Last Friday saw a post Christmas shake-down at 'dry tooling central' aka White Goods. Even 3 moves into my warm up I knew which one I was of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Totally flat and fat! Mr T claimed to feel the same but he still quickly dispatched White Goods and then set about Left Over Goods the very stern roof testpiece at the lefthand side of the main crag. A big effort on multiple figure of fours into fig nines saw both Andy's axes left abandoned near the top of the crag and his forearms turned into this...
The Good was undeniably Timmy, who whilst claiming to have eaten too many Christmas pies seemed incapable of getting pumped - here is making Tumble in the Jungle, an M9, look like M7.
Someone this good isn't supposed to have this much fun. Tim left us at the end of the afternoon for the Power Pact cliff where he did the lip project - which is supposed to be good training for Spray On.
The Ugly was left for Andy's final effort on Left over Goods when he ripped a hook whilst pulling into a fig four - I wasn't sure if the grating was my borrowed axes (his still being in wedged in the route) or his shoulder ripping apart. Luckily it seemed to be sore but not as ugly as it looked. I had a final effort on White Goods huffing up to the roof only to drop my tool in a definitive display of bad climbing. Then hung on forlornly whilst Andy and Tim took it in turns to throw my tool up so that I could demonstrate I was as good at catching as climbing. 1 hang later I managed to clip the chains only for my crampon to come flying off. All in all a typical White Goods day of humiliation and ineptitude, leaving with the usual (but useful) feeling - I must train harder.
All I really have to go on is the gut feeling each month on how good each issue really is. Well this last month (actually 3 months) labour has produced our first ever photo issue of Climb - and the gut says good, very good. It will be interesting to see if there is any response from our readers and hopefully previously non-readers. We've made a big effort to make it more than just a token extended gallery. We've also tried to offer more than just images, with mini story length captions for many of the shots. The result is something that if you've got out of the habit of buying mags, perhaps with the free content available on the web you might even see magazines as pointless, then give this issue a good look - I strongly feel it does things the web can never match. 
