Martin Kocsis's blog

When we were kids, we played by the railway lines at the back of our estate, risking death & the wrath of train drivers. We also risked the anger of Michael Holden’s mum who was the most terrifying person we knew. I did my first climb there, up the side of Fat Sam’s shop to get a ball back (VS 4a, if you ask me). We played Hide & Seek, Spike, War, Kick the Can and put coins and toys on the tracks for trains to squash as they roared past, feet away from our cowering, fragile little bodies. These days we’re much bigger but still fragile, and in many more ways than we were.

At the start of December, a few of the kids who live down the lane came a-knocking. They were after jobs to earn money for Christmas, and they thought I might have something for them. I’d met them many times in the park at the top of the lane as I played with my big ol’ husky dog Frank, and as he in turn played with them. A dog (especially Frank) can be a bonding, sociable experience in the right hands. The last time we all met, they ended up screaming in mock terror as Frank pursued them round the field in the late autumn afternoon.

Three days into the sandstone desert canyons of Indian Creek, people were already splitting into their respective clans. The finger crack specialists looked down on the hand crack climbers with their taped up mitts and massive racks of yellow Camalots. They in turn looked up to the thin hands climbers with their serried ranks of red Camalots. The off-fingers (ringlocks) specialists sat together on a boulder making strange faces and contorting their fingers into ever more peculiar stacks…but everyone looked in awe at the offwidth fetishists: a strange breed who no one understood.

I’d had an odd feeling for a while that something had to give. I’m not sure whether I’d been holding my breath over the previous few months or I just wasn’t able to catch it. Either way, it unbalanced me and I fell. The gear ripped, the ground hit me and the pain exploded through my lower back. It took this life threatening fall to finally bring my breath back in great, sobbing gasps. As I vomited, Budgie stared goggle eyed at me, whilst inexplicably still “taking in”.

This year, Colin Foord is 50. This might come as a surprise to those of you who are married to him, or who went to his 50th over a decade ago. What we're dealing with here is a parallel universe and it's an interesting place. There are no alien life forms here, just a series of fortunate encounters that have led Colin to where he is now. Fifty years ago last month, a chance meeting with a couple of youths in a Cumbrian youth hostel introduced Colin to the world of rock climbing.

Picard: "Come back! Make a difference!"
Kirk: "I take it the odds are against us and the situation's grim?"
Picard: "You could say that."
Kirk: "If Spock were here, he'd say that I was an irrational, illlogical human being for going on a mission like this...sounds like fun!"