My holiday consisted of 3 ingredients: Melloblocco, Climbers Against Cancer and the Italian SingleSpeed Championships.
Melloblocco was my thing, 100% pleasure, the rich sauce tying together all the other elements in harmonious union.
CAC – Unless you keep yourself locked in a box you will have at least heard about John Ellison. I didn’t know the guy, I will have first heard about him from Beth and Alan Monks, maybe Dan Bradley.. one of that crew anyway. Everyone in climbing seemed to know him and I felt an idiot because I didn’t..
Finally I did meet up with John at the Climbing Hangar in Liverpool. We had a long chat – you don’t have a short chat with John – and of course he had been following Alpkit since it started via Dan, Beth, Ashleigh and others in the junior climbing team.. I sucked it up, trying to ignore the fact this was a man dying of cancer but had more energy than a dog on heat.
CAC was still in its early stages, T-shirts were printed and being sold, but his web site was yet to come online. Going away from that meeting something was wedged in my mind.. what could I do? Of course I could buy a T-shirt, and I did, but what else. What could Alpkit do, should it do anything? No I had to do something as me.
I told John I was going to Melloblocco, he was aware of it but had never been. I suggested I could take a few T-shirts and sell them for him in the evenings, it seemed like a good balance… the spaghetti not too tangled, just nicely twisted around the fork.
SSIT – After living in Milan I moved to Lecco because that is where the mountains start. During my time there one of the characters I met was Paolo Zorloni aka Explorer. He had opened up some boulders in the local area, popularised them with an annual bouldering meet and published them on the website of local activists Paolo Vitali and Sonja Brambati. After I moved back to the UK he got more involved in mountain biking, and as a metal engineer started to produce his own mountain bike components, Zeta components. My own interests in mountain biking, especially singlespeed were developing concurrently, so when he emailed me to invite Alpkit to the Italian singlespeed championships, one week after Melloblocco, just 30 miles away it seemed the ideal sauce.
There is no way Alpkit could have justified attending this event, but as I was there, on holiday anyway.. damn it, i just wanted to do something and that is all there is to it.