









I reread this Out To Lunch and it brought a lump to my throat as I reached the section about my Dad. I’d completely forgotten what I’d written to celebrate those times together in the Scottish hills and what a profound effect they had on my life. I hope you enjoy it too…
At the heart of every climber’s house lies a rank of erect spines, guardians on parade, a shelf of climbing guides. Miniature time machines, they protect our past and intimate our futures, either minimally ticked or expansively annotated, plain record or exhaustive personal history. They may prove, I guess, that climbing matters, signifying a worthy quest, one measured in feet ascended and difficulty overcome, in countries visited and cliffs vanquished, a chivalric slaying of dragons that verges on the heroic. At worst, we are quixotic dreamers tilting at windmills, hell-bent on a mission that will fail as our faculties do. The truth probably lies between the two. After all, any quest, however trivial, is better than no quest at all. Take a look at your guides, I’ll warrant they’re not far away even if only in your imagination. Marvel at the assiduousness with which we codify and catalogue. The beautiful covers, the purple prose within, geology, geography and social history all crammed into one volume. Wonder at the care you take to record the details of your efforts. The date, climbing partner, extra stars and potent exclamation marks of triumph and adversity. Perhaps you’ve been through with a pencil, ephemerally marking targets, mapping out a possible future or hostage to fortune, who knows? But a climbing guide is more than a simple list, it’s a live historical document, evolving with and mirroring its owner. Remember that when you next cram it into a rucksack. Looking at my guides, I tally up the places I’ve visited. Croatia, Belgium, (I mean, why else would you go there?), Greece, Italy, Australia. As single minded as I might have been, determined only to climb, my guides led me to alien places and inevitable adventures. Lifelong friendships, memories seared into me, all thanks to a simple list of climbs. But what a list. Skydivers, surfers and skiers may wax lyrical about a particular jump, wave or mogul, but the rock’s very solidity gives substance to our musings and recording of its particularities. While our experiences are necessarily diverse and personal, they are based on common ground. The rock is mute and immutable but full of possibilities, possibilities to which the guidebook writer must allude. The very brevity enforced on the chronicler will on occasion produce a spare poetry, a tiny masterpiece. And if each of those descriptions is a short story, then every route name is a title. Those titles can be arcanely amusing like Which way up Mr Rothko? and Oedipus! Ring Your Mother or clunkily poetic as with A Dream of White Horses. They can be serendipitous like Cemetery Gates or verbose like How many people who work in Ellis Brigham’s in Manchester have ever been out on the hill? Or they can be intensely personal. I have only one new route of any worth to my name. Rotating Knives, yes! is on Bosherstone Head in Pembroke. A line from Monty Python in memory of my dear departed dad, it reminds me of how he used to laugh. I guess I could
have come up with something a bit more poetic, but I always remember his laugh. In a sense, he was my guide too. He took a recalcitrant teenager and introduced him to the wilds. He ignored the bleating and dragged me to the Highlands of Scotland for summer holidays, took me on walks I grew to love, used the sheer beauty of the Scottish mountains to civilise the hormone unbalanced, monosyllabic dolt I was at the time. He co-opted the wilderness as a means of forging a relationship with his son. As two rank novices, we discovered the hills together. He went on to bag Munros and I, by means most circuitous, moved on to climbing, but I never forgot that initiation, those pristine afternoons, an exhausted youth and his ebullient father. And the laughter. Like the time when, poorly equipped yet keen, we were left by my dear old mum at the foot of a hill with the intention of walking over the top into the next valley to meet her. No sooner had the car disappeared into the distance than the clouds began to roll in. Undeterred, we set off into the murk. After only a few minutes, it began to rain. We looked at each other, willing the other to call a halt to this folly until our pitifully ill-equipped state forced a strategic retreat. Haring back down to the road, we hitched round to the next valley in no time. Bemused tourists watched as two damp hill-walkers skirted commando style around the car park in a vain attempt to make it appear that we’d completed the walk. Mum’s total bewilderment was enough to bring on an attack of the giggles so fierce that dad ended up with tears running down his face. Love your guides, that’s what I say.