Cake n Cheese n Mix n Match meet – Oct 2016

Hold hard a minute, then!’ said the Climbers. They parked the vans, climbed into the depths of various crates and sacs, and after a short interval reappeared staggering under fat cake boxes. ‘What’s inside them?’ the climbers asked each other, wriggling with curiosity. ‘There’s Bara Brith inside,’ replied the Meet Organiser briefly; ‘coldcheeseBakedcamenbertApplePieCustardPlumandChocolateCakeLemonDrizzleCakeFreshBakedBread KiwiCheescakeFruitCakeVictoriaSpongeBrambleVodka—-‘ ‘O stop, stop,’ cried the Climbers in ecstacies: ‘This is too much!’ ‘Do you really think so?’ enquired the Meet Organiser seriously. ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut it VERY fine!’

Somehow despite stuffing ourselves silly, we also managed to get quite a lot of climbing in and the weather was fine until mid sunday afternoon. The complete team at the hut consisted of Andy Brown, Coel Hellier, Liz Fowler, Kevin Raisin, Ken and Anne Daykin, Graham and Mary Titterton, Hilary lawrenson, Adele Long, Claire Wilson, Nigel Bassam, Dave Jones, John Bucke, Keith Turton, Pete Murphy, James Rowe and Peri Stracchino. On saturday groups headed off to Stanage and to Froggat, with a splinter group (Adele and Dave) going to the Western edges. On Sunday most people headed off to Stanage, with John revisiting Lawrencefield after a 30 year gap and another splinter group going up to Bamford. Despite the vast quantities of cake everyone tried quite hard during the day, highlights including ascents of Archangel, The Strangler (Andy and Coel), Goliaths Groove (Ken and Kevin), BAWS crawl(Liz and Andy), the Tower trio (Tower Chimney, Crack and Face) and Milsoms Minion (Pete completely suprised himself by finding it easy). Nigel discovered he can climb a grade harder on grit than he thought, and Ken was particularly busy, ticking off eight routes on saturday and six on sunday. James shivered our timbers with his description of being washed into the sea at Pembroke, Claire did Froggat classics and Graham and Keith acted as trusty local crag guides.

With 18 people on the meet in some form or other (some staying in the hut, some in vans and some just day visitors), the car park was under severe pressure, and at one point car shuffling operations resembled one of those christmas stocking games where you have to move all the letters round in a little tray with just one space left, so that the day visitors cars could escape the overnight stayers. At one point a van somehow ended up with one wheel over the edge of the track in proper Italian Job style and was totally unable to move, other than the worst case scenario of a dramatically downwards direction. Eventually someone said “Hang on, lads; I’ve got a great idea” we rigged up a winch system and out came the van. Next time you hear someone say “you could hang a bus off that” you can confirm its true – you heard it here!

Peri Strachchino

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