Zena and I have a friendship that goes beyond climbing, which is good because she’s crap at it. Her command of inventive expletives and cutting tongue make up for her lack of enthusiasm, and her bloodymindedness is generally comforting in a crisis.
I decided her keen nose for bullshit could be useful for this review project, so I enlisted her help, or rather, bribed her with the email address of some unsuspecting member of the male sex she has in her stalker’s sight.
‘Petzl Tikka XP 2. Stupid name.’ she muttered as she sniffed the package of shiny new head torch.
‘Sounds like the noise Dymo Dave makes when he’s choking.’
I didn’t ask but quickly removed the blunt knife she was using in an attempt to break through the hermetically sealed packaging.
‘Stupid packaging. Is that part of the review too?’
Using wire cutters and a saw we prised the torch out of its plastic wrapping.
‘Lovely colour. Reminds me of bruising’, she said with a faraway look in her eye.
She then tried it on it various and imaginative ways – thigh, ankles (both at once), and upper arms. I persuaded her that trying to put it around her waist was probably stretching things too far.
I began to feel twinges of regret but soldiered on and suggested we put the batteries in. How many women does it take to put 3 batteries in a head torch and how long? Don’t answer that. 2 women; 5 minutes including dissuading Zena from using the blunt knife to prise it apart, and dealing with the death threats when she broke a fingernail.
‘Bright isn’t it?’ She said. I stopped her from blinding the cat and said we needed to come up with an idea of how to test it. Having the attention span of the bad belayer I know her to be, she’d already lost interest and was making an origami animal from the instruction sheet. I turned on the flashing red light. ‘Ooh. Pretty.’ she said snatching it from me. A tussle ensued during which all 5 light modes were demonstrated.
‘Can I borrow it on Friday night?’
‘No. That’s not the sort of test they have in mind’, I said, imagining it causing irreparable retina damage to over-excited club goers.
She grunted and disappeared into my laptop for a while. When she resurfaced she had a scarily triumphant look on her face.
‘From the spec on their page for geeks it’s clear there’s only one place to go – it has to be the cave.’
I could see she was holding back a snigger. Why is she my friend? She knows I have a phobia of enclosed spaces since the incident involving a drying room with a broken door latch, anchovy olives and a floor mop.
Zena is essentially an urban girl. Brought up on a diet of tree climbing in crummy inner city parks and exploring Victorian sewers, beautiful wildernesses don’t fill her with joy. I then realised what I’d done – and I had the feeling I’d just had dug my own grave. I had encouraged both her obsessive tendencies (usually only controlled by a Police Caution or Seroxat) and her passion to explore secret city spaces.
‘Thursday at 11 on the Portway. Bring these things.’ She’d conjured up a list in a nano-second.
2 days later. Zena was early. I was late. She’d swopped her usual Barbie-meets-crusty look for urban guerrilla and I had on the dirty waterproofs I wore everywhere. I didn’t like the look of her bulging rucksack.
‘Down you go’, she said, shouting to be heard above the 50 ton lorries as they sped by a metre away from us. Just behind the dirty shoulder high wall was the entrance – big enough to drop through with a little squirm. Petzl at the ready I….
I’ve decided to hijack this review as it was my idea and Sarah doesn’t know her arse from her perimenopausal flushes. (And I’d like it noted that her obsession with climbing far exceeds any of my ‘tendencies’)
This is Zena Williams’ report of the Pretzel Chicken Tikka Masala Squared:
It was as dark as a Goth’s fingernail in the cave. Just how I like it. Pretzel’s full blast beam hit the roof and bounced off the walls like the bullet from a gun. I mantle-shelfed neatly down with a double layback twist and flicked on economy drive mode. It was like being inside a festival toilet but bigger and brighter – and less putrid. I snapped on the diffuser as I was getting sick of Scared Sarah’s complaints of vision impairment, and the place glowed like Chernobyl. Keen to get the dirty job done, I pulled my vintage lace wet suit out of my rucksack and prepared for action in the soft porn light of the economy diffused light mode. When the rope ladder I had knitted from crisp packets earlier that day was secured on the edge of the well, I rugby-tackled Scared Sarah to the floor, fearing she had escape in mind. I prised the Pretzel out of her claw-like hand and tried to hypnotise her with the flashing mode. When this failed I slapped it on my head in full blast mode and, like a spider on hallucinogens swung down the ladder, leaving Scared Sarah whimpering in the blackness behind me.
It was brilliant down there: like when I was a kid and we had picnics lit by the car headlights. The water wasn’t the effluent mudflow of the Avon. It was as clear as the bottom of a pint glass and as deep as my Dad’s bum cleavage. I turned on the flashing red light, which was really cool in the enclosed space.
‘I’m going in’, I said. The whimpering grew louder but luckily I couldn’t hear it as I had my head underwater with the main beam on. Amazing. I could clearly see the small passage that led away and into the second chamber that Mad Ceris had told me about. But suddenly I remembered I had a date with the blonde from the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. I couldn’t miss it. It had taken hours of finely honed manipulation to get him to agree to it. So, I backed out and retreated up to the miserable heap.
‘Bastard. Leaving me in the dark.’
She was deliriously happy to see me. I reminded her she was a wimp, that I was doing her a favour, and that the Pretzel had passed the test.
Conclusion: Very good. Does all the right things in the right places at the right time. Nice weight, size and colour. Stupid name.
PS from the official reviewer:
It more than passed the test – after explaining to Zena that water resistant is different from waterproof, I took it away to dry out. It survived its first adventure. Zena did manage to sneak it out to Lakota on Friday, and surprisingly the batteries are still going.
The slight flaw with this project was that due to my fear of hobbit holes and Zena’s adrenaline addiction, no photographs were taken, so there’s nothing to let the consumer know that this is an honest review of the product and a real and true version of our assignment…
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