FONT

Trips to Font in recent years had meant mornings where you could see your breath on a good day, pulling on a duvet jacket in-between pulling-down and all too often a damp hike around damp boulders. There are few places more miserable in the rain. For some reason the notion of ever going there in the summer had been sacrificed at the altar of cool friction.
That was until the challenge of coming up with a holiday with the kids where ideally we could all climb. The R.L. Stevenson quote just inside the Essential Fontainebleau guide offered hope: "There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their age."
If the youngsters mutinied at the idea of another sessionat the crag then the fallback option was the campsite swimming pool. What is with kids and water? They just never seem to tire of it. As it turned out five year-old Ruby and sister Zo‘, age nine, visited the pool only twice during four days of climbing at the end of August.
The sun shone and the neon sign outside the pharmacy in Milly said 30¡. But it was a dry comfortable heat, easily escapable in the forest's leafy shade. It was simply joyous. Al fresco lunches were leisurely affairs without the customary stiffness of cold fingers. And as for the friction it was a lack of technique or strength that stopped me long before poor conditions. The stone felt desiccated it'd
been dry for so long. Earlier in the month Mina Leslie-Wujastyk had climbed Atomic Playboy

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