outdoors-ish, real rock-ish

I've managed to find a bit of beach-side sandstone to train on. it's a man-made little bouldering wall, part of a cafe on the beach dominated mostly by sandy volleyball courts. the wall has lots of jugs for the kids but the base wall is a nicely featured compact sand with a smattering of pockets and crimps to make it interesting if you read between the lines. it made me realise how rarely in the past i've enjoyed the features on a man-made wall. it's a god-send considering font is in three weeks. already been twice, i went this morning so there were a few kids in their bare feet being watched hawkishly by their parents whilst this red-hooded paedo cleaned out little pockets with a toothbrush. go home freak.

i also went to a local route climbing wall to meet up with a local club. they were all nice folks, i'm not sure that we were the same demographic, will probably meet up again. the wall was grand, like ucd before the facelift.

was close to building my own little board, went as far as to check out plywood sheets in the local woodies equivalent but ultimately decided against it.

K2 Crawley

My nails grow longer, my skin more lady like. We had nearly two weeks of mostly blue skies here and I was too intent on saving money to get the train, by the end of it I had mostly stopped feeling that guilty niggle that whatever I was doing was a waste of perfect conditions.

Today it was damp out and at the end of my patience I headed off on the train to an indoor wall up the way. A farcical £11.50 in, it was the lobby of a sports centre, mostly routes with maybe a ucd sized bouldering section. Fifty yards away was the centre cafe which seemed to be pumping that delicious/obnoxious chip fat scent at me the whole time, like having dec breathing on me. Stayed there for the guts of 4 hours, did what I could to feel like a climber again despite having to share the bouldering section with kids parties half the time, fortunately they weren't the "here, mister" type. Good to do something again but am going to get the train up to sandstone next good weather I get, before I turn into a properly bitter ex-boulderer.

the doldrums

i didn't quite realise what a climbing backwater brighton was until now. In researching to come here I found two new climbing centres in the pipeline and I thought great but somewhere along the line that pipeline's got clogged and there's radio silence on when they're actually going to start building. so in the short term i'm a little fucked. Font in less than two months and all i've got is a chin up bar.