writing fifty: adventures everyday and extraordinary
Up before the sun. Who ever thought I’d be celebrating that?When I first imagined doing 50 things, watching sunrise was one of them: I had a romantic notion of being somewhere warm enough, and verdant and lovely, preferably with a long view; there would be a flask of tea and a sense of wonder, perhaps with a side of epiphany. But that particular version of (more…)
Silent, upon a peak in Cumbria.Or to be more precise: intermittently rustling, upon a peak in Cumbria.
Or to be even more precise: intermittently rustling as I shifted around inside in a bivvy bag on a flattish grassy hillock overlooking Easedale Tarn on a clear early autumn night. In Cumbria. (more…)
I’m lucky enough to be able to say that Grasmere’s not a long way away for me. Pretty much all year round, though, getting up into the Lakes on a Friday involves crawling along in traffic (and though I can’t really blame people for wanting to drink it all in, that doesn’t mean I don’t blame them, vociferously, in the privacy of my own car). (more…)
You know when you’re driving along in the rain—the kind that your wipers can’t really cope with, and they go into a sort of frantic ineffectual fastwipe which is slightly silly, somehow, in the way that a powerwalk is—and you see walkers trudging along the verge, heads bowed, sheathed almost entirely in rustling nylon, their huge packs, also nylon-sheathed, rearing behind them like a doom they can’t shake; and you think casually, in passing, ‘Poor bastards’? Well. On day three of the pilgrimage, those poor bastards were us. (more…)
It was one of those days Messrs Ordnance & Survey tend to put on the covers of their 1:25,000s: deep green hills, and water sparkling under a sky whose few meringues of cloud only emphasised the depth of the blue.Usually, stopping for a squint at the map during a trudge across the rain-wreathed landscape, your cag hood rustling about your ears and your face screwed up against the wind, you regard these images with a sort of resentful disbelief. (I call this look ‘the (more…)