This year's Journal is something of a new venture, and readers will see several differences between it and previous issues; advertisements have been included, as have articles by people outside the Club; stencilling has been replaced with Offset Lithography, and the circulation has been considerably increased. These changes have been introduced because, with an active membership as small as ours, everyone knows what the Club has been doing during the year, and so the primary purpose of a C.U.C.C. Journal must be to publicise our activities to the University and to the caving world at large.

Cambridge's crippling distance from any major caving area means that - unlike more fortunate University Clubs - we can have little original work to report, and it is to remedy this that articles have been included from members of other Clubs. Lithography has given enormous scope for the reproduction of surveys, maps and photographs, which do so much to add interest to any Journal. Advertisements alone have made it possible to publish in this form, and the Club is duly grateful for the support it has received.

Although caving Clubs in most Universities have generous subsidies which rightly extend even to the production of journals, Cambridge - which is twice the size of many of these others - has, over the twenty-two years of our history, been generous to the extent of a little under 1.5 p per member per year. A sum which allows each of us four squares of chocolate and one trip down P8.

The fact that problems of finance have always beset the Club does not make them less severe, nor does it make a solution any nearer. Our difficulty is that in a University where sport is college-based, caving is an activity which is expensive for the individual member, which is the pursuit of a distinct minority and which cannot function satisfactorily on a college basis.

The most promising line of attack may well be that brought up in last year's Editorial; if the money is controlled by the College J.C.R.s, use this system by forming Caving Clubs within the Colleges. A year ago there was one such Club, in St. John's, and now a second one flourishes at Jesus. Members of other Colleges can continue the process - "wherever two or more are gathered together..."

But this method has its limits. How, for instance, could we acquire tackle which C.U.C.C. may desperately need, but which a College Club could not justify? What could be done about the most expensive item, transport? Will College Clubs have to restrict the use of their equipment to their own members? The Societies' Syndicate offers only minimal and infrequent support, and so some way must be found to co-ordinate what J.C.R. funds are available. The money is undoubtedly there - the question is, how to get at it?

Publicity is a primary purpose of this journal, and if it brings C.U.C.C. to the notice of other Caving Clubs, it will have achieved something. But if it can bring the Club's position in university sport, which is peculiar both in its requirements and in its absence of financial support, to the notice of those in our own university who control the funds available, it will have achieved something of far more value.

ANDREW NICHOLS (C.U.C.C.)