the Sichuan-Hubei Region of China, and unknown to science until 1944. Maybe a bit big for a small garden, but it would be sacrilege to cut it down.