Befontled.

A last minute trip joining a bunch of middle-aged ladies including Phil Murray, who were already out there with a spacious gite and hired pads. The weather was amazing, my climbing less so. I tried hard but a winter off any form of training proved to be fairly debilitating for power-to-weight ratio. My tactics were also a bit mixed, not resting my skin for 3 full days before going, and sometimes throwing myself at easy problems in the baking middle of the day instead of fully waiting for the contrastingly cool and lovely evenings. 

In the end I managed to have fun because Font is brilliant and easy Font is just as brilliant....

....but overall the highlights of the trip were:

1. Watching a very fluffy dog roll repeatedly and giddily through leaf piles until it was a very happy leaf pile itself.

2. Introducing Williams to a variety of exciting music genres including 250bpm gabber driving to the crag.... "Utterly appalling and beyond comprehension."

3. Moutarde avec vanille du Madagascar, who would have thought it, this is delicious.

Hmmm.

So.

The whole thing got me pondering that given a reasonable track record in Font previously (often in less crisp weather)...

Calins Du Kim 2nd go

Bizarre Bizarre 2nd go

L'Egoiste 3rd go after driving overnight

Duroxamine 2nd go

L'Oblique in 30 mins

El Poussif in an hour with a golfer's elbow

...I'm wondering why it's been so much of a struggle since those halycon days. Well those days were a decade ago and it turns out that technique is no substitute for being having functioning digestion, functioning legs, and thus being light (and uninjured). 

Further, aside from my slightly shoddy tactics, previous trips have been strategically enhanced by joining groups of experienced mates / send train bellends who have been revising 6+7 or whatever it is for their essential number-bagging ticks and thus actually know which 7As are approximately 7A and thus vastly easier than all the 5C blue slabs I was wasting time and skin on (incidentally I do remember failing to work a red 6B at Rocher Canon for a full hour before very narrowly failing to flash Calins Du Kim 7A). Knowledge is no substitute for power either but it does help a bit...

Still, this hasn't put me off. I'm already thinking about a proper winter trip back after hopefully rectifying most of the above issues (the ones I can rectify without surgical intervention, that is).