Is anyone cracking up under the enforced lockdown?

I think I might be starting to, but I'm not the only one...


I was talking to my old mate Sid on the phone last night, asking him how he was getting on stuck at home with this coronavirus.

?Not very well,? he replied.  ?Not very well at all.  In fact I was going absolutely crazy.  No caving, no pubs ? I was going out of my mind.  So I went caving.  Well, sort of.  Popped round to have a look at the old Odin Mine.?

?Isn?t that still supposed to be out of bounds?? I asked.  ?Anyway, you aren?t supposed to travel for unessential reasons like caving.?

?I know!? said Sid.  ?So I went at night.  In the dark. Nobody about to see me.  Parked up at the end of the road, climbed a fence or two, and found the old way in.  It was pretty messy inside ? some stuff had fallen from the roof and the place was as muddy as hell ? though that?s not right, ?cos Hell isn?t muddy at all ? but I persevered, trying to make my way towards the Cartgate.

?But, as you know, there have been a few places in there where the floor has given way and holes have opened up into the lower workings.  Well, I found one of ?em.?

?In your usual way, I suppose?? I said.

?That?s right,? said Sid.  ?What I thought was a solid bit of floor suddenly gave way beneath my feet and I found myself sliding downwards in an avalanche of mud and bits of shale and rock, mixed in with a few bits of rotten old stemples.  That mine goes down a really long way.  And there are places where the old miners broke through into other stuff.  Natural cave, you ask?  I?m not so sure...

?I slid down and down and down, with my head in a whirl, until I found myself half-buried in bits of rock at the side of a large chamber with a bit of a sulphurous smell to it.  As my head slowly cleared, I could see a whole load of little purple devils busy digging away with picks and shovels, enlarging the chamber.  They were singing away to themselves...?

?Diggy Diggy Hole? I suggested.

?That?s the one,? he replied.  ?Anyway, one of them shovelled me out of the pile of rubbish I was in, and then up came this big blue demon with a clipboard.  ?What in Hell are you doing down here?? he asked.  ?We?ve got enough work on enlarging this chamber without you filling it up again with all this stuff.  Anyway, have you got a permit to be here?  And you?ll need to go into 14-day quarantine.?

?Well,? said Sid, ?I was flabbergasted, I can tell you.  ?What do you mean, quarantine?? I asked. ?And why are you enlarging the chamber anyway??

? ?It?s this wretched virus,? replied the demon.  ?We?re all having to observe social distancing. And there?s a hell of a lot of people down here to be spaced six feet apart.  Hence the need for extra space.  And hence the need for the permit system.  We can?t be having more people down here unless their visit is essential.?

?Well,? said Sid, ?I told him that my visit there was both unessential and unplanned, and that I?d be happy to get back to the land of the living as soon as possible. ?And by the way,? I said, ?just out of interest ? how do you get rid of all your spoil when you?re digging new cave like this??

? ?Ah,? he said.  ?That can be a bit of a problem.  We melt a lot of it down and get rid of it through volcanoes as lava.  And we use some of it building boulder chokes to cause problems for you cavers.  But actually, if you don?t mind, you can take some of it with you when you go.?  And then he called out, ?Asmodelius!  A job for you!  Your friend?s back again!?

?And once again that vast dark shadow rose out of the gloom, and I found myself being violently propelled, along with a whole load of rocks and stones, back up the shaft I?d fallen down.  Then there was a crash and a wallop and I found myself lying in the open air beside the old crushing circle, on a spoil heap that I?m sure hadn?t been there the last time I visited the place.?

?I see, Sid,? I replied.  ?And how?s your state of mind now, after that little adventure??

?Fine, just fine!? he replied.  ?As long as I don?t forget to take the tablets the doctors give me.?

Caverns of the mind, eh?

As Mr Tweedy famously said,

"It's all in me 'ead."

But in times like these, you've got to go caving somewhere!

I hope you understand now why the NT have been so slow in sorting out an access agreement. They asked me not to mention any of this. But now it's out, I guess we'll just have to add this new pitch to the DCA anchor list. Hopefully Robert Hallom will still be around in his office and he can show us where the Deepe Shafte is. And that Brass Castle place too...

And the days go by, and the pressure of being stuck at home continues to degrade the little grey cells....  I'm cracking up fast.  Or Sid is.
I wouldn't believe a word of his stories, by the way - I'm sure that all the characters and situations are totally out of his imagination (or mine!).  So...


I was talking to old Sid on Skype last night, and there he was on the screen as ugly as ever, with his wide central parting (wider than it used to be!) and the hair bushing out on either side.

?It?s all right talking about that big cavern you say is deep under Derbyshire,? I said to him, ?but we can?t get to it these days, and I?m not sure many of us would want to, if it?s what I think it is.  What other ginormous caverns have you been to recently??

?Of course it?s what you think it is, and where else would it be but under Derbyshire?? he said.  ?But how recent do you mean by ?recently??  There was that expedition to South-East Asia back in ?97...?

?Was that the one where poor old Jock McWhatsisname bought it?? I said.

?The very same,? said Sid.

?SRT accident, wasn?t it?? I asked.  ?Something abut his descender coming off the rope on one of those bottomless pitches??

?That?s what was said.?

?Come on, then,? I replied.  ?Tell us the true story.?

?Well,? said Sid.  ?It all started when we heard about this massive cave in the mountains there.  Travellers? tales and all that, but there seemed to be a kernel of truth to them.  So Jock and a few others decided to organize an expedition to have a look.  I got roped in and off we all went.

?It was a long journey out there, and I won?t bore you with the details.  But we ended up in this valley, miles from civilisation, listening to what sounded like the Treorchy Male Voice Choir.  This missionary fellow had succeeded in converting the natives there ? they had built their own Welsh Calvinistic Methodist chapel in a clearing in the jungle ? and you should have heard them singing ?Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah? in Welsh.  But the missionary chappie warned us that the Gospel hadn?t reached the next valley yet, where we wanted to go ? the people there were still heathen, following the traditional practices of their ancestors.

?Well, he did warn us to be careful, but he sent us on our way with a couple of native guides who brought us to the next village.  The folk there turned out to be friendly enough, in spite of the bones they wore through their noses.  They were in the middle of a big feast when we arrived, and they invited us to join in.  While our guides from the Christian village headed back home, we settled down to a big meal of what seemed to be roast pork ? very sweet and very juicy.

?The next day a couple of the tribesmen took us to the cave we had heard about.  It was a very special place, they said, and they were only willing to take us there because we had joined in their ceremonial feast with them. 

?So they took us along this jungle trail to a place where there was a largeish cave entrance in a rock face, with a small trickle of water coming out of it.  The tribesmen lit up some oil-soaked torches and we turned our lamps on, and in we all went.

?It was quite level walking passage, and it went quite a long way in.  No ? there were no low crawls, no boulder chokes, and definitely no pitches.  Just this long winding level passage into the heart of the mountain, until after a good few hundred yards we suddenly came into a huge chamber.  It was a wet and active place, with stalactites and curtains festooning the ceiling, and the place was alive with the sound of dripping water.  But what grabbed our attention were the ordered rows of what appeared to be large stalagmites filling the floor of the chamber. 

? ?By gum ? it?s like Callanish!? said Jock.

? ?More like Rider Haggard and his Kukuana kings,? said Jim, looking more closely at one of the stalagmites.  Sure enough, there under a translucent layer of flowstone we could just make out a human figure.  And all the other stalagmites were the same ? long-dead Papuans entombed under a layer of stal.

? ?Who are these?? asked somebody

? ?Dese fella papa bilong long time gone,? said one of the natives in the local Pidgin.

? ?That?s right,? said the other, who had studied at Oxford and come away with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.  ?They are our ancestors.  This is where we buried them long ago.?

? ?All these folk must have been here a long time, though,? said Jim, ?judging by the thickness of this stal.  Where are the more recent ones??

? ?We don?t do this any more,? said the one native.  ?We haven?t done it for a long time now.?

? ?Now, him fella die, we eat!  Him fella die, good meat, like pork, very tasty!? said the other.

?At this, Jock suddenly turned grey and started making choking noises.

? ?Hey ? be careful!? said Jim.  ?You can?t be sick here ? it?s their holy place!? 

?But Jock couldn?t help himself.  Out it all came ? last night?s roast pork and that morning?s breakfast ? all over the encapsulated remains of one of their holy ancestors.

?Well, the natives were not amused.  We were taken back out of the cave, and back to the village, where a special ceremony then ensued to purge away the shame and insult that had been offered to the ancestors.  It was a very ugly and unpleasant affair ? especially for Jock.  But after that the tribesmen, who appeared to bear the rest of us no ill will, invited us to join in another ceremonial feast to round the proceedings off.  And, to be honest, we didn?t really have much choice...?

?Roast pork again??

?Well, you could say so,? said Sid.  ?Very juicy, it was, very sweet.  Just like pork.  But we couldn?t tell that to the people back home, could we?  So we concocted this tale of the deep shaft and the SRT accident...

?For goodness sake, though, don?t go telling this on the forum.  We don?t want people knowing what really happened to Jock.?

?It?s OK,? I said.  ?Nobody will ever believe you!?

Have you been kipling perchance?