The state of climbing 2019.

A factual analysis:

PROS:

• Ground Up guides - especially the North Wales Bouldering bible but also in general. Elegant, functional, and characterful, I like the consistent subtle prose and descriptions.
• The amount of indoor bouldering walls around - God knows we need them with this weather. Hurrah for commercial populist bandwagons that actually provide some good fun and good training.
• Beta chalk - getting harder to find because like all good things people want generic crap instead, but still as deliciously crunchy as ever. I had to go back to using Metolius SuperChalk when I ran out of Beta and it was like finely powdered butter on my fingers. Drying agent my arse.
• IFSC - constantly entertaining throughout spring summer and autumn. Production values are now nearly matching the exceptional climbing and (mostly) setting values and even Baldy Boscoe's commentary has transcended tolerable and is actually sometimes good. WTF did I watch before this was on regularly??
• South Stack - still the illest. It only took one route to remind me how deeply wonderful Red Wall was. My plan to live their for 2 months over the autumn failed dismally though. The best "roadside" adventure in the UK if not the world, and all quite amenable too.
• Peaks / Yorkshire sport climbers - quite surprising given the  pointless, miserable, unaesthetic, repetitive, puritanical work ethic sub-genre of climbing they're so addicted to, but actually mostly a nice and welcoming bunch. Being able to mix and match and share ropes and chat (blah blah polished crimp blah minging undercut blah blah polished knobble etc) with random strangers was a relaxed sociability I'd almost forgotten about.
• Building patios - a bit naughty but oh so nice. Not talking about Hayward's "let's build decking structures the size of a Swedish chalet in a sensitive nature reserve and then make sure they're hidden in all the topo shots" at Fontainfawr, just common or garden reshuffling of ground level blocks and stones. It's the closest to gardening I come these days thank fuck and sometimes more fun than the climbing. I particularly enjoyed dismantling the patio beneath My Private Idaho (hard lineless eliminate) at Crafnant and rebuilding it beneath Riley's Arete (mid-grade classic prow) - redistribution of patio For The Many, Not The Few!
• The amount of techy slopey weirdness indoor problems - generally because it means that walls are setting with half decent holds not the dismal old style Core and Holdz shite. But also they're quite fun and sometimes fat weak people with some outdoor nouse can do them.
• Dogs at crags - far better than people at crags. Infinitely better than squawking kids (how did those idiots get their trio of rampantly shrill grubs down to Moat anyway??) Apart from that one Buster at Trollers, he was a bit of a dick.

CONS:

• Alan James - gets his knickers in a twist because I post a polite but critical reply about the content of an article. Bans me on the basis that all I do is post negativity BUT SOMEHOW KEEPS THE OFFENDING POST UP - perhaps because it's got far more total likes/dislikes than the original article post AND has caused enough discussion for my name to crop of 41 times in the replies. Hope you're liking those page views, user engagement and advertiser views that my "ban-worthy but not censorship-worthy" (how the fuck does that work??) post was getting you. Then demands me to justify why I should be let back on the forum. Tell you what Alan, if you just apologise for your double standards and using my post to keep the discussion flowing whilst simultaneously banning me for it, I won't ask you to justify how you can get away with abusing forum moderation (I reviewed the UKC forum guidelines to know full well that I didn't contravene them) that much.
• The amount of indoor wall boulderers around - cunts, the lot of them. I don't know what's worse, that they all got into it indoors and are all vacuous shallow gym bunnies who aspire to go to the Plantation or Almscliff and think that Malham is the epitome of adventurous roped climbing (and clearly don't know how to brush the fucking holds indoors nor out if they ever get there) or that because they all got into it indoors, they're all far far stronger than I'll ever be, regardless of age, gender, body shape or stupid floppy hipster haircuts. Arseholes.
• Videos full of choppy editing and shoehorned slo-mo - I'm amazed this is still a thing, but apparently "unwatchabley annoying" is still an important ambition for today's budding Youtuber. What part of their brain thinks "I am filming this problem, and the movement looks really cool, so midway through I'll chop out random sections of the move and glue the rest together so it looks like my camera was malfunctioning, yes great idea. Maybe I'll slo-mo one hand slap out of the remaining 50% of unedited movement just to make it more jarring". Because I want to carve their fucking skulls open and burn out that part with acid until they actually use some fucking sense. Also special shout out for anyone doing a trailer for a po-faced pretentious bouldering film and then a teaser FOR THE SODDING TRAILER. You aren't making a $500 million Hollywood movie, get a grip.
• The weather - two days of heatwave or occasional dryness followed by two weeks of pissing wank isn't weather, it's shit on a stick. Where the stick is also made out of shit.
• The Climbing Hangar - One of the 3 out of 37 indoor walls that I've been to that enforces a strict shirt-on policy (presumably they don't allow girls just wearing sports bras either), and since the other two are council / general sports run, the only one apparently run by climbers, but clearly not for climbers who actually want to train, on a damp warm summer's day, by pulling hard. The reason behind the rule?? "It's just wall rules" Why?? "Because it's the wall rules".  OH JUST PISS THE FUCK OFF. Incidentally on the subject of how intimidating shirtless males must be, out of all the possible choices at The Boardroom (good wall, no stupid rules, go there instead), a dad and young daughter chose the shirtless meathead to ask to take a few photos of them in front of the wall. Oh the intimidation! Oh the horror! FFS.
• Mundane shit VLogs - The great thing about the internet is anyone can make and share content. The terrible thing about the internet is anyone can make and share content. And yes that applies to climbing VLogs too. Climbing footage is fine, personal videos are great, but if you're going to wrap it up as some heavily commentated fucking "lifestyle" diary, it better be remotely interesting and exciting. The same old same old with a lot of filler and some fucking blethering shite into the camera - FFS get your snout off my screen, if I wanted talking heads I'd watch some TV chat show, I want to see cool climbing, not some over-hyped dross. Bonus anti-points if you're spamming it all over social media without the slightest though to it's relevance or value. 
• Road cyclists - One of the main things putting me off moving down here. What's the point having 20,000 Peaks and Yorkshire crags on your doorstep if it takes all day to get there because you're stuck behind a flotilla of matching-logo lycra-clad cunts swarming like a cloud of road-based midges on their poncy fucking roadbikes that cost more than my Audi and weigh less than Paul B's toe, weaving around to ensure than any attempt to get past them and get to a crag in the same day you set off results in a head-on collision with a tractor and the self-righteous twats videoing it to smugly post on a Indignant Road Bikers 4 Justice 4 Ever facebook group. Thank fuck I can go the other way to Helsby or Wales. As for climbers who have partly given up and are focusing on road cycling more....don't get me started, there aren't enough swearwords (I'm running low already).
• Bog - I moved down to Scotland to avoid this malignant entity*, and yet somehow it's floated down after me. Wankerish stuff. Particular fuck off to the bog that I trod in in my freshly re-proofed £35 Decathlon waterproof shoes over the ankle twice, so they filled with brown slurry and the waterproofing must have worked because it wouldn't drain out. (* actually the malignant entity I moved down to avoid was Scotland itself).
• The lack of old school board-style indoor problems - Jesus fuck does EVERYTHING have to be techy slopey weirdness these days?? What if you actually want to train by pulling on holds and don't want success entirely dictated by hypothetical conditions in some grimey warehouse sweatbox, combined with a specific 3 minute window after setting when a hold has been chalked but before it's caked in gank, plus some bloody yoga-like flexibility and teetering on some random textured skin-scraping shelf. You can have too much of a good thing, try adding some actual holds FFS.
• People missing off UKB - You know it's in a bad state when people actually start replying seriously to Mr ScrapeScroat's threads the poor buggers. Bring back Dense, Dave, Cofe, Scouse, Jasper, Sloper and several others, I miss their banter and discussions. I'd even tolerate the return of Slackbot as long as he didn't actually post anything.
• People who don't go trad climbing - you're all disgraces. Do you think I want to be scraping lichen and moss off with my teeth, just because you're so lazy and cowardly that you'd rather be polishing up the Catwalk or burying Trackside under chalk ALL THE SODDING TIME instead of getting any variety and breadth in your climbing. I've been in away in Scotland for years and you slackers have let everything slide into the over-eroded vs neglected-and-filthy dichotomy. Rubbish.
• Speed ""climbing"" - the biggest piece of turd in the history of colossal pieces of turd. It's scarcely worth my contempt - but it gets it anyway.

So there you go. Objective science. You read it here first.

Two Years Of Total Yuck.

Hopefully this won't be reposted in 8 years time and entitled "A Decade Of Disease" or some such horseshit. It's now two years since I contracted gastroenteritis and never fully recovered - and still am not, although I am recovering (very slowly, mostly the nausea bouts have been sparse enough that I can stockpile prochlorperazine - at least until last week when I had two sleep-deprived nights in a row, ugh). Still it's been two fucking years and I'm not exactly thrilled about that, apart from generally feeling unpleasant, I feel like a reduced version of myself. Fiend V2 (post-DVT), sure there's 30% remaining leg fitness and 15% additional weight gain, but the spirit and sanity is generally intact. Fiend V3 (post-GE) ...is not quite himself. Not so much a shadow of his former self, but a slightly greyscale version.

People often highlight the silver lining benefits of going through injury and illness and indeed that is sometimes the case. For me, going through DVTs encouraged a fight and determination that I was previously convinced my flaccid moral fibre lacked. The bad soft-tissue leg injury at the same time as GE - I found patience dealing with it, and doing a steady job of healing, and trained my upper body well. Double tennis elbow - frustrating but I found some cool slabs.

The GE and subsequent "Post-Viral IBS Of The Upper Digestive Tract" (a catch-all term for something in your upper gut is b0rked and no the NHS has no idea what to do with it), well let's look at the pros and cons of that:

Pros:

+ Learnt a bit about the sensitive and complex workings of the gut that I never wanted nor previously needed to know.


Cons:

- Reduced sense of self
I just don't feel like myself. A bit wishy-washy maybe, but it's a constant feeling that I'm not me, I'm me with this disease inside...somewhat unclean (even more than normal), and inhibited.

- Reduced reliability
Because I can struggle to plan in advance of my insides are bad, and have to change and cancel plans.

- Reduced energy
Just more tired and less physical (and sometimes mental) energy.

- Reduced levels of activity
Due to less energy but also timeouts due to queasiness / indigestion, and making less big plans than before.

- Reduced pleasure in food
Mostly being on a much more restricted diet, with occasional general wariness about eating.

- Slightly increased weight
You'd think a restricted, healthier, lighter diet would help me to lose weight, but no. I've gained a bit, presumably because my body isn't digesting food properly and putting on weight rather than giving me energy.

- Inconvenience of trying to eat on the go
Obviously convenient snacking isn't usually healthy, but hey it's convenient and works fine as part of a normal diet. Unless of course you can't do it. Food out and about is more of a pain.

- More susceptible to stomach bugs
For obvious reasons.

- Increased food expense
Having to avoid cheap staples and cheap enhancements, and buying more "luxury" healthier food to make it remotely palatable. Added to the cost of nutritionist, naturopath, counsellor, etc......

- Increased depression and vulnerability
A combination of feelings about many of the above factors, along with a direct emotional effect of when I have nausea bouts, which can be debilitatingly prominent and upsetting.

- Reduced sociability
Because a fair bit of my socialising revolved around good food and good coffee. I'm not a boozer, but I relish sharing a good meal, a fun pub dinner, a nice strong coffee and pastry. Or rather, I did...

......

(In fairness there's a few things it doesn't seem to affect - I don't seem any more prone to illnesses like common colds, nor injuries (the tennis elbows were down to plain stupidity), and my cognitive faculties are fine as are my sleeping habits (despite needing a bit more)).

None of these issues, apart from maybe the lower energy and depression, are major in themselves, but culmulatively they actually make the post-GE situation more inhibitive and harder to cope with than the at-the-time "life-threatening" and subsequently "crippling" DVTs. Thus is the nature of the gut (and brain).

Yes this is me moaning again. Yes get a whole fucking orchestra of tiny violins (they can be the soundtrack to you clicking the Back button on your browser). Yes people are in much worse situations - and they can write about that themselves. But for me, as a dedicated climber, this is part of my situation and part of my climbing (which partly got wiped out by it in spring/summer 2018 and bits of early summer this year). Do all those cons above sound good and beneficial for the climbing lifestyle?? Errr. No.  Am I getting "used to it" and plodding on?? A little bit. Am I still healing?? A little bit. Am I healing quicker than I'm getting used to this bullshit situation?? I fucking hope so. I've accepted being Fiend-with-DVTs, I've no intention of accepting being Fiend-with-perma-PVIBSOUDT - because that greyscale version really ain't me.

Well maybe just occasionally...