Adventures in Mind (eBook)

CHAPTER One

Fitting in

It is always windy in the old quarry on the edge of Ilkley Moor, above the famous Cow and Calf rocks. Today is no different; the heavy greyness of the sky also suggests rain sometime soon. I’d better get myself up this climb a bit faster, so Sarah can have a go at S-Crack before the rain starts and we will be forced to beat a retreat to the pub.

I am halfway up Walewska, one of a string of classic rock climbs that the quarry contains, and I’m contemplating doing something I have never done before — a handjam.

The rock I am climbing is gritstone. More pedantically, it is Yorkshire gritstone; God’s own rock. Gritstone — or grit — is a very rough and hard sandstone which is fantastic to climb on as it offers great friction and gives intricate, challenging problems for climbers to solve as they strive to scale a line. Gritstone crags abound in the north of England, particularly in the Derbyshire Peak District and the moorland above and skirting the edges of pennine towns in North and West Yorkshire. Good climbing can be found on single boulders, in old quarries or on the outcrops untouched by industry but shaped over the millennia by the weather.

These faces can have few holds for hands and feet; perhaps a couple of pebbles to gently pull on. The rounded breaks frequently require force and determination to pass. Climbing on grit demands either pure thuggery or delicate, thoughtful and precise movement; rarely anything between. Perhaps the most accomplished gritstone climbers are bi-polar; a bizarre combination of thug and ballet dancer.

A handjam is often a useful technique to have up your sleeve when gritstone climbing. Routes frequently offer no handholds apart from narrow rounded breaks. You can wedge your hands in these cracks, and attempt to form a fist. In doing so, your hand effectively forms a camming device inside the break, enabling you to pull on it and progress up the climb.

After a weekend of climbing the backs of our hands would look like we had been fighting; cuts and grazes all over them, suggesting bare-knuckle boxing was our forte, not grappling with rocks out in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. It wasn’t very lady-like but we didn’t care. Non-climbing friends would ask what I had been up to at the weekend. One time one of them was aghast when I told her I had spent the weekend sleeping in a cave with my mates, halfway up Stanage Edge. We’d hitched down to the Peak from Leeds for a few days of climbing. We climbed for hours, had a pint or two in the pub (for those who could afford it) and then retreated to the cave for a surprisingly cosy and dry doss before another day of much the same.

Other times we’d hitch to the Lakes for weekends of climbing in the Langdales, drinking in the Old Dungeon Ghyll and then bivvying on the fell behind the pub, or head over to North Wales for adventures in the Llanberis Pass, leaving our bivvy spot by the boulders early to avoid an argument with the 50p lady. All this when we were supposed to be revising for summer exams. No contest.

Many of the friendships I made at the climbing club during my first year at university were ones that would endure. There was an acceptance of people for who they were. Coupled with the routine piss-taking of bullshitters, you had an environment where individuals could be themselves without having to prove anything to anyone or pretend that they were something they were not. Although it generally mattered to the individual and there was a healthy spirit of competition, it didn’t really matter how hard you climbed; in fact there were some in the club who hardly climbed at all.

After a first year spent living in university accommodation, in the second year I moved into a shared house with friends from the climbing club. Sarah Church, Ellen Wolfenden (‘The Wolf’), Kate Duncan and Kate Fairgrieve. We lived in Woodhouse in Leeds 6, in one of the red brick terrace houses built at the turn of the 20th century. While the postcode district has a high crime rate (once boasting the most burgled street in England), we almost always felt safe; I never had any qualms about going out for a run after dark. Lockable metal gates on the front and back doors were normality, and something we got used to very quickly.

We were never actually burgled which I think was more luck than anything else, given the amount of times someone left the front door unlocked. Maybe it was because they worked out we had nothing worth nicking. We didn’t own anything that was technologically state-of-the-art or even with the times; the TV in the lounge was third-hand and on the blink, and that was about it for objects that were approaching being worth stealing. That didn’t stop them trying early on, soon after we’d moved in. One night when Kate Duncan was in the house by herself she made a nervous phone call to the police to report that two men were in the process of attempting to break in to the back door’s metal gate, just feet away from where she was stood with the phone.

Our house was used as the unofficial club headquarters for that year. It was here that all the club equipment was stored as The Wolf was gear secretary. Behind the sofas in the lounge were a multitude of ropes, ice axes, crampons, helmets and a wide assortment of other climbing hardware that people could borrow. People dropped by to borrow kit, for a brew and frequently after a night’s clubbing we had at least two people sleeping in the lounge. One of these regulars was Al Powell, who at the time was teaching over near Halifax and still living in Leeds 6. Having studied at the university prior to entering the world of work, Al was still involved in the climbing club, imparting his knowledge and experience modestly to us wide-eyed freshers. Legendary in the club for his debauched drunken antics as much as his climbing exploits, Al spent his weekends establishing hard new Scottish winter mixed routes, trying to win the Karrimor International Mountain Marathon (KIMM) with his brother Ifor (which they did in 2006), and running and climbing in various mountainous parts of the UK. During school holidays he would be off — to the Alps for shorter trips, and further afield to places such as Greenland and the Himalaya during the longer summer break. Dedicated to new routing and repeating hard established routes, Al was very focused. He would bemoan his climbing partners who forsook these weekends and longer trips away for the sake of spending time with their girlfriends. Once, sat having a cup of tea with the four of us — me, The Wolf, Sarah and Kate Fairgrieve — he complained that one of his usual climbing partners was not going to the Alps that summer but going on safari with his girlfriend:

‘Yet another one succumbed to the enemy.’

Raising his eyes from his cup, Al looked around the lounge and realised that he was the only man in the room. He looked slightly sheepish and maybe even a little worried.

‘Not you lot obviously. You’re alright.’

Now an Alpine guide, Al lives in Otley with his wife Sima and their two young children for most of the year, when he is not away working. Even he succumbed in the end.

The parties held by the climbing club were legendary and it was a well-known rule never to hold the Christmas party at your own house. Each year it was a challenge for the club exec. to find a venue, but eventually some poor fool would volunteer their place. They got a free Christmas dinner but also a whole heap of mess to clear up. Always fancy-dress, outlandish costumes abounded; one time the theme was ‘the sea’ and Dave, a fiercely intelligent guy doing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, came dressed as a giant lobster. He must have spent ages on his costume: his huge claws were combined works of art and science, perfectly to scale with working hinges. Keeping with the marine theme, Al orchestrated a surfing competition: down the stairs on an ironing board. Geordie Nick won.

Sarah’s boyfriend Dom was a man of many layers. When I joined the club as a fresher he was president and everyone knew and liked him. He was funny, gregarious and could be extremely lazy, but also so very focused and hard working when he chose to be, and generally his focus was on climbing. He could recite climbing guidebooks to the letter, so voraciously did he read them, planning his next adventures. Dom had a scar that spanned the length of his body, starting near his shoulder and ending at his ankle. It was acquired when he was struck by lightning while climbing in the Alps. Very well read and intelligent, he was a Catholic who had spent some time training to be a priest. A student of Philosophy and Russian (until he got thrown off the course for attending no lectures and doing no work), he was extremely good on the trumpet. One night we went to watch him playing at the Hyde Park Club, in a soul-funk band whose lead-singer was another climber, a guy called Arne.

One of my lasting images of Arne is of him skiing down the Goat Track Gully on Coire an t-Sneachda in the Cairngorms. We were climbing a route on a buttress adjacent to the gully, and watched him as he telemark-turned in the tight confines of this snow-filled gap. I had never seen anyone ski down as narrow a place before; Arne did it with style and grace and with a massive smile on his face. Whenever I saw him and whatever he was doing, he always looked like he was enjoying himself. I knew him for a year, and in that year I saw him skiing, climbing, singing, studying, dancing, smiling: living. He and Dom were peas in a pod; so varied in their pursuits, and so focused, but doing it for the plain reason that it made them feel alive. It was no surprise that the two of them got on so well.

Dom lived with Sarah in our house. That...