One bit of kit that I had for ages and really used to love, and still now miss most decidedly, is my old Sierra Cup! I previously had a Coghlans brand one but other mauufacturers in the USA sell them too I believe, as it is a classic design of outdoors cup over in the United States. I just cannot seem to find anywhere here in the UK that sells this small item part of the absolutely huge Coghlans outdoors accessories range! I do not like buying now on E-bay, as I have just been cheated on there far too many times to go trusting to its systems again.
Now, I should declare here, most particularly, that I did not in any careless way go losing my prized favouite outdoors cup of many years! This was unfotunately one of a number of items of kit that I lost last year in early december, when I was attacked while out walking one morning in the sleepy little village of Wonersh, near to Guildford of all places! I had been on my way to a survival skills course weekend, and was on the main road approaching Wonersh village, as dawn came up. A group of young muslim guys pulled up in a car engaging me in conversation, and asking me if I were a squaddie.
I suppose it was just because it was a saturday morning perhaps, and I was kind of dressed in green and camo walking kit, that they assumed I was a TA soldier or something maybe. When I politely refused an offer of a helpful lift, as I already knew where I was heading, and it was fairly close by, the guys in the car piled out and attacked me. I only managed to escape, the Surrey police reckoned, because I would not let the two main attackers drag me kicking-and-screaming into their BMW estate car; fighting back instead with a metal mini-maglite torch I had to hand in my jacket pocket by luck! Using the end of it as a sort of a Kubotan type of a self-defence thing!
Anyway, the upshot of it all is that amongst the sixty-quid or so of kit I had then stolen, by these damn guys as they grappled with me, was my favourite Sierra Cup attached in a separate kit-roll underneath my backpack with my bivi-bag and other essential stuff that I then subsequently lost!. I guess that I am lucky I only lost some much loved kit and not my life really! The local Surrey cops seemed to think that I was indeed lucky that I did not get myself stabbed fighting them off anyways!
To be honest though I was not at all going to give up either my life or my kit without having at least tried to put up a good fight! Even when it was really rather scary with what was happening there, as one of them was shouting at me that I was somehow responsible for what was going on in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts! "How many of my brothers and sisters have you mutilated and massacred in Afghanistan and Iraq?", was the kind of thing one of these guys was shouting at me, as I tried to desperately fight them off!
Still I really must get one of these little Sierra Cups from someplace very soon, as I really do miss it! My 58 pattern metal mug is great but just not my favourite. When I drink from that I think of times in the TA on exercise in the damn cold all of the time! When I used my Sierra Cup I thought of nice backpacking adventures past instead! I know which memory I preferrred! I rest my case; I need a new Sierra Cup ASAP! So does anybody know somewhere/anywhere in the UK that sells these great type of outdoors cups please?
