Moving to Sheffield was probably the pivotal point in my life. There aren’t many events that come close to paving your life compared to choosing where to live. You move from one place to the next and your entire world restarts with a different set of parameters. Much of ‘you’ is already set, but from your new ground zero you build friendships, careers and passions. Everything will be shaped by what is around you. I like pondering over this, wondering how different things would have been if I’d opened my suitcase in Leeds. I’d still be a climber but would I have taken a similar path; was it something I was destined to follow? I might have been a bumbly all my life with an eight-’til-six job in an office, or maybe I’d have got a head start, found a way into the scene much earlier. I might have been hanging with Ben and Jerry at the Tor and ticking the hard sport routes way back in 1990.
It was ironic that my choice of Sheffield University was based entirely on my desire to climb, but I then spent most of my university years doing almost no climbing at all. From my viewpoint, there wasn’t much climbing to be done, not once I’d reached the edge of my rigidly enforced comfort zone. I was blinkered and lazy; un-ambitious and easily led. There was a much bigger world of climbing on my doorstep but I never managed to be at the right cliff with the right routes and the right people at the right time. Looking back I realise I should have tried harder.
But the accident in Pembroke was also pivotal. Perhaps not in paving my life, but in redirecting my climbing. Though as it’s turned out, it could be argued that climbing is my life. At first it wasn’t so obvious, I’d find myself at the familiar cliffs of Burbage and Stanage, perhaps through habit, but my intent was weak and excuses to leave easily found. In a way I went out just to validate myself, ‘Hello, I’m here, I’m still a rock climber, but got to go now.’ Gradually I let it all slip, it was easy to step away and I found new non-climbing doors opening before me with inviting stuff behind them.
Once I’d come to terms with what I assumed would be a temporary fall-out with climbing, the fun could really start. Living together with a good bunch of mates on Freedom Road in Sheffield was a first term riot. Autumn came in a rush, soaked in dampness and shrouded by mist and I didn’t give climbing a second thought – but then second thoughts were hard to come by considering the quality of this particular magic mushroom growing season. We picked them by the field load and visited whole new worlds probably too many times. Our cellar was coloured in ultra violet paint and lit with a UV tube and a strobe. The Orb provided the soundtrack. Parties came thick and fast with our poor neighbour, Gladys, fortunately deaf, telling us each time to, ‘make as much noise as you can’.
But I’d chosen the wrong university course for the professional waster or potential dirtbag climber and could never get completely involved. Sheffield University had a top-three reputation in the UK for mechanical engineering and it made its students work for that, obviously keen to hold its position. Nine until five, five days a week with a shit load of homework, additional holiday studies and a heap of exams. From February onwards, basically as soon as the weather came good, life was all books and thermodynamics and material science. As the year wrapped up, with everybody else heading into summer and juggling in the park with cans of Stella and a picnic blanket, my work placements began, a whole holiday evaporating in a sweaty office in Portsmouth. Full-time, five days a week, no escape whatsoever. Without a car, weekends were barely better than work days.
My final year surprised me with the amount of work I was willing to endure. Strangely I seemed focused and determined on getting a good degree despite the fact I already knew without a shadow of doubt there was no way I was ever going to use it – not if being an engineer meant wearing a tie and sitting in an office wishing most of my life away. I’d learnt that much from my work placement at least, though I’m not sure it was the desired outcome. I stuck with the studying and, walking out from my final exam, I was without doubt the cleverest I’ve ever been and ever will be, with a ridiculous amount of knowledge somehow wedged into my tiny little brain. Unfortunately it would all tumble out before I’d even made the cycle ride home, but it was an incredible feeling and I knew I’d done well. When the results came I was happy with my 2:1, but slightly miffed with an overall score of 69.8 per cent when the pass mark for a first class degree was 70 per cent. When the breakdown dropped onto my doormat I couldn’t help but notice my outstandingly low mark in ‘Solar and Wind Energy’, the lowest mark in the entire year in a subject that was a complete piece of piss. At around 30 per cent I couldn’t imagine how I’d got less than 80 per cent, and, in fact, I’d known so much stuff that during the exam itself I left a few pages’ gap after the first question before moving on to the second and third so I could come back and add even more knowledge … ah!
I went to my tutor, ironically the solar and wind lecturer who was most puzzled by my score, until noticing the overall mark. Then it was suddenly case closed, nothing could be done, apparently all the papers had been shredded immediately. I coped with that. It’s only a number after all; an interesting comparison with the world of rock climbing grades. Compared to the boffin mature students on the course I didn’t really deserve a first class degree anyway. It’s only later that you learn about quotas and ratings and how the system works and that PhD students with hangovers mark your work and give scores based on handwriting, and that papers are definitely NOT shredded after marking.
During my final term a funny thing happened: The Foundry opened – the UK’s first dedicated climbing facility. It was awesome. Just down the road from where I lived and packed full of brilliant routes. Not a training facility in my eyes, but a whole new crag, with steep and hard routes to test me without a hint of death. The rock stars were there too. I saw Jerry Moffatt from a distance and hid in case he saw me. When Ben Moon said ‘Hello’ I couldn’t think of anything to say and just stared blankly at him before running into the toilets. I watched Simon Nadin fall off a 7b and then I moved in when he’d gone. Putting in the fight of my life I got the on-sight and so for an instant was better than him (and he was a previous world champion), even though it was probably the last route of his day and probably his hundredth day on. The scene was great: loads of people, all motivated and friendly, and I was hanging with dudes who seemed capable of crimping on nothing, banging out problems on the famous ‘Wave’ using holds I could barely even see, never mind pull on. Inspired, my physical strength skyrocketed. With renewed psyche from grabbed sessions between revising I felt I was discovering climbing again, but with a whole new twist. The addictive movement was pulling at me, even though it wasn’t even on real rock, and I welcomed it like an old friend. But the real excitement came from leading up insanely steep terrain without a jot of fear. Or at least that’s how it seemed. I still backed off when a fall looked likely, shouted ‘take’ when my arms gave out and would grab a quickdraw rather than accept a lob – but the fear was completely different to my usual whimpering on gritstone wobblers. Just as I’d trusted the top-roping system as a child I now trusted this indoor leading system completely. Being an engineer I understood how it worked, knew the strength of the materials, knew there would be no failure, just as I understood how natural protection could come out and bits of rock could unexpectedly snap.
The break from climbing had probably done me good. For a start I’d focused on my degree, but it had also been a time of reconciliation, allowing my aspirations in climbing to orient themselves without being influenced in one direction or another. The Foundry was the jump start I needed and allowed a glimpse of a style I’d only but dreamt of. It was my entrance point back into climbing and with bold, traditional climbing completely removed from the equation, at least temporarily, my view shifted. It became simpler and clearer and so much more suited to my personality. It became obvious. Suddenly I was as keen as ever. Old magazines were found under the sofa and re-read, and new ones were hotly anticipated. Guidebooks were dusted off and objectives came back into view. I wanted to climb all the time and was surprised at how much I’d shut it out. It seemed such an integral part of my personality.
I wanted hard stuff, to push myself physically, I wanted to be strong and fit and to throw myself at the outrageous terrain decorating the glossy pages of the magazines.
I took out an extra student loan on the very last day of my student life to pay for an immediate departure on a six-week trip to the south of France and when I came back to Sheffield I signed on at the dole office. It was the first stage of my apprenticeship in being a full-time, dirtbag climber. And, of course, every strong and serious climber needed a cellar. By now the secret was out: it was impossible to get strong without spending countless hours hanging from little bits of wood in a damp Sheffield cellar above a moulding mattress dragged out of a skip. I blagged some half-inch ply sheets from a building site, lugged them home and chopped them up with a blunt handsaw. I cut some holes for handholds and then set about fixing the boards to the wooden roof joists. This was going to be awesome. I could see my grade flying. Balancing one end of the panel precariously on a heap of tables and pushing the other up against the cellar roof joists with one hand, I slowly pinned the boards into place with a shoddy screwdriver. Twist by twist the roof took shape; closer and closer to awesome power. Tough work – a bonus maybe? Free training before I’d even started. My arms were getting a thorough work-out. In fact, I’d never been so pumped. All this screwing work was screwing with my forearms. It must have taken all day to place a good few hundred screws, standing on my tiptoes. Talk about power endurance training. Next day I was still pumped and, strangely, also the day after, though the pump seemed to have kind of moved out of my forearms and intensified into my elbows. It was a different kind of pump too, actually more of an all-out pain, a kind of pain I hadn’t experienced before and the kind of pain that was becoming increasingly obvious as the kind of pain that means ‘you’ve just fucked your elbows up completely.’
In true climber style I tried to cure the problem with a few sessions down at The Foundry. I’d have used my new awesome training roof facility except I couldn’t support my own weight or hold my arms above my head for more than about three seconds. Funnily enough the climbing sessions didn’t work – a lesson that, despite being taken probably hundreds of times since then, I’ve still never quite managed to grasp. It may be obviously stupid, but it still seems sensible to ignore any symptoms completely in the hope that they will just disappear by themselves. Eventually I realised the game was up when I couldn’t even lift a kettle or sleep properly, but even then it took a cycling accident to finish it. Pedalling hard down the super steep Hoole Street in Walkley I hit about 55 kilometres-per-hour before pulling hard on the brakes as I closed in on my rented house. This hurt my elbows like hell, but not for long, as the front brake cable snapped and the wire loop between the brake cantilevers dropped neatly onto the heavily knobbled front tyre stopping it instantly. As would be expected I continued at roughly the same speed, up and over the bars and then through the air in some kind of Superman pose, flying down the middle of the street with no kind of landing plan whatsoever. The resulting bad back was relatively minor, but put me out long enough to realise that my elbows were well and truly broken and that no amount of climbing wall therapy was ever going to fix them.
I saw two NHS physios, but as one strongly recommended deep ‘frictions’ to break scar tissue, and the other insisted I avoided any massage at all, they didn’t really help. They both reckoned that doing absolutely zero exercise whatsoever for a very long time was the best plan, along with the old ‘hot – cold’ treatment to stimulate blood flow. The elbows needed be subjected to a temperature differential to kick start the blood and so I’d sit with a bag of frozen peas on one side and a bowl of red-hot water on the other – which inevitably would get tipped into my lap or left on the floor and kicked over later in a stoned stagger in search of late night munchies.
So my ambition of becoming a dossing climber had got off to a less than ideal start. Other dubious career paths appeared on the horizon – not that I was looking for them. A job as a ‘calculator operator’ brought in £2.60 per hour, a ridiculously small wage for a ridiculously crap job, basically adding up numbers all day on an oversized white calculator with big blue buttons. This wasn’t really what I thought I was cut out to be doing. I needed something to fill the gap of climbing, but didn’t really want to go down the proper job route quite yet, confident that my career as a climbing bum was my destiny and that I’d need to follow it for at least a few years. Conveniently, I didn’t have to look any further than right in front of my face to find a solution – the parallel and actually pretty-similar life that my university mates were all still living. I’d been bouncing along the edge of it for the last three years of my life. This was the party life and right now it was getting pretty interesting. Acid House was flooding the scene and we were there right at the start. The ‘Cyclone’ was our baby, a big dance party rave in a hired room on the university main campus. Five hundred ravers freaking out to their own tunes, all spun right in front of their luminous painted faces. We organised the whole event, printing fliers, hiring lights and smoke machines, selling tickets and mixing the trance. We even handed out icepops, quick-frozen in a bucket of liquid nitrogen nicked from the chemistry lab. It was the ideal distraction for a while, knocking out these events every month or so and generally being too knackered to worry about my ability to hang on little crimps. Life was either extremely busy, extremely funny or fast asleep. In the end we got banned. Of course we did. It blatantly should not have been allowed.
From there the Sheffield scene split, either travelling into Asia for half-year stints or working in Holland in order to save enough money to travel into Asia. I put on my sheep costume and headed over to Holland. Looking back I’m pretty alarmed at my complete inability to even think for myself without the direction of climbing, as it’s painfully obvious that Holland is about the bottom of the list of places that I’d like to live. Fortunately I realised this, though not for some time and it would be a lie to say I didn’t have fun figuring it out. A team of us lived in a big rented flat, working in the flower fields by day and getting boxed by night. We earned exactly enough to spend all our wages partying, which seemed like a pretty good formula at the time, especially considering how funny life was. Still, after a while, laughing your head off for hours on end for no apparent reason can only be so much fun and I began to notice just how flat the world was, the highlight of my day being the slight downhill cycle ride on my way to work over the largest bridge in the area.
Back in Sheffield I still had my sheep costume on. Travelling seemed a good idea. It had a purpose – a gap year. That was surely long enough for my elbows to fix and, anyway, I did want to travel. Or at least I’d convinced myself that. India and Nepal are probably fairly poor choices for the climber (we are talking pre-Hampi days), but without rock climbing in the equation the mountains of the Himalaya shone through. The whole travelling sketch would be easy. I’d not be alone as I’d be travelling with my girlfriend. We’d been together for a couple of years and, with similar interests, had been funnelled into the same travelling route, along with a whole bunch of the Sheffield posse who’d be out there at the same time. We’d all be criss-crossing our way through Asia, meeting up now and then, only to branch out on different paths if we wanted, or to hang for a while if we didn’t. It was uncharted territory but how hard could it be? We’d take it as it came and, all good mates, we’d hold each other’s hands if they needed to be held. For the New Year of 1993-4 there would be no less than eight of the Sheffield posse, all giving it some on the beach dance floor at the New Year Party at Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand.
They say going travelling is going on a journey of self-discovery. That studenty thing needed for late teens or early twenties kids who don’t know who the hell they are and have basically bumbled their way through life without daring to open any doors. Though my travelling wasn’t a journey of self-discovery I was definitely looking for something. I’d lost my way. Right up until the end of university I’d followed some kind of path, not looking too far ahead, but somehow sure it continued into a happy place. I didn’t need to ‘find’ myself. I felt I already knew the score and was confident in my ability to make things happen, even if it hadn’t quite worked out and my nicely-defined path had petered out into a confusing maze. I’d been naive and relied heavily on rock climbing as a backbone to direction. Climbing gave me a purpose, a meaning to life no matter how vague my path through life became. Now, without climbing I stumbled into dead-ends and passed blindly through unmarked junctions. I’d lost my direction a little, but travelling was just about filling in a gap. Somehow my clouded state felt temporary – soon it would right itself and, out of the fog, I’d pick up the track again, clear and defined, and continue happily forward along it into the rest of my life.