Nick is a climber!

Except, he's not really.  I have climbed three routes within two months, unfortunately two of them were the same (for logistical simplicity).  The Cracks at a mere HS 5a was hard, and damp, and Oxine at VS was once again steady, but should be with the second ascent this year.  Not exactly a stellar performance.

We did have our own personal photographer this time though, so here are some of Big Jim's (as to differentiate from JfW) snaps.  Thanks Jim.

Mike 'I prefer rambling' Cross

Dirty Weekend and Bellatrix Laspeed

A couple of weekends ago Lee, James and I did the Rat Race Dirty Weekend – a 20 mile, 200 obstacle, race.  It was okay.  The river sections were really fun (apart from for James who lost his specs and then got hypothermia, we put it down as a bad day at the office) but some obstacles had a lot of queuing and there were quite a few using alu scaffolding which wasn’t hard, just uncomfortable.  The final big ‘team’ walls were a comical mess of poor technique.   It wasn’t that hard, yet it was also quite draining.  We finished in about six and a half hours, which put us exactly mid-table (across all categories) but we stopped for a pretty long time in the middle.

James’ experience has made me wonder of the worth of such long events – normally I am ‘hardest, longest, toughest’ but running long distance requires a slow pace which seems at odds to the gun-ho obstacles.  So, after I complained about the events safety processes (James really was that cold!) and received a hefty discount, Lee and I have entered the Men’s Health Survival of the Fittest in November, which is a measly 10k, but should allow us to blast it (we even paid the £5 extra to start in the first wave).

In other news, Felicity is dead.  Our beloved Fabia vRS has been part exchanged for a smart new car after we decided the broken power steering was too much and too expensive to warrant repairing.  And what a new car it is!  Say hello to Bellatrix Laspeed; an Octavia Estate vRS Blackline Edition.  She is a DSG automatic (flappy paddles!) and I must say, I am an immediate convert.  She is also reasonably rapid.

Is it possible to be more middle-class?

I sit typing this while working from home on the laptop with the back doors wide open, eating goats cheese on artisan bread while the workmen fix the Smeg dishwasher whilst drinking Nespressos.