I've lurked here for a while, but then I got hooked on the Fear in the Dark thread and the gripping story of the subterranean pistachio eater, and decided the whole community was such a bunch of right-minded blokes that I might as well pitch in. I'm over the hill, age-wise, and a much bigger shadow of the whippet fit little smartarse I used to be.
Did nine years in the TA, and a few tours with the regulars. From my teens to my thirties, camped and climbed on a regular basis, all over the world. Then there was a hiatus of about a decade which is currently being remedied. From childhood my brothers and I camped out in a patch of thick forest near our home, and so I've been very much at home in the woods all my life.
We spread the good news and many of our friends and cousins joined us over the years, so that there is a group of us who still, in our thirties and forties, get together every year or twice a year in the forest to camp out, stare into the fire, tell tall tales, show off our new knives, and kit, and savour a few nips of malt.
Lately it's gotten a little out of hand - last time one of us brought a folding chair - so I've started going alone again, as I used to in my youth. It never gets old, and there are few better antidotes to the travails of the middle-aged male than sitting before a campfire in the pouring rain, whittling on a stick.
Well, all right - a twenty year old supermodel would probably help too
Did nine years in the TA, and a few tours with the regulars. From my teens to my thirties, camped and climbed on a regular basis, all over the world. Then there was a hiatus of about a decade which is currently being remedied. From childhood my brothers and I camped out in a patch of thick forest near our home, and so I've been very much at home in the woods all my life.
We spread the good news and many of our friends and cousins joined us over the years, so that there is a group of us who still, in our thirties and forties, get together every year or twice a year in the forest to camp out, stare into the fire, tell tall tales, show off our new knives, and kit, and savour a few nips of malt.
Lately it's gotten a little out of hand - last time one of us brought a folding chair - so I've started going alone again, as I used to in my youth. It never gets old, and there are few better antidotes to the travails of the middle-aged male than sitting before a campfire in the pouring rain, whittling on a stick.
Well, all right - a twenty year old supermodel would probably help too