Just had that Ben Winston in my kitchen shining bright lights in my eyes and asking me difficult questions. Turns out Ben is making a video for the guys at Rab focussing on what people in the outdoors industry make of the brand and unaccountably wanted to talk to me.
And blimey, those lights are bright in a proper visit to the dentist / special forces interrogation way, which is oddly unnerving. I have an odd respect for people who can sit in front of cameras and rabbit away as if they're not there at all.
And then there are the difficult questions: 'If you had to sum Rab up in five words, what would they be?' asked Ben in a pub quiz fashion.
Oddly the reality is that the first word that comes to mind when I think of Rab is actually 'pastrami', which you're probably thinking is a little, well, odd really. It all goes back to a visit a few years back when the brand's head marketing honcho and serial photo model Neil Mcadie, took me out to the fleshpots of Alfreton for lunch.
It turns out that Alfreton has a charming Royston Vasey vibe to it and, one of the dangers of buying baps there, is being offered huge chunks of free pastrami to take away. Which we did. So... pastrami.
Second word? 'Feathers' - you might not know this, but Rab still fills many of its down bags and jackets at their HQ on the edge of the Peak District, as a result there's a 'down room' housing two time-served stuffers who, until recently, used some sort of uncanny black magic intuition to decide exactly how much down to stuff into each baffle.
Genuinely quite gob smacking. But what you really need to know about down is that the stuff has a Houdini-like ability to sneak through the narrowest cracks and openings, with the result that Rab's warehouse tends to have a gentle dusting of down and anyone who ventures into the down room itself emerges with a sort of dandruff-like downy halo.
I could go on and usually do, but it was a genuinely interesting process which unaccountably made me want to go and buy some pastrami for lunch, though I'll take a rain check on the down... the video may, apparently, take somewhat longer and is scheduled to emerge some time next year.
