Ashes to Ashes.

I went to Simon Davidson's funeral yesterday. It's very strange when people ask "how was it?", as if there is any sensible or appropriate answer to that question. "Yes, it was great, top funeral, would heartily recommend". Hmmm. I guess it was good insofar as saying goodbye and mourning the dead can be good. A lot of people came and several of them offered very appropriate and heartfelt tributes to his life - the introduction about his climbing skills in face of the inherent risk in the mountains was particularly well put. It was poignant for me personally seeing his coffin arrive in his latest dodgy van (a transporter, last seen when he and I were sitting together in the VW dealer in Llandudno Junction, discussing the imminent £800 repair bill), and his rope brought along (I was quite familiar being tied into that rope).

Simon wasn't a close friend, and it was more shocking then upsetting to hear he'd died, but we did do quite a lot of climbing together including several memorable trips, and looking over these has made me grateful and appreciative of what we did together...

An early visit to Weem where I started to master the walk-in and got to grips with the excellent slabs...


A great visit to Skye on his birthday doing some superb sea-cliff routes...

A long day out seeking some dry Northumberlad rock in an otherwise dismal summer...

A lovely long weekend on Mull with lots of varied climbing and superb scenery...

An excellent Jubilee weekend which was rescued from an earlier van disaster and turned into a great trip...

The usual semi-local dicking around at Balgone Heughs , North Aberdeen and Weem again...

A memorable big walk-in big crack attack day out at Binnean Shuas (last paragraph)...

A superb day doing my best routes at the mighty Creag Dubh (and a quick hit to Gairloch after)...

And finally the last summer in Wales, we had a few great days spread out at Gogarth (he came to North Stack, lead some easier routes, belayed me on the route of my life The Long Run, and we celebrated with a curry in Bangor afterwards), The Moelwyns with Coel, and an action packed evening visit to Pen Trwyn after the van debacle. And finally the obligatory Pizza And Pint in Llanberis before I left.

 RIP Simon, cheers for all the days out.

New Year 2016

New Year's Goals / Resolutions:

1. Go climbing as much as possible outside of Scotland and outside of the UK.

That's it.

Nothing else to blog about as the weather has been permanently wet for over 2 months now. I've been doing a lot of training indoors, at the gym, and micro-runs when it's been merely damp. Despite this I'd put on 4kg weight before Xmas (after losing 2kg in Wales), and am now the heaviest I've ever been despite training 5+ days a week, the tightness of my harness yesterday indicates this is more fat than muscle. I'm not sure about my actual indoor climbing benchmarking though, I think it is maybe 1 grade below previous for bouldering and 2 grades below for routes (the latter might be being out of practice though).