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Away from the Gray by Jo Morehouse; read 9 November 2018

Surfing YouTube whilst bored one evening I came across a channel named Minimal List that is the Vlog of Jo and her American husband, Michael, who have been cruising the English canal network as ‘live-aboards’ (I believe that is the correct term) for the last 2 years on their narrowboat ‘Perseverance’. I can highly recommend the channel and its now become somewhat addictive to follow it even though I have never been on the canal system nor a narrowboat myself. The one thing that is missing from the Vlog is the story of how Jo and her husband came to be living on the boat. ‘Away from the Gray’ is a short (roughly equivalent to 68 pages long) Kindle book that cost only 99p that answers this question. 

Having previously thought about travelling but finding the usual excuses not to – mortgage, relationship, good job etc- in 2013 Jo in her mid-30s was ‘ sitting at my desk looking out at that grey rainy carpark, utterly depressed by the small minded office politics and petty micromanagement surrounding me. I decided there and then that I had to leave my shitty office job, and at the same time leave my house, my family and my friends. I was going to go somewhere else and keep going, I was going to see what else was out there, there had to be more to life than this…’ well there was. Putting her ‘stuff’ into storage and renting her house she set out to journey around the world. She bought an inter-rail ticket to travel solo across Europe and then an Orient Express Ticket to travel the trans-Siberian railway to China. Then travelled overland to Vietnam, where she met Michael who was on his own round the world trip, though going in the opposite direction. Both would hit it off and after completing their own journeys would meet up again and move to work for a year and a bit in New Zealand. They would then move to the LA as Michael had a job offer in his native land get married there. It was in LA that they married and where the sotry for now ewnds before they resurfaced in 2017 in the UK on their boat.

This book proves that you do not have to be a super-hero to travel the globe, Jo is at 1st underconfident and refreshingly honest about it; at times she was lonely. There are some good lessons here that should apply to all of us:

1. The hardest step is the 1st one – as Jo says ‘the hardest thing I had to do was deciding to leave in the first place. The traveling was easy; the deciding to go? Not so much.’

2. When travelling everyday s a Saturday

3. Even on a tight budget don’t be afraid to go over the budget occasionally – don’t regret having missed out on something later

4. An unanticipated positive of budget constraints meant that Jo walked everywhere getting fitter in the process

5. When traveling you need to let yourself have days off, and not feel guilty for not being out and seeing new things all the time.

6. India is pretty unpleasant, Thailand, away from Bangkok is lovely, Vietnam is becoming more commercial but still very nice.

A good wee read this one

Alfred Gregory's Everest by Alfred Gregory; read 27 November 2018

Released in 1993 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1st ascent of Everest, this book has been in my loft for nearly 20 years. Gregory was the British mountaineer who, despite being an amateur was the official stills photographer on the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition. Whilst none of the expedition members were what we might today recognize as professional mountaineers they were all at the top of the sport as it then was in the days before commercialisation changed everything. Secondary roles, such as movie and stills photographer were allocated based on willingness to undertake the task. For Gregory, who reached 28,000 ft in support of Hillary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt, the expedition would provide a bridge into professional photography such was the quality of his work. In 1992, when this book was put together that was still his profession.

The book is foolscap format, 183 pages long and contains a short foreword by Jan Morris and an introductory chapter by Gregory followed by sectional photographic chapters (Approach, Base Camp etc) that show a world and Nepal before the modern world had intruded. Not only has man intruded but also climate change has also meant that the giant ice seracs at the Base camp (not the same as today’s Everest Base Camp) used by the expedition have also gone as the glacier has retreated.

The photos themselves are stunning when one considers how hard it must have been to provide sufficient contrast on black and white film against a world of snow, ice and rock without the aid of integrated light meters and camera sensors. Today a photographer can check instantly how well his photograph has turned out and take it again a thousand times. Gregory had no such luxury of feedback – he took the photo and then sent the negative away to be processed hundreds of miles away and had to wait to be told by returning mail whether he had got a good shot or not. Indeed, he was not to see most of his photos between the time he pressed the shutter and 1992 when putting this book together. That many have become classics is a huge tribute to his ability.

Gregory’s photos are still subject to copyright but many can be viewed here:

http://alfredgregoryphotographs.com/everest.html

Gregory died in 2010 at the age of 96.

Photo of the Western Cwm of Everest - Moving Mountains Trust [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin, read 7 December 2018

Many remember the heroic age of Polar Exploration as taking place in the time of Shackleton, Amundson, Scott and Peary at the start of the 20th century but 60 years before two little Ships, the Erebus and the Terror , just a hundred feet long and powered by sail completed heroic journeys of their own. Under James Clark Ross they travelled further South into the Antarctic pack ice than any ship before or for a further 70 years before. I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Palin’s story of the Erebus (now lying in around 90 feet of water in Queeen Maud Gulf in Canada,having been abandoned, on the disastrous Franklin North West Passage expedition, probably in 1846 or 1847. As I am short of time I am going to use the Guardian’s review below to save me writing my own, not least as it accords so nearly with my own assessment of the book:

If there’s one thing the British love more than a hero, it’s a heroic failure. Few individuals fit this category better than the 19th-century polar explorer Sir John Franklin. If his memorial in London’s Waterloo Place is to be believed, he cut an impressive figure: firm-jawed and barrel-chested, his statue gazes towards the horizon as if searching for new worlds to conquer. The reality was very different.
A podgy, balding Royal Navy officer, by the age of 40 he had already achieved an unenviable kind of fame, after he led an overland expedition to chart the north coast of Canada, during which half his men starved to death and Franklin himself earned the nickname The Man Who Ate His Boots. But it wasn’t until he led another Arctic expedition in 1845, this time to find the fabled Northwest Passage, that Franklin truly became a household name, although again this was because of what he had failed to do rather than what he had done.

Several years after he should have returned, a search party stumbled across a sad trail of relics in the snow, including a chronometer, four teaspoons, and a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, together with some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth. What had begun as a voyage into the icy unknown had apparently turned into a real-life Heart of Darkness. Despite angry protestations from such influential figures as Charles Dickens, and a determined one-woman campaign by his widow Lady Jane, it looked suspiciously as if Franklin (or one of his crew) had become The Man Who Ate His Men.

Although the story of this disastrous voyage has often been told, two things distinguish Michael Palin’s revisiting of it. The first is that he’s Michael Palin, which means that his narrative is driven by a deep sympathy for explorers and adventurers, while also being illuminated by flashes of gentle wit. (Whales are so reluctant to hurry, he points out, that their lives appear to be like “the human equivalent of taking very long baths”.) The second is that he has plenty of new material to draw on, the most important of which was the discovery of Franklin’s ship HMS Erebus by a Canadian underwater archaeology team in 2014. Lost for almost 170 years, it lay virtually intact on the Arctic seabed, swaddled by strands of kelp and preserved by the ice like a giant ship in a bottle. In classical mythology, Erebus usually referred to the depths of the Underworld, and the ship that bore this name had certainly found a suitable resting place for itself.
But before Franklin took it on its final voyage, Erebus had spent several years successfully exploring other equally bleak parts of the planet, and it is this previous life that forms the first two-thirds of Palin’s book. It’s a fascinating story that he brings full-bloodedly to life, stripping away the barnacles of the past to reveal the hidden history of a ship that spent years encountering places such as Cape Disappointment, Delusion Point and Exasperation Bay.

Commissioned in 1823, the 372-ton Erebus was one of the last warships known as bomb vessels. Designed to fling shells high over coastal defences, they are referred to in “The Star-Spangled Banner”, where “the bombs bursting in air” alludes to the fire from British bomb ships. A tough, squat vessel, she spent a couple of years patrolling the Mediterranean as a visible reminder that Britannia ruled the waves. But it wasn’t until she was converted from a warship to an ice-ship that Erebus acquired a distinct identity. Her hull was strengthened with six-inch oak planking, and extra thick copper sheeting was used to cover the bow from waterline to keel. Under the command of the dashing Captain James Clark Ross, the crew of the Erebus then spent the next four years voyaging further south than anyone had ever been before.

As Palin notes, they were “polar pioneers”, at one time even sighting the Antarctic continent itself: a barren white landscape that looked like a huge sheet of paper waiting for someone to write on it. Then came the more complicated mission of finding a way through the Arctic’s moving jigsaw puzzle of ice, which Ross declined and Franklin eagerly accepted. The main challenge with this sort of biography is that it’s hard to make life at sea sound interesting. A captain who ran a tight ship in the 19th century was thought to be one who kept his men busy with regular daily routines, occasionally punctuated by bursts of official violence when a sailor was thought to deserve a flogging. Even so Palin teases out some good stories, such as Ross and his men spending New Year’s Day 1842 dancing in an “ice-ballroom” they had created, where “ice-creams were handed round”, followed by “a sort of slapstick Antarctic Olympics”, where they attempted to climb greasy poles and catch greased pigs.

Palin also has a good understanding of the personalities involved, such as the ship’s surgeon and naturalist Robert McCormick, who had previously been on the Beagle with Charles Darwin, and claimed to be “a lover of the feathered race” despite taking every opportunity to blaze away at them before (no doubt lovingly) stuffing their carcasses. Like Franklin himself, such figures were obviously deeply flawed – gods with feet of slush – but Palin deals with them tactfully and kindly, recognising that it is precisely their failure to live up to their own heroic ideals that makes them so interesting to modern readers.

Just across the road from the Franklin statue in Waterloo Place is a memorial to Captain Scott, who was beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen. A few years earlier Amundsen was also the first man to cross the Northwest Passage by sea. And as Palin points out: “He has no memorial in London.”

Book Review - The Mountains are Calling: Running in the High Places of Scotland by Jonny Muir; read 1 November 2018

The Mountains are Calling: Running in the High Places of Scotland by Jonny Muir; read 1 November 2018

The front cover of this book includes Alastair Humphrey’s comment from his review ‘A paean of praise for the mountains and the runners who go there.’ and this is a great description of this book. Although the topic of the book is unashamedly Hill Running (not Fell Running – that’s for the Lake District) in Scotland it is not a book solely for runners. Anyone with an interest in the mountains of Scotland will enjoy this book. Its central theme, though not sole topic, is Ramsay’s round, a run over 24 Munros in under 24 hours. Its climax is the author’s own completion of the round in 2017 when he became the 101st person to complete it.

The book introduces the Ramsay’s Round early on and always comes back to it but follows different Mountain rounds, Tranter and Bob Graham for example, and the people who run them. It talks about the Cuillin traverse on Skye and introduces short local and training runs and the amateur and understated culture of the Hill running scene. Some of the heroes of the sport – such as Angela Mudge – one of Britain’s former world champions of whom you are unlikely to heard of unless you have read this book are already involved in the scene. Vet Jasmin Paris the former record holder of the Ramsay Round (holding the Male and Female record at the time) and her husband whose training is to just go running. Alex Brett the story of whose death on Liathach is told with sympathy and many others are here.

Stories of some of the record breaking Ramsay rounds as well as the author’s own round in the penultimate chapter are inspiring. Tales of the winter Ramsays rounds (usually taking more than 24hours) usually held in appalling weather and mostly in the dark with minimal equipment make one realise just what tough Hombres these athletes are.

The final chapter asks several questions about the future of the sport. Is it becoming to commercialised and are commercially run races a threat to the ethos of the sport? The perennial question is also asked, though not answered, on where the next generation of Hill runners shall come from. These questions are left hanging for the reader to make his or her own conclusion though the author is upbeat. Throughout the language is sublime and the book is an inspiration – I will look to walk the Ramsay round over a few days next year as a result of reading this book.

For more on Jonny's adventures go here https://heightsofmadness.com/

Addendum

Jasmin Paris has since gone on to achieve the record (male and female for the Montane Run along the Pennine way - theguardian.com - Jasmin Paris becomes first woman to win 268-mile Montane Spine Race | Sport | The Guardian

Sailing a Long(ish)boat - July 2018

One of the original Roskilde Ships in the Ship Museum

Ever since reading Magnus Magnusson's 'The Vikings' in the early 1980s I had wanted to visit the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde (at the head of Roskilde Fjord) in Denmark.  The museum holds the permanent exhibition of five original Viking ships excavated in the Fjord in 1962.  They had been deliberately sunk as Block Ships some 900 years earlier at the end of their working lives.  Their excavation has allowed the authentic reconstruction of the vessels to take place and a number of discoveries have resulted from this experimental archeology (e.g. we know that the life of one of these vessels was around 35 years as the iron nails rotted and damaged the surrounding wood beyond repair in that time).  I achieved this ambition in September 2017 but missedout on the chance to sail one of the vessels that day as I had not booked in advance (sailings can be booked on the museum website between May and September).

Roskilde Cathedral - A Unesco World Heritage Site

In July 2018 I returned with Marie and Matthew, this time with tickets for an 1 1/2 trip in the fjord.  There are several replicas used to provide trips but I was lucky enough to sail in one of the newest vessels and the one that 9 months earlier I had viewed under construction (the master boat builder at Roskilde is Faroese and builds using traditional skills).  When one sails thes ships it is easy to realise why the vikings were so successful.  The ship has an incredibly shallow draught - we sailed  in less than 18" of water without so much as scraping the bottom - and without the use of anything other than a light breeze were able to maneuver with ease using the sail alone having used oars only to leave the harbour.

The ship we sailed - under construction Sept 2017

A disappointingly boring heritage

For my birthday I treated myself to an DNA testing kit with the idea that I would find out a little of my ancestors.  Born in the east of England (formerly part of the Danelaw) of an English father and Irish mother I suppose I should't have been surprised by the results but I do admit I was hoping for something a little more exotic than this:

Route Submitted for TGO Challenge 2019

As Mike Tyson once said - 'everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face'.  Well my plan for next year's challenge has been submitted for vetting.  Hopefully neither the Vetters nor the reality of the Challenge shall punch me too hard in the face.  This year will be my 1st challenge since 2015 and as I have been away from the hills for a couple of years I decided on a familiar start point Shiel Bridge from there the plan is:

The Saddle

Soouth Glenshiel Ridge

Fort Augustus

Corryarrack Pass

Monadh Liath

Kingussie

GlenFeshie

Mar Lodge

Braemar

Jock's Road

Glen Clova

Tarffside

Fetteresso Forest (last done in 2012 before the Wind Turbines were installed)

Stonehaven

With luck I should meet up with a few old friends along the way.

There’s Always the Hills by Cameron McNeish

 I was lucky enough to buy my copy of this book directly from Cameron after he had given a talk on his life in Banchory during the summer.  In this autobiography Cameron looks back on his childhood in Govan, his early interest in Athletics and his discovery of the Outdoors as a playground and the realisation, after a variety of ‘normal’ jobs that, with luck, hard work and perseverance a living could be made from one’s hobby.  The result has been a career now decades long, and continuing, in which Cameron has become a guru on the nature, history and culture of Scotland’s wild places.

Cameron’s early life, though marred by the early death of his father, seems to have been a happy one from his recounting of it here.  Today, as in the past, many youngsters, on leaving school or university, are pressured into deciding on a career before they even know themselves.  They can take comfort from Cameron, who would take seven years after leaving school to find a job, as the warden of Aberdeen’s SYHA Hostel, that gave him the time to plot what he actually wanted to do.  In the meantime he would marry at the age of 21 and work as a policeman, a part-time barman, selling weighing machines, selling insurance and spend a year in the financial sector. Even getting the SYHA job was not easy due to sectarian discrimination the appointments board of the 1^st hostel he applied for turned down his application n the grounds that his was a mixed marriage – his wife was Catholic.  Once the appointment at Aberdeen was made however, Cameron discovered the nearby Cairngorms and never looked back.  Soon he became the warden at Aviemore SYHA and eventually, through beginnings in writing outdoor articles for local newspapers, would become the editor of ‘The Great Outdoors Magazine’ and author of a number of books on Scotland’s Mountains.  After a stint on Saturday morning radio, a chance conversation with Richard Else who was then covering a Chris Bonington expedition to Mount Elbrus would lead to TV career that began with ‘The Edge – One Hundred Years of Scottish Mountaineering’ and would lead on to ‘Wilderness Walks’, some episodes of which can be found on You Tube and which inspired the title of this book, and the series of walks that have become essential watching each Christmas on BBC Scotland.

As age has slowed him down, Cameron continues to work in the outdoors and to carve his own path.  A health scare is overcome and the worries it brought about are recorded here with honesty but phlegmatically.  Cameron’s response to old age is to recognise that one needs to modify expectations though he still treads his own path.  Mountaineering and guiding take less prominence than pack rafting, cycling and travels in his campervan through which new adventures are still pursued (walking and back packing are still in his repertoire though less prominently than before).  McNeish is clearly his own man, obviously he has made compromises but this book is the record of a life that is continuing to be well-lived and should provide inspiration to us all that we can choose our own path provided we don’t fall into the trap of forever wanting more ‘stuff’ we simply need to recognise what is ‘enough’ and to work hard at living the life we desire not what others desire of us. 

Book Review: Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem by Tim Severin; read 22 May 2018

Nine hundred years after the First Crusade, Time Severin and Sarah Dorman set out on horseback to follow the 2500 mile route of Duke Godfrey of Boullion and other Crusaders, from Belgium to Jerusalem travelling through the modern lands of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia (itself today consigned to history), Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria.  The horses chosen were a riding school palfrey (Mystery) and a Heavy Ardennes (Carty), the latter a descendent of the war horses of Crusader cavalry – what Severin calls ‘the Main Battle Tank’ of its day. This Journey, after many years of marine expeditions was a return to long distance land expeditioning by Severin (in 1961, whilst at university he had travelled to China on a motorcycle following Marco Polo’s route).

Track of the 1st Crusade and Severin's Journey

The book’s dust jacket claims, not unfairly, that it is a ‘dazzling synthesis of adventure, practical history, and exploration’ which is also a claim made on the jacket of the author’s next book ‘In Search of Genghis Khan’* which makes me wonder whether Crusader had sold as well as expected.  It did not matter to me as I read the book on publication in 1990 and have just revisited it.  Times have changed; when this journey was made, the Iron Curtain was still drawn across Europe; border checks remained even in Western Europe as this was prior to Schengen and the Customs Union; the Lebanon was a no-go zone for Westerners which forced Severin and Dorman to detour through Syria (and Jordan) to reach Jerusalem – today an impossibility.

The book tells the story of sourcing and training suitable horses to recreate the journey as well as of the journey through a now lost Europe - I am sure you can no longer find Bear trainers in Bulgaria - though it was done just over a quarter of a century ago. In communist Hungary they add a 2^nd palfrey (Szarcza) to the team as the huge Carty is extremely uncomfortable to ride, this emulates the Crusaders as their heavy horses would have been used as pack animals until they would be mounted battle.  After an unpleasant journey through Yugoslavia, the expedition is lauded and extremely well looked after in Bulgaria- a result of Severin’s network of friends and again in Turkey. 

Battle of Dorylaeum 1097

The story of reception of Duke Godfrey’s army, and those of the other crusaders by Alexius in Constantinople is recorded as is the decimation of the Peasant’s crusade by the Seljuk forces of Kilij Arslan at Civetot in north-western Anatolia .  The main crusader army would gain some recompense by investing Nicea though by subterfuge this city was obtained by Alexius and was not sacked despite a long, and generally incompetent siege of the crusaders.  It is just past Nicea (somewhere in the likely locale of the Battle of Dorylaeum) that the expedition is halted for the winter and the horses handed over to the safe keeping of a retired jockey for the winter, a change from the original plan decided upon by the need to rest horses and people (Severin had lost 20lbs in weight and Sarah had broken her foot in a fall the day before the stop).  The expedition had travelled at the same speed as the crusaders and it had taken just over 4 months to reach this point.

As it turns out, this is as far as Carty gets, unable to settle in the winter quarters despite the attentions of former jockey Remzi, he is retired to a horse farm in Vienna, he is replaced for the second year’s travels by the diminutive and spirited Zippy.  Sadly, Mystery, is destined not to make it to Jerusalem either as she dies, probably as the result of a blocked intestine, by a river on the approach to Syria after the winter break.  The Hungarian horse Szarcza would also fail to make it to Jerusalem, breaking own in the Syrian desert and being given over to a horse owner in Jordan just before the journey is completed.  The fact that neither of the original horses make the whole journey is perhaps a pointer to the crusaders own problems on their journey 900 years earlier as it’s likely that they too lost many horses through wear as much as war.

Duke Godfrey attacking Jerusalem

This book describes an extraordinary journey made in modern and medieval times.  It is well worth a read as both a history and a travelogue if one can still get a copy I would highly recommend.  The book is a reminder that history never stops as we see the story of the First Crusade told whilst we see for ourselves the significant geopolitical changes since Severin and Dorman made the journey just 30 years ago. 

* ‘A dazzling synthesis of exploration, living history and adventure'

2017's Best Podcasts

This year I have mostly been listening to Podcasts whilst cycling around Denmark.  The usual suspects  BBC Radio 4's podcasts - In Our Time and Great Lives plus the Friday Night Comedy - have been much enjoyed travelling companions but for me 2 independent Podcasts have stood out:

James Holland's Chalke Valley History Hit and;

Dan Snow's History Hit have proven to be very high quality productions with fascinating topics.  

The Chalke Valley History Hit provides roughly hour long talks recorded at Chalke Valley History Festival's over the years and topics this year have ranged from Andrew Marr's take on Brexit and Tory leadership contenders to succeed Theresa May to Bettany Hughes' history of Istanbul.  Himmler's Great Niece talks of the struggles of the family in coming to terms with their infamous relative whilst James Holland tells the story of Dunkirk. For me though the best episode was undoubtedly the one in which Jung Chang spoke of the Empress Dowager Cixi.  This particular episode talks of a figure that will be unfamiliar to Western Audiences by an author with a superb grasp of modern Chinese history and who herself witness Mao's cultural revolution 1st hand.  If you listen to nothing else from 2017 listen to this podcast.

Dan Snow's history hit has a similar wide sweep but is wonderfully prolific and reactive to ongoing world events with 'emergency podcasts' on Theresa May's calling of the UK General Election in 2017 and then another on the unexpected outcome of that election, the troubles in Catalonia and the toppling of Confederate memorial in the US as well as Donald Trump's policy of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital provide great topics for Dan and his expert witnesses to provide historical insight on these current events.  The rate at which Dan produces high quality insightful podcasts is stunning - sometimes new episodes appear on a daily basis and the historians who contribute are leaders in their fields - from Margaret MacMillan to Mary Beard to Anne Applebaum to Niall Ferguson

Highly Commended:

Other podcasts that I have dipped in and out of this year include:

Brian Moore's Full Contact which given how much I dislike Moore's commentary on rugby matches on BBC has been a revelation as it is balanced, informative and very enjoyable though I tend only to listen on International weekends it has been a must listen in a Lion Year.

Remainiacs - only recently discovered this keeps me in my happy place.  Ian Dunt and crew with 'a no flim flam Brexit podcast for everyone who knows that leaving the EU won't be un morceau de gateau. We're not sick of experts and we won't shut up and get over it.'

The Outdoors Station - Bob Cartwright has passed the 10 million download mark thisyear and still produces this excellent podcast the highlight this year for me being his 2 Moors Way Trip from South to North across Devon.  Bob also produced a You Tube record of the trip well worth a watch.

Ascent; a life spent climbing on the edge by Chris Bonington; read 28 November 2017

I am no climber, and never will be but have enjoyed, both vicariously and with envy, the adventures of Bonington though it is now over 30 years since I read Bonington's 'The Everest Years' that lead me to go on to read his other autobiographical works – 'I chose to Climb' and 'The Next Horizon'.  I was dubious whether a new autobiography would add much to what I had already read, other than to refresh my memory, especially as 'The Everest Years' had ended with the then 50-year-old author's summiting of Everest it was unlikely that age would bring greater adventures. How wrong I was.

Of course, there is familiarity in his re-telling the tales of the Eiger, Annapurna, K2, the Ogre and Everest adventures but not only did the author continue to climb in the Himalaya in his sixties and elsewhere – notably in Morocco - into his seventies (indeed the book opens with his climbing the Old Man of Hoy aged 80 in 2014) but this is also a more personal book than his earlier autobiographies.  There is much more here on the author's earlier life with many gaps filled in by his mother's unpublished autobiography.  The early unconventional (for the 1940s) family life is covered with honesty – his father's desertion and his mother's arguments with her own mother, her same sex relationship and attempted suicide are all here.  Also here is the story of his own long 1^st marriage to Wendy and the support she gave not only to her often absent husband but also to the partners of the many climbers lost on expeditions – the roll call is long as Bonington, in reflective mood, notes that 'Four of the eight lead climbers on Annapurna's south face died in the mountains, all of them great friends. Of the four of us who climbed Kongur, I have been the only survivor for over thirty years, after Al Rouse died in 1986.'

As Bonington was a trailblazer for the professionalisation of Mountaineering in Britain – and one of the 1^st to make a reasonably good living from it, not only has he been the face of Mountaineering in the British media for 50 years he has had to work to maintain that position in order to continue to earn his crust.  It was this logic that drove him to be a reporter covering the Eiger Direct climb and after a stint of photo-journalism covering Blashford-Snell's 1968 expedition that led him back to lead expeditions in the Himalayas in the 70s and early 80s.  In that time, the nature of the game changed from siege to Alpine style climbing and for most of this period Bonington was away from home and at the same time Bonington's fame, if not fortune, grew. When asked 'how I justified it when I had a wife and two sons. There is no justification; it was my thirst for adventure, undoubtedly selfish, that drove me on' Bonington is honest but I feel a little too hard on himself – after all he did need to earn his crust though undoubtedly his family paid a price.  With frank honesty he discusses that price that was paid as he chronicles his oldest surviving son's late teenage drug habit and run ins with the law.  This could be laid at the feet of an absent father but happily Joe is today himself a successful businessman in outdoor adventure so, perhaps, his father's influence has been more favourable than he credits.

The final chapters of this superb book are both poignant and inspirational.  They tell of the tragedy of the developing illness (MND) and  loss of his wife, Wendy and the intense grief that this brings but they also tell of the development of a new romance and that love is never closed no matter one's age.  This is an enthralling and inspirational book that should make anyone's Christmas reading list – you don't need to be a climber , or even an outdoors person to enjoy it.  The final words I shall leave to Sir Christian Bonnington:

"What I wanted was to make every single day of my eighties mean something, get out and climb and walk, enjoy my grandchildren, keep working and make life as rich and exciting as it possibly can be."

A Stockholm Microadventure

OK so staying in a hotel, even in an inexpensive one, hardly qualifies as a micro-adventure but what the heck I'm calling this short weekend trip just that.  With a dull autumn weekend forecast in Copenhagen I decided it was time to take the opportunity to travel further afield to explore Stockholm.  A cheap and short SAS flight could be had on a Friday night and the Arlanda express train (running every 15 mins or so) will transport you the 40-odd km from Stockholm Arlanda airport to the city centre in 20 minutes.  Booking.com found a relatively inexpensive stay at the Terminus hotel just 3 minutes' walk from the central train station. 

Arriving at 9 in the evening didn't leave a lot of time to explore on the Friday night but the centre of town is compact hence a short stroll through Gamla Stan (the original settlement at the centre of the modern city) and back to the hotel allowed me to get my bearings.  Having got my bearings I proceed to lose them a little by drinking 3 pints of local ale in the hotel bar – not realising until dealing with a Saturday morning headache that this tasty stuff was 6.5% ABV. I mention this as a warning to others.

I woke early on the Saturday as my guidebook said the Vasa museum was open from 0830.  A couple of paracetamol sorted the head whilst the hotel breakfast sorted the stomach.  My intention was to visit the Vasa Museum 1st of all so I set off at 0800 to walk to the water taxi pick up just outside the Royal Palace on Gamla Stan. Whoops it doesn't start to run until 1000 in winter months, never mind I would just walk to the Vasa Museum, OK I would miss opening time, well I thought I would, it turns out that in the winter months the museum opens at 1000 also – in fact it seems that 1000 was becoming a theme.  Never mind the walk was fine along Strandvegan with its sumptuous houses providing a fine back drop until I reached the Vasa museum – still 45 minutes too soon.  A visit to the public toilets whilst waiting cost me twice what it should whilst I waited for the museum to open as I chose not to use the 1st cubicle I had paid for given the rather awful state it was in! 

1000 and the Vasa museum opened.  A short wait in the queue was well worth the time spent as the Vasa proved even more impressive than I imagined.  The photos do not do the ship justice as it is HUGE in a way that cannot be seen though I did try to include some people in my shots to give scale.  The museum was purpose built for the ship and is 5 stories high (even though the tops of the masts were removed 300 years ago when it was still a hazard to shipping. 

The Vasa was built, ironically, of Polish Oak, by a Dutch ship builder for Sweden's war against Poland but sank just 20 minutes into its maiden voyage killing around 30 of its crew and guests (the skeletons of several of these poor souls are on display alongside their reconstructed faces).  The cause of the sinking was that the ship was top heavy (or too narrow – the effect being the same).  Within 30 years of the sinking all but 3 of the valuable bronze cannons were recovered from the ship but then the position of the ship was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and raised in 1961 – 333years after it sank.  After years of conservation it was placed into the current purpose-built hall and is 98% original – the best-preserved ship of its time by a wide margin.  The displays on show include the dioramas of the ship's construction and its recovery, a cinema where the story of the ship and its discovery is told in a 15-minute film, a reconstruction of the ship's lower gun deck and artefacts from the ship including the 3 cannons not recovered in the 1660s oh and there is a nice café.  Alongside this there are regular free guided tours in a variety of languages although being good Scandinavians it seems all Swedes speak English.

The Vasa was truly the highlight of the whole weekend.  It is stunning though as I couldn't spend the entire day there so after lunch I took the 'Red Bus' water taxi from the short pier at the back of the Vasa Museum to tour the inner water ways (in summer more extensive tours are available).  As ever on these trips headphones are provided and interesting sights are pointed out – usually just after they are past in my experience.  For the Afternoon, I decided to buy a ticket to the Royal Palace – still a functioning government building and where the King and Queen's offices, though not residence, still is. The Royal Palace is big – bigger even then Buck House.  You are not allowed all round it but access is good.  A 3 pass ticket buys access to the Palace's public areas plus the older part of the palace not burned down in the fire of 1697 – the Tre Konor; the Treasury and the Chapel where the monarchs of Sweden have traditionally been deposited when no longer in use.

For dinner, I wanted to try something typically Swedish however this wasn't going to be as easy as I had thought.  It seems that Sweden's national dish is Pizza or pasta given the look of the majority of food outlets.  Gamla Stan seemed to be the best place to escape the Italian influence and after a couple of refusals (restaurants were booked – I didn't smell or anything) I found a table at Martin Trotzig's Restaurant where I had a great 3 course meal of Grilled Scallops on Jerusalem Artichoke Puree followed by Veal in redcurrant and with Apple Strudel (OK not strictly Swedish) as a dessert – yummy!

On Sunday I had to leave for the airport by 5pm so I still had a full day near enough to look around.  As with Denmark most places are closed until 1000 but 0900 found me at Stockholm Cathedral to have a good look around before services began.  This church, the oldest building in Stockholm was originally St Nicolas Church and became Stockholm's cathedral in 1942.  Whilst the Royal Family are buried at the chapel around the corner it is here that Royal marriages take place.

The oldest parts of the brick built church date to 1306 and reached its current extent in the 1480s.  The exterior was rebuilt in 1736. An interesting feature looking up is that parts of the roof are painted and others not – I wasn't sure if this was a result of the reformation or not but I thought it worth considering.  Whilst modern Sweden is very secular, it is officially a Lutheran country so there was some understated information in the cathedral celebrating the 500th anniversary of Luther's act of vandalism to the church doors in Wittenberg. For a Lutheran church, I thought the inside was rather well decorated (or is it that my experience of the bare insides of Scottish churches have taught me to expect less).  The Silver Altar (actually ebony and silver) but to its left is an even more impressive statue of St George skewering the Dragon carved of oak and consecrated in 1489 as an altar monument.  This is in remarkable condition, and is here as a symbol of Sten Sture the elder, who had conquered the forces of King Christian of Denmark (Denmark is represented in the sculpture as the Dragon and Sten Sture as the saint).

The Parhelion painting by the cathedral exit is a 1630s copy of an earlier painting depicting the Parhelion that appeared over Stockholm on 20 April 1535.  The Parhelion was, at the time, interpreted as a divine revelation of the impending collapse of worldly power which caused a rush of people to the churches.  In fact a parhelion is a common meteorological occurrence caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere acting as lenses. 

Painting of the Parhelion

Real Parhelion

 Next stop, via water taxi, was Fotografiska for a view of some excellent photographic exhibitions.  Two were worthy of note.  The 1st showed photo journalism by a local reporter with moving and vivid coverage of trouble spots from Libya to Palestine to Kenya and beyond.  The second, entitled 'Last Night in Sweden' was a middle finger to Donald Trump's now infamous (though sadly not lonely) tweet, based on a Fox news on God knows what that Sweden was in turmoil due to Islamism.  The exhibition showed what actually was happening that night across this huge liberal and very impressive country.  Fotgrafiska also has a good restaurant so a prawn smorre brod washed down by a pint of 6% IPA whilst looking out over the water at what must be one of the most beautiful capital cities in the world was a good way to finish my trip before hopping onto the water taxi again.

With just a couple of hours left I took a walk around to the Parliament, passing some men fishing for Salmon in the water that separated Gamla Stan from Normalm – a benefit of Allemansratten which is the Scandinavian right to fish or forage (as well as walk) for one's own consumption without asking the landowner –very civilised if you ask me.   From here I looked around Kastellholmen.  Here the turreted castle, a former armoury, flies the National flag daily when the country is at peace so it has been flown for over 200 years.  Walking back towards the railway station to catch the 1700 Arlanda Express, I was ambling and took time to enjoy the walk along the shore of Ostra Brobanken looking at the old time vessels that belonged to the members of the Stockholm  old ships society (or something like that).  Most of these vessels were around a 100 years old, one had taken part in D Day and one appeared to be the Royal Yacht.

Well that was my weekend up and I must say you can see a lot in just a couple of days it just whets your appetite for more.  I must return in the summer where more opportunities exist to travel the waterways and where the long nights would give extra time for looking around.

Costs for the weekend:

Return Flight – CPH to Stockholm: £141

Hotel – 2 nights B&B: £180

Food and Drinks: £134

Transport (Arlanda Express and 24 Hours Red Bus/Water Taxi): £82

Entrances to Attractions: £35

 

Total: £572

A Saturday in Northumberland

Woefully short of both walking and holidays in 2017 I took the opportunity to meet up with some very old friends at Bamburgh on 1 October for a coastal walk Southwards to Boulmer.  I had forgotten how truly beautiful this part of the world is but was rewarded with fine weather (mostly), some fine beers at pubs along the way and of course excellent company.

Bamburgh

Beadnell

South of Seahouses

And on Sunday back at Edinburgh Airport a chance to see Mark Beaumont's bike (I think this is the Africa rahter than around the world one)