Anniversary.

Saturday was my birthday.

(Last year's birthday was pretty amazing - Pavey Ark ... glorious sunshine ... stinking cold ... scarcely less stinking Pylon King ... sitting on the belay of the classic Cruel Sister with my throat burning, staring out at the amazingly expansive view ... rushing round to Bright Beck crag after the rest of the team had gone back down ... ordering food from the New Dungeon Gyll pub by mobile phone from the crag and rushing back down to collect it well after last food orders ... spending 3 days afterwards hardly able to move after burning up all my cold-healing energy on that one day out... )

This year, I felt little like celebrating, mostly due to my elbow, and a hint of general malaise. However, surprisingly and against my better (bah humbug) judgement, it was still a good fun day, in fact one of the better "days out" I've had recently. After a rather plethoric quantity of (good) presents, we headed up to Simon's Seat in Yorkshire, somewhere that had been on my wishlist (for Easy Trad(tm)) for a while. A long, tedious drive, and a long-ish, tiring hike gave an important feeling of "being away from it all".

The crag was in great condition, almost all clean and bone dry. We climbed several routes, I pissed up an E2 5b and had an epic fight on a HVS 5b, hmmm such is the nature of things (those things being rubbish grading in both Yorkshire Grit and Rockfax Northern England!). The rock quality is excellent up there, it's rough, but not in a nasty crystally sort of way (which I usually don't like with harsher grit), but in a compact pitted sort of way. And liberally splattered with a smattering of pebbles, and more unusually, vast herds of millipedes. For future reference there are some amazing looking highball ankle-snapping solo micro route things...

Finally, we yomped down well in the dark and well after pub-food-o'clock, and decided a quick, simple curry in Skipton would suffice and restore moral fibre for the journey home. However this quick, simple curry was not to be as we stumbled across a branch of the acclaimed Aagrah and had one of the best curries I've had for ages. Tasty, consistently good, very clear ingredients so the dishes were all distinctive, all served smoothly and promptly. This rounded things off rather nicely :).

So happy birthday me, I guess...