Climbers as a breed have certain tendencies, which though they cannot be applied universally would generally be acknowledged to be true. They don’t tend to be hugely into team sports (following a football team obsessively would cut into a lot of climbing time), they are more likely to own cycles and they are definitely not into the Hello celeb culture. This may be because despite climbing having a very honourable democratic tradition of welcoming blue collar types (Brown and Whillans immediately spring to mind) the traits listed above are shared by a lot of the middle classes. One trait however that is more difficult to explain is why climbers seem to be so mean as a breed. I do use the word in the sense that they in anyway are unfair or duplicitous to other people but more that they make a virtue of being parsimonious towards themselves. You will find, especially when organising foreign trips, that they will fight tooth and claw to seek out the cheapest car hire firms with the worst cars and take flights at hideously inconvenient times just to save a few pounds or euros here or there. When shopping for equipment too they will seek out obscure shops with discounted end of line gear and then proffer a range of BMC membership cards to yet reduce the hapless retailer’s already paper thin margin. They will elect to camp in areas profuse with hospitable B&Bs in completely foul weather and have lengthy debates about whether monthly passes at the wall are good value (averaging out the frequency of summer and winter visits). Sometimes these practices can be regarded simply as efficient use of resources but sometimes they plain false economy, for example somebody in the club was once terribly proud for buying some secondhand cams from Easter Europe on Ebay. Even this is not as bad as an acquaintance (not in the club) who drove back to London from the coast once with his oil warning light on because “he had some oil at home”.

One must remember that these people are not students or unemployed people on benefits. By and large they are highly qualified well paid professionals who are definitely in the upper income brackets. So why do they pretend to be so poor? I think there are two reasons. First, as mentioned above climbing does have a healthy democratic tradition and unlike a lot of other sports the equipment is actually not too expensive and hence one cannot up ones grade by chucking a lot of money at it. This means that it would be considered contrary to the spirit of climbing to make an ostentatious display of wealth in front of other climbers. If you were into powerboat racing it really wouldn’t matter because it is assumed that you are as rich as Midas to take part but with climbing you have to assume that everyone is as poor as a church mouse so you simply don’t suggest that everyone has got loads of moolah.

The second reason is that in pretending to be poor it releases the atavistic subconscious desire to be young again. Thus your contemporaries my be driving their BWM X5 to the golf course but while you have spent the equivalent of an Ethiopian toddlers pocket money on you weekend’s entertainment you can feel morally superior because being poor equates with being young and having fun again. The real irony here of course is that the naturally parsimonious climber probably has a modest mortgage and owns his car outright, unlike the Beemer driver who has debt equivalent to that of a Central American country.

Maybe the question has to be turned around and we should ask not why climbers are mean but why mean people become climbers. If one looks at it this way around the whole thing makes a lot more sense. The actual climbing is free, equipment is reasonably priced and once bought tends to have a long life, you are not forced into an expensive social scene (Cocktails at 7 for 8 in the front porch of my Quasar, Black Tie! I don’t think so) and even when venturing abroad this tends to be outside of the peak season and when prices are generally lower.

There are of course genuine reasons for taking the cheaper option sometimes, there is more independence and privacy in a tent than in a bunk house and it sometimes it is simply more fitting to camp in the environment rather than trying to insulate yourself from it. It is quite easy to cook campsite food that is just as good as pub food and will remove the need to queue on busy weekends or search out special dietary requirements. Car sharing is a purely logical choice and reduces congestion, pollution and is far safer on a long journey where driving can be shared.