Towering

The good news is

• I didn’t have a Rolleiflex/Leica/Voiglander to crush when I fell on the rocks
• Later on I only sank to my knees in the mud, not my neck.

The bad news is

• The GRD III took a serious battering on the rocks (moi aussi) and
• Gizmo did go over his middle sinking in the Thames mud, which not only has set like concrete on him but absolutely fucking stinks.

The bath is full of darkroom equipment including an enlarger and I can’t be arsed to relocate it to bathe him, and the shower head in the shower doesn’t reach down far enough to wash him. We’ve been there before, naked with 25kg of slippery pit-bull in the shower. We are not going there again…

Ho hum pig’s bum.

Today we looked at chimneys and towers among other things.

This was directly into the sun with -2 stops hence the flare, but it is dramatic.

I feel like I might be getting a bit too familiar with this stretch of the Thames. These are pushing it a bit, I need some tilt & shift to de-verge the convergence.

It was here that the Ricoh took a hit. It has to be said, it appears to be built like a tank for such a small camera. It hit the rocks pretty hard and the metal is gleaming through the paint but nothing is rattling and it appears to be working. I think the case is magnesium alloy which explains the external strength and the bright shiny scars. Its resale value has just zeroed though, cosmetically it is well fucked. Lets call it ‘character’.

Moving seamlessly away from beetling towers, the view through the gaps are good too

Beetling. A word I first came across in ‘The magic of Skye’ by W.A Poucher* (Constable, 1949). He was describing some of the cliffs of the Black Cuillin, the twisting ridge of Skye. Aptly as we found out. The following day we were to climb ‘Whispering Wall’, an allegedly V Diff rock climb of about 180m vertical and about 8 pitches with a really long hard approach. It was first climbed by Chris Bonnington and Tom Patey in 1960 and possibly not again until we rocked up. They were just about to depart for the Himalaya and were in top form, so they shinned up it for practice. There is no way it is a V Diff, tis way too hard and exposed, but it must have been a piece of piss to those two so that’s what they described it as. The climb is so named because the pebbles whistle and scream past you as they fall down Deep Gash Gully having reached critical mass some way above. A salient reminder of what would happen should we come a gutser.

We had my then 12yr old son climbing with us… luckily social services never found out. It was moderately irresponsible. Rock climbing is dangerous. But what a thrill when we came across a piton left by Patey and Bonnington! (No pitons allowed now, just ‘friends’ and ‘nuts’). And what a worry to have your boy roped to it 30 or so years since it was last used for that purpose. It was pretty rusty and corroded and we knew exactly why they had banged it in at that point. There was fuck all protection anywhere else.. so we had to use it for our own to get past the crux.

Especially poignant considering the banality of Patey’s early death. His sweater got tangled while abseiling… he unclipped to sort it out. Wrong.

An exhilarating, thrilling, stressful and tiring 18hr day start to finish, from and back to Glen Brittle Mountain Hut. Possibly one of the best literal and metaphorical non-pharmaceutically induced highs ever.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present… 12hrs later and the dog still pongs of the Thames

* Poucher -  an interesting man and fabulous writer from another age. Rumour has it he walked and climbed in “gentleman’s theatrical make-up”, testing the products he sold for a living. I may be completely wrong about that though. But I also can’t believe I  made it up – you couldn’t could you? It must have been a treat to meet him on a wild Scottish peak! I have this vision of a rouged old roué with a gift for words. Probably wrong about that too!

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