Stanage is a spectacular gritstone edge in the High Peak, home at weekends to rock climbers from all over the country.
A million years ago I was a moody teenager living just down the valley; I spent way too many hours composing terrible existential poetry on the top of Stanage, grappling with burgeoning hormones and longing for love.
If only Nick Hawkins and his coffee shack had been around then, I could have saved myself a good deal of angst and society would have been free of some of the worst poems on the planet.
Nick’s a climber from (whisper it) the South but visited regularly to climb. After 20 years of traveling to Derbyshire, he and his artist wife decided to make it a permanent thing, giving up the day job and buying a splendid silver coffee shack, complete with shiny, hissing Italian espresso machine. Where to base oneself though? Only one location in the end; at the foot of the hill that’s brought Nick so much pleasure for so many years.