UKH

It's life Jim, but not as we know it.

“I’m going to start climbing,” a friend told me last summer. My mind raced back to when I began climbing forty years ago. Learning to climb then meant you had meet up with some experienced climbers and learn the secrets of their trade. That usually meant meeting bearded young men in the back rooms of pubs. They’d give you old pieces of equipment no one used anymore, smiling, “Just to get you started.” I thought of my days in Sheffield, driving out to Gritstone edges in my clapped out Marina, I thought of sitting in Grindleford Café, drinking tea and eating bacon butties, while we watched the rain run down the steamy windows. I thought of shaking my way up easy climbs, taking the skin off my fingers on the rough rock, being shown the mysteries of rope management by a grey bearded climber.

More than anything else, of course, I thought of going…outdoors. Here I made my biggest mistake, that wasn’t what my friend was talking about at all.

Outdoors! Why would anyone want to climb there?

(Blog post, complete with my first cartoon!)

Read more here https://johndburns.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/its-life-jim-but-not-as-we-know...

In reply to John Burns:

An excellent rant! Agree wholeheartedly

In reply to John Burns:
Thanks for linking john, as always sort of disagree but like reading your stuff . Very much like the outcomes cartoon , would be a good poster / t shirt . Just made me think of an incident some years ago. Climbing with another poster of this parish at a well known Lakeland indoor climbing venue , lateish on a midweek evening we got caught doing "jumping practice", in preparation for an upcoming sport trip , we were usually careful not to get caught but slipped up . The ensuing telling off , given by a member of staff who had a reputation for grumpy ness was suitably long and patronising and I suppose well deserved. We of course both took it like naughty school boys . Shuffling our feet and looking at the ground .Yes sir no sir , won't do it again sir . We would now be compelled to sit through a PowerPoint made up of your cartoons before being allowed back in to the wall , like a speeder on a speed awareness course .