Matt forgot his helmet, couldn’t remember how to set up his kit, and told everyone he was going home.

He’d turned up to the Pindale SRT practice expecting to feel rusty. He felt worse than rusty. It had been months since his training course with Pete Knight, and standing in front of the scaffold rigging with no helmet and no muscle memory, he figured he was wasting everyone’s time. He suggested leaving.

Nobody let him.

Helmets appeared from everywhere. People offered to take turns sharing theirs so Matt could stay. Nicky, who was running the session, talked him through the setup from scratch. Kyle, who knows his way around a harness, checked everyone’s kit and walked them through the moves. Even Pete and Justin, both new to SRT themselves, were chipping in with encouragement.

“Once I did it that first time, it all started to click and come back to me,” Matt said afterwards.

He wasn’t the only one fighting nerves. Pete had trapped his finger in a machine earlier that day and arrived wondering if he’d manage at all. He made a tactical stop on the way to settle himself down, then confessed in the group chat: “I’m a bit nervous too,” followed by a laughing emoji that wasn’t fooling anyone.

He managed it. Went up and down twice with a tender finger and came away knackered but pleased. “I was pleased that I’d remembered most things!”

Justin had a different kind of learning moment. He’d chosen a Kong descender instead of a Petzl, and spent the evening discovering why that matters. “Glad I didn’t try the Kong in a cave situation,” he said. Which is the whole point of a practice evening: find out what doesn’t work while you’re six feet off the ground, not sixty.

Kyle stayed long after most people had packed up, determined to nail the changeover.

Nicky had her own observation. “Only half of Matt turned up,” she announced, “not sure where the other half of him has gone since I saw him last.” Matt’s weight loss had been dramatic enough that the compliment landed before the joke did.

The weather helped. Gorgeous evening, warm enough to practise without the usual Derbyshire penalty of horizontal rain. Though as Nicky pointed out, they’ve done these sessions in hailstorms before, so the sunshine was a bonus rather than a requirement.

For Matt, staying changed everything. “If I had left, I think I would have been stuck on how to progress with my SRT.”

Instead, he went home looking into buying his own kit, already thinking about the next session. All because a group of people said “stay” when he wanted to leave. Pete, talking about Matt the next morning in the chat: “He was up that rope like a whippet!”

SRT opens up a different side of caving. Pitches, mines, lower series. The kit feels complicated until it doesn’t, and the gap between those two things is smaller than most people think. It’s a few practice evenings. It’s people who’ll share their helmets. It’s going up and down a scaffold in the sunshine until your hands are sore and your brain remembers what your body already knows.

Matt’s already looking forward to the next session. Given how Tuesday went, he’ll probably remember his helmet this time.