Jura

I’m learning a little about Stoicism.

Derren Brown’s “Happy – why more or less everything is absolutely fine” is a pitch for leading “The Considered Life”. It was recommended, repeatedly and with uncharacteristic gusto by a fellow introvert. The by-line at once delighted and appalled me. I haven’t finished it yet, but he’s building a convincing argument for the value in taking control of our emotional reactions to uncontrollable events and then accepting, even embracing the uncontrollable nature of life . This idea is appealing when you’ve lost control before, conversely though, I fear it could foster suppression and impose a rigidity onto the human condition that just wont fit, regardless of will. The stoic ideas have hit me though, and particularly in relation to fell running.

Perhaps Jura was a congregation of stoics. Arranged together on the start line in the rain, eager to go and practice their responses to those unknowable events crouched waiting for them in the clag-shrouded scree above. This famous old race, the pilgrim-like journeys to it are maybe unspoken celebrations of stoicism and human resilience, a communal reaffirming of the fact that we are not just alive, but living. Despite what went before.

Brown talks extensively of stories, and of storytelling being the defining human characteristic. This resonates, and thinking back over all the times people have asked why I run in the mountains I wish I’d had this answer. We are storytellers, and every time we line up together below those myth-like mountains we are reinforcing the story we have written for ourselves. The positive story that we want so dearly to define our lives, the one where we didn’t crumble, where we were the hero.

Resilience comes with practice. The strength we form in the mountains, as we overcome physical and mental challenges is not separable from that required to face real life. Challenges we don’t choose are infinitely harder to face than those that we do, but the attitudes that we forge in the fells do guide us, they are directly transferable. The mountains extend into our lives in ways we don’t immediately see, when I really try and picture what it is inside me that feels strong, it looks like scattered mountain rock and brooding mist, long grass bent in the wind, it’s an abstract picture of a lifetime in love with high places.

Completing Jura continues my story, it acts as a milestone, a reassuring trig point that I’ve patted on my way through the cloud. It was the hardest running experience I’ve had. Incessant boulder scree, unrelenting steep climbs one after another, cold, wind, rain, and most of all a lack of familiarity. This wasn’t the Lake District anymore, and when a group of us got lost on a steep mountain side with boulders rolling like footballs away into the mist, I did get very anxious. We descended too far and had an extra long climb to the last checkpoint, adding almost an hour to the ordeal. Now I was exhausted, to the point where some of my steps lacked the strength to succeed. Slowly though, I did progress, recalling advice I’d once read to “just get your head down and wait for the top to come”, then later, as the top refused to come, remembering Joss Naylor’s beautiful summation of the mental side of fell running “Don’t think about it, if you thought about it you’d lie down”.

The retelling of Jura is where the joy lies. Because I did finish, and as I descended from the clouds towards the road, and the sweet smell of May in the verges, I felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction. My story was to continue and the pain and suffering over the last six and a half hours was lying neatly in a box with a ribbon and a bow on it. The person I am after that experience is a little stronger, a little hardier, slightly more prepared for those uncontrollable events around the corner. I used to think strength was a finite resource, I agonised over this and at times saw myself stood naked before the vast starless skies that lie ahead. I now believe the opposite, strength multiplies and develops the more it is drawn upon. The future contains pain, that’s without doubt, but like the stoics we can choose how we feel and furthermore we can train for it.

On the run back along the road I saw an otter slicing its v-shape into the calm waters. Everything was grey, and the stench of rotting seaweed menaced me with the threat of vomit. Gulls took off and landed on the outcrops, blackbirds scalded from gardens, my hands were cold and swollen and a dull ache spread across my shoulders. So much beauty, so much pain. They come as one.

New Zealand

Landscape plays a slow tune.

At first distant, a gathering of cloud beyond the horizon. Or, spring sunshine on frost. It’s a gradual softening and loosening of things. It builds, there’s a reordering and at some point it throws flames, sudden, great flames that leap and cast shadows and throw warm arms up to the cracked walls and smashed glass windows. And there’s a heat, and it melts the creaking doors from their frames and dawn shines on flame and it doesn’t relent and nothing asks why.  

It took an entire week in New Zealand, this tune. No conscious hand can hurry it along yet I seemed destined to try. Wild-eyed and crazy for a connection I pulled my thoughts this way then that, through days and lakes and books. If I could just be startled, or sad, some sort of shock perhaps? Anything that would open those doors to the sunlight. This awful dance started early, on the slow descent over the beautifully named “Remarkables” mountain range near to Queenstown. They were enormous, clouds were boiling in valleys and what wasn’t black rock was brilliant white snow. I conjured up some tears and swept some make-do emotions into a nice neat pile, you know the way, like wondering at a baby’s hands or how on earth did they build the pyramids? We turned down a river valley, the water was turquoise and the stone was that alp-grey colour; as the engines whirred through their landing notes I grappled around faster and faster for connections, some way, any way, to bring the landscape to me. All this, even before I’d breathed the air.

It was through this hazed panic for joy that I approached the first days. There are plenty of ways in which not to connect with the environment in New Zealand and I drifted about these corridors quite regularly, what’s worse is I’d taken to using a camera. So on more than one occasion I’d pull over into a little carpark and take a photo, get back in the van and drive on, that anxious, hollow desire to record and catalogue, a reducing of the actual world to your own dreary collection of lurched-for images, holding onto moments that never extended beyond the act of capturing them anyway. It’s a regret that I never quite shook this off, this awful enslavement to images, following my camera around like some faithful dog.

I was living as some glitching computer programme or machine, flitting about between places and times, through sleepless nights and knotted dreams, over and over that same dry, wheel-rutted terrain of conscious grief. But then the brilliant flames? The doors melting away all of a sudden? Well of course, I exaggerate. I can chose to remember and repackage this holiday however I wish, whatever seems most appealing in retrospect. The truth is there were moments of peace and clarity throughout the holiday, it didn’t all burst at once, and I’ll come onto those. But there was this one experience at the end, something of an epiphany - or at the very least some sense of becoming okay - that I want to indulge, embellish here and there, take liberties with and simplify. All with the intention of presenting the holiday as I’ve held it since, as some beautiful coming together of threads.

It was on the shores of Lake Hawea at a little Department of Conservation campground. I arrived late, but in time to have a swim and cook dinner before spending a few hours on the beach with the setting sun. The swim had been calm, I remember standing up waste deep and letting the water drop from me before diving under again head first, I kept doing it and a London Grammar song lyric drifted around my head, maybe I’m wasting my young years. A smile rose, I wasn’t. At some point, after the sun dropped behind the mountains but long before darkness, I laid down, it was warmer down here and I felt assured, my thoughts had slowed to the pace of the idle breeze and flames lapped away inside me unhindered. I began to fall asleep and each time I opened my eyes, the huge cloud that cut across the sky had darkened a little more. Eventually stars switched on and the tent zips and camper van doors became the only sounds, even the lake became silent, nothing, no rustling at the pebbles, no sloshing, absolute calmness under the long dusk. I’d spent the week in crystal clear waters, walking endless beech forests, long sweeping ridges above Fjords and sailing on the world famous Milford Sound. These environments had their slow effect and there is no way that arriving here on the first night, I would have drifted into a peaceful sleep under the stars like this. Slowly the mania had lifted, and as it fluttered off across that silver lake I realised it was the first time since Ali died that I had felt peaceful, or indeed anything approaching it. And so New Zealand holds a special place in my heart, the giver of peace and as odd as it feels to say, something of a redelivery of Ali, now in a form with which I don’t need to wrestle, or spin around, or scurry away from. Now a peaceful, permanent, loving companion lying comfortably alongside me as the stars of the southern hemisphere knit those great unfamiliar shapes across the night.

In reality - and I should record the truth - during this epiphany I had two trips back to the van, one for a jumper and one for some insect repellent. I couldn’t get my back comfy after a while, the stones cooled down rather fast and thoughts of airports kept intruding like heavy boots, but at some point during that time all those wonderful things did happen to me, the calmness, the Ali-by-my-side, the big dark cloud like a tear across the sky.  

To all those other experiences then, the threads, the actual holiday I sat down to write about today. I should start with the Milford Sound (actually a Fjord, not a sound). Foremost, it had the most arresting effect on me, I find myself telling people it changed the way I see the world, and although that seems a little grandiose, it does persist as a feeling. The actual experience wasn’t all that visceral, I was milling about on a boat with others taking photos and listening to the too-loud tannoy guide, but the scenery has stayed lodged in me. The slow progress of the boat through the deep, blue-green water made the mountains seem infinitely big. Mitre peak, which stands straight up like the Langdales do above Old Dudgeon Ghyll stretches up 1692m and you see all of that, foot to summit from the water. Tides and crabs slip up and down its base, trees cling so far up and then it’s just brilliant silver rock chiselled into some kind of lightning strike, the perfect jagged triangle. Gable from Wastwater. There were seals and a solitary dolphin, there were huge forested valleys sloping off around corners, under impossible cliffs and ever-changing low clouds. Sometimes a wind whipped down the fjord off the Tasman Sea, I held a coffee and leant against the railings at the front whilst sea birds came close then far, giving some scale back to the cliffs, small planes did the same, or perhaps they were big? After the cruise I swam awkwardly at the head of the fjord, clambering over seaweed rocks out into a sea that refused to get deep. Once afloat though, I could stare up at Mitre peak and across at the 150m waterfall cascading from a glacier high above in the frozen valleys. There was an Oystercatcher and a few Brent Geese enjoying the late afternoon sun, and on my way out I let saltwater dry across my back as I crouched over a rock-pool bustling with tiny life. Everything beautiful.   

Later in the week I climbed Mount Luxmore and Ben Lomond, both of which provided unnervingly vast views. I felt compelled to pull the mountains closer in, huddle them around me. The lakes stretched away forever like seas and the mountain ranges were enormous piles of snow-capped monsters. These hills with their muscular, freshly formed shapes were, at times, an aggression upon the senses. I couldn’t stand the thrust. I longed for those old sages of Lakeland and thought wistfully of Skiddaw who’s youth was not unlike this. Its adolescence was full of drama, bursting up from a fault line into a mountain of Himalayan proportions, before the long drift north, the slow weathering into that beautiful stump sitting now, ever watchful over Keswick.

Weather? Clean air, winds. From the south, air uninterrupted since Antarctica would bring cold mornings to the campsites, chins in zipped fleeces over barbecues, dew on tents and puddles in ruts. Then warm tropical air would blow from the north and cicadas would wake up, the grass would crunch underfoot and everything seemed to be suddenly hot, like Spain or something. Often the sky would wake-up and cloud the heat away, wind would whip shapes across the water, rain would fall and then stop, leaving sunshine on steaming roads. Long days tumbled by and that beautiful dance between cloud, water and mountain never stopped all week. It was free, ever-changing weather, fast and troubled like a mind.

I genuinely didn’t think a place as beautiful as Britain could exist elsewhere, that a climate so spectacular and engrossing was just pottering along like ours, equally over-looked and undervalued at the opposite end of the globe. I can feel my hand on the warm pebbles at Lake Hawea, I can feel that mineral-like fine dust they left on my palms, I can hear the tents and camper vans, I can close my eyes and see the dark hills across the lake standing tall and black against the last embers of the day. Everything is a re-imagining, a sense of shapes in the chaos and New Zealand will remain just that to me, a forming of fantastic shapes that I’d long-forgotten existed. 

Langdale Horseshoe Fell Race 2018

So it rained. Needles of it lashed across Martcrag moor, on Crinkle Crags it came hard and heavy from above, thrown down with intent and malice. Sheltered behind Esk Pike, it drifted like sea fret, warm and slow through the silence behind the wind. It never stopped. As sure as the Thames, it came and came again. The fells were dark and muscular, racehorses, bad dreams. White veins had burst out everywhere, marbling Bowfell, fizzing and tumbling all-over like packs of terriers.

On the start line, a self-satisfied roar went up as it was announced that only half of the five-hundred people registered to race had turned up, making us the ‘hardy few’. I suppose there’s an element of personal heroism in choosing to run in conditions like this, a reinforcement of that familiar old narrative runners slip into: I do this, I don’t quit and am therefore valid. Of course there’s something in that, the satisfaction of completing something is deeply appealing, especially when it’s difficult, but there’s something to avoid there too - needing to punish yourself to feel OK. Is that what we’re up to? I hope not, but a friend once said to me that he’s never seen a runner looking happy in the act and for whatever reason that really stuck with me. I dwelt on it whilst jiggling around to keep warm on the start line, wondering why, questioning the motives. As we left though, clattering along the lane towards the first climb, something shifted in me, and once the steps to Stickle Tarn took hold of my legs and lungs all those half-baked, anxious thoughts slipped away behind, unresolved, returned to chaos.

I listened out for ravens under Pavey Ark. They’d been croaking and diving all over during my recce, but today it was just that familiar old shuffling and snorting sound - a pack of runners slowly catching me - rowdy bullocks, the hardy few. Reminded I was in a race, I pushed on. Soon enough another climb came and I felt sick and then hungry, then sick again. Later on I fell in a stream, cutting my knee and taking a bang to the shin. There was a low level of discomfort all the way around, but I never snagged again on those barbed, twisted thoughts, those forever why’s that pull and drag like the black dog and its tattered toy. Even walking along Wrynose bottom with all hope of competing gone and no energy left to run, even then I felt rested and sure. In motion there’s peace and what wouldn’t you trade for that?

I’d clearly I got a bit too peaceful up on Crinkle Crags, after running the little trod around Bad Step, I felt good. My mind was settled, my legs were springy and I’d found myself positioned well in a race that I’d been excited about all week. In this state of quietness I switched off completely and where I should have been descending to skirt around the last lump on the ridge, I ascended. The climbing felt good so I carried on, totally absent from the situation, completely adrift. Unwittingly, two other runners followed my absent mind into the mist and all of a sudden we found ourselves stood still, I’d woken up from whatever dream I was having to see two very concerned faces. I had to admit to them I was lost, my hands were too cold to unfold my map properly and it felt like minutes until I managed. I stared at it with aimless eyes, knowing it had no answers. I span the dial on my compass to a bearing I thought might do the job, I guess there was a 1 in 360 chance of it being right. In the end we agreed to follow a bearing of 55 and set-off down some steep fell, at some point we tried a bearing of 80 too, then 90. Tiring, and becoming cold we stumbled across a fence that followed a stream down to our right, sensibly one of the guys suggested we just follow that wherever it goes in order to get off the tops and down to safety. We dropped down beside the stream through rotten bracken and eventually out of the clag to see a shining Wrynose valley, full with streams, rivers and that familiar winding road up the pass to Three Shires. 

It was a long way back, and after a final bit of drama crossing the torrents, we were plodding nicely along the roads back to Langdale. Once we reached Blea Tarn I let the other two run ahead and I walked slowly up the gravel path beside the water. Recceing the Three Shires race back in summer, I swam here, disturbing a heron as I splashed into the water. It was warm and a family were picnicking on the other bank, skylarks were singing tall in the blue skies. Now, as the rain hardens, and the trees sway, I think about how memories are layering up in the Lakes once more, building on one another, holding me upright. Then, with a dull thud, it dawns that looking backwards isn’t always to look at Ali now, there’s a bit of road in the way and it’s stretching. Loss, if anything, is another dimension, it’s everywhere; it’s the light behind the poplars, casting those long, beautiful shadows into the distance, all afternoon.

It rained all the way home, cars were stranded in floods and traffic was backed-up for miles out of Ambleside. In-between the wiper blades were glimpses of shadowy fells and low clag, nothing flew or moved, crows, like deer, were sheltering in the woods. Whatever it is we brought down from up there is still burning away inside me now, I’m not sure what it is, but it feels something like gratitude.

Fieldfares

These are good times, because they are the only times.

A sense of permanence is lost in the bereavement process and today, sitting at my desk watching the clouds build and then collapse, as doors slam shut and buckets tumble about in the garden I feel grateful. It’s not always like this, but as I spend more and more time on my feet, moving through the landscapes I love, my thoughts come to rest more easily on gratitude. Transience and mortality seem so piercingly natural at times like this, not something to fight, or make sense of. Something to hold carefully in your hands like you might a butterfly or a broken light bulb.

Earlier, the wind was building frantically, and just as the rain began to splatter the window I found myself in a natural break from my work so headed out for a jog around the block. Descending through steep woodland, sheltered from the wind and rain, I dodged fallen branches and hopped over the stile in the wall, feeling light and awake for the first time all day. The wind sounded like surf in the tree tops and as I left the wood at the bottom it lurched across the field in gusts, blowing me from the path. Along the road, an odd coincidence of timing meant the siren of an ambulance started just as the rain became torrential. There were storm debris all over the footpath and I had my head down tacking against the showers, a wheelie bin fell over and a man held his hood across his face as he walked towards the bus stop.

Turning back up the hill and out of the wind I enjoyed the climb up the old track towards some more woodland. Leaves were flying past me horizontally and the rain had really kicked in, now pouring down my face. As the path steepened through some bracken I met a guy with his dog, his red coat was tied tight around his face but his dog was free, steaming, weaving.

“You’ve picked your time!” he said

“I certainly have”

And I had. All the irony in my intonation was through a sense of politeness. Because this is when to run. No doubt if the day was baking under tedious blue skies and a gentle breeze I’d have skipped all this, I wasn’t planning to run today. But the wind thrashing around like this, the broken skies and sideways rain bring some of the mountains down and it’s irresistible. After that steep section the route levels out through some woodland. Jogging along that path I thought back to the big freeze in February when I’d walk up here every day for a week. I’d booked holiday but we stayed at home, maybe because of the weather or maybe because Ali was too ill, I can’t remember. But we were snowed in for a few days and I walked this loop via Co-op daily, to get Rabbit out and to buy our evening meal.

Leaving Ali at home with the fire blazing and everything she needed for an hour or two meant I could focus on the silent, frozen landscape, exercise my legs, maybe even try to process some of what was going on. As the week progressed though, I became increasingly concerned about the birds. Some fieldfares – winter migrants who come to the UK from the east looking for berries – were knocking about near the woods. I bought a bag of apples, which they like, and placed them in some trees and on a little mound that is usually covered in heather but was thick with frozen snow. I’m not sure how long I waited for them, but enough time passed for me to become really cold, I was anxious to see them arrive for food, see their grey heads and spotty chests. They never turned up, so the next day I moved some of the apples but still no peck marks, in fact they never came all week. Rather than assume they’d found other food, I panicked they’d not found this food and I wondered about cutting the apples up, or moving them down the hill, nearer to the garden I’d seen them in.

Each morning I’d defrost the bird bath and after we ran out of food I baked a big cake for all the sparrows and tits, it was full of all our expensive nuts and seeds and they never touched it. I got to the point where I couldn’t think about much else but the birds, their struggle against the relentless winter was all consuming and a couple of times it became too much. I thought about their tiny hearts fluttering against the cold, about the race for life the fledglings had won over summer only to be faced with this frozen, foodless desert. And I thought about them at night, whilst Ali slept beside me, full of chemotherapy drugs and painkillers. I wondered where they slept and how I might manage to do the same.

Running around there today, past all those trees where the apples were hung, up those same paths, warm now, full of worms and bugs, running past Rowan trees overflowing with berries, running under a sky that blew as hard with rain as it did pigeons, I realised for the first time that those fluttering little hearts I’d cried for in winter were just spray flung high from a torrent, a raging torrent at which I couldn’t look.

These are good times though, because they are the only times. To see permanence flutter away on the wind, to know we are all gone in a gust, is to be alive. The season is on the move, birds are starting to flock and geese have taken to the skies once more, arriving here for our mild winter. Soon enough the fieldfares will be here too, and when it snows you’ll find me up the lane with a bag of apples, even if the fieldfares don’t.

Applecross

I have been entering some writing competitions recently. I'm finding it a really good way to practice writing under some imposed conditions. My latest piece not to win was about a holiday in Applecross last year for the Just Back travel writing competition in the Telegraph. I guess I was stretching the definition of "just back" a touch, but I came in on exactly 500 words thanks to some dodgy hyphens.

Its quite a sad piece, so if you're feeling a little wobbly about Ali today then maybe avoid it. Thanks

Applecross

 “They’ll be pinkies heading south” says Ali, looking up from her book as twenty or so pink-footed geese fly low across the grey sea that separates our cottage from Raasay. As I make another tea in the silent kitchen, Ali calls through “another fifteen just gone past, must be migrating, heading to Solway”

“sod the tea Al, I’ll get you a beer, lets watch the Pinkies awhile”

She could manage a couple of beers back then, it was the second week of her chemo cycle so each day was a small improvement as the toxins left her system. She’d slowly come back to life, start talking again, telling me about the geese or hedgehogs or something Grayson Perry said, or that maybe we’d see eagles this week. The geese kept on coming as the light faded on our first day in Applecross and we relaxed easily into our slow, quiet week together, both excited for another one of our Scottish adventures.

That was October, and somehow now it’s August. In between, Ali died. She talked about Applecross a lot during her final weeks, she told me that it’s all she could think about, that it had become an obsession. I got this panicked desire rise up in me to drive her up there again, like I had in October, with her fast asleep next to me as the sun slowly rose over the M6. I drove for nearly ten hours that day with barely a break. I could have done anything back then, bent down and pulled the mountains flat like bedsheets, sucked the clouds from the sky, because for once the drugs were working. Each month Ali improved a little more and she could breathe, walk, laugh without coughing.

So we didn’t pack her incurable diagnosis, we left it at home and spent a week amongst the bellowing red deer stags. We watched white-tailed and golden eagles float around like barn doors above Shieldaig harbour and most evenings a pine marten came to visit, helping the local mice eat  peanut butter that we’d smeared across the patio. 

As the week went on, the wind started to pick-up, battering our lonely cottage with rain that had come north from the distant Cullin mountains on Skye. We listened to the whistling window frames as we read our books and took long baths. Days rolled in and out with the weather off the sea, and through it all, pinkies continued to fly south into the wind, determined to leave those arctic breeding grounds before the real cold came.

It’s my turn to think of Applecross all the time now, it’s my obsession. This conflict of a place where I was the happiest I can remember being, but that I can barely say out loud. To help, I turn again and again to a quote Ali wrote for me towards the end, faced with a choice about where to die:

“Place is everything and nothing, for he is me and I am him”.

Brenda G Macrow

I didn’t go to the hills this weekend but I did drink too much which means I’m fumbling about at home on a Sunday evening looking for something tangible. The Crows outside are starting-up with their bedtime routines, cackling and posturing on their way down the field towards the woods. I’ve dug out my Brenda Macrow books, their torn jackets and brittle pages always sooth me. The smell of dust, or trapped damp, or whatever it is these old books smell of is taking me back to Barter Books in Alnwick where we bought them, I can hear the little train rattling around overhead and the pointless ticking of a clock.

Brenda wrote beautiful prose and melodic poems that scratch away furiously at the clichés and weary language we use when describing the hills. She was digging for that jewel in us for which she readily confessed, there are no words. Yet she tried, and I think what she achieved was to express just how compelled she did feel to dig, and it’s that journey which she takes us on. She wasn’t satisfied to have something in her that couldn’t be explained, almost at odds with this love for the mountains, so great and raw that it overwhelmed and confused her. She was out of control, and I haven’t read anything else about the hills that conveys this reckless love so purely.

“On days like this…” is a short piece of prose that I have found to be the most honest of her attempts at rationalising her feelings and it is as much about what it is to be alive as it is about the mountains.

The whole piece is here: http://www.electricscotland.com/travel/hills/chapter37.htm    

This passage seems to be shouting, begging, pulling at the ankles of the reader. I could imagine it shouted by a street preacher at indolent passers-by, it’s her rallying cry to us all, do you not hear??

“Do you not hear the faery violins of the grasses as they bend and bow to the breeze? They are playing for you. The trees are touching their harps for you -- the heather-bells are murmuring a song which reaches out to all the lost and lonely places of your soul. You are happy for the sun-kissed summer flowers -- and sad for the broken reed at the edge of the mourning stream. Whatever else you have known or failed to know about life, you feel that this day will live forever in your heart.”

She goes on to say that “while the senses cry “This is madness" the spirit cries “This is real!” which is a brilliant description of that conflict within us, when standing in the mountains, contemplating a view with your conscious thought, thinking how this or that look amazing, incredible, yet inside your spirit, which never grapples around for meaning or ideas, is finally connected and crying out way beyond your disintegrating thoughts, out beyond the senses, beyond reasoning, a spirit in you is crying out this is real! Do you not hear?

Later on, perhaps describing herself:

“Down in the glen, the shaggy red cattle stand at peace under the tall trees and the woman at the bothy door forgets her weary task and looks away up into the mountains, with that in her eyes for which there are no words.”

Yes, there are no words Brenda, but there’s a cry and we hear it loud and clear. And you can hear it too, in the following poem which reads like a song, it forces you to sing it, it swings and heaves off the page. It’s possibly the most cheerful thing I’ve ever read. 

I WILL arise and go, and go to the mountain: Oh, I will arise out of my darkness, my sorrow, and go to the mountain. To the old ways and the wise ways: To the lost ways and the long ways. Where life is but a shadow that plays on the calm face of the mountain. 

I will cast off my shackles and flee to the mountain: Oh, I will cast off my shackles of care, of envy, and flee to the mountain: To the cool days and the still days: To the brave days and the blue days: Where Peace in blessing forever lays her hands on the brow of the mountain. 

And I shall find my soul again in the mountain. Oh, I shall find the soul that I lost in the City, there in the mountain. With the wild things and the shy things. The swift things and the sure things. And the night, a mysterious folding of wings on the broad breast of the mountain.

The shy things, what better term for wildlife? conjuring up swathes of fantasy and magic in us with the simplest of language. And what a beautiful way to spend a Sunday evening, bathing in passion for life. Here’s to Brenda and a life well lived.

Borrowdale Fell Race

Something’s catching moonlight and I can’t tell if its high trees, clouds or mountains. That’s the thing with the lakes, nestled in these deep valleys you get your perspective all out of sync, get yourself lost in the folds of the... shit, must be all the Sneck Lifter and Stella sloshing around in me but I think that’s just a security light shining out, not the moon. Actually, it is, it definitely is. I still don’t know what it’s catching on up there but one things for sure, it’s shining down on a complete and utter ponce, swooning about in the beer garden alone, me and the moths giving it Wordsworth at the wall lights. I’d come out when the musician stopped, thought I’d cool off before he returned, its getting on for midnight but he had promised to be back after his piss. Unfortunately the staff thought different and his kit was unplugged, people were dispersed from the dance floor, and lights were flicked on. All a bit unceremonious, he’s worked so hard all night screaming Nirvana and Prince down the mic with just about everything he had. Anyway, he seemed happy enough and drunk enough too, telling one woman he lives in Paris and telling me he lives in Liverpool. I don’t know which is true, but his thick liverpudlian accent explaining how there’s “a lot of water round here” and that “Tories can’t swim” suggests maybe its Liverpool. I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Earlier he’d stood aside from his mic, put Karaoke versions of Right said Fred and Dolly Parton centre-stage, he’d stood screaming Smells like Teen Spirit to the point of speaker distortion as one after another shirt was flung in the air by a group of runners hitting a big second wind. I resisted of course, in my usual deliberating, hesitant way, with fractured thoughts about toxic masculinity popping in and out my head as the dance floor swirled and stamped all around. Then someone behind relieved me of my top and I instantly got it, put the thinking to one side for a moment and joined in the abandon. I guess it’s all about being immersed, whether that’s dancing, running or anything, it’s about being totally immersed and present. Like descending Scafell Pike earlier in the day, sliding through the scree, out of control, completely at the mercy of that moment, the next step, that’s all. Thrown up to the wind like confetti, alive, smiling a smile that starts in your chest and rises, that’s what happens out there in the hills and I guess that’s how you end up stood romanticising at wall lights, half-drunk and hungry for beauty and experience, what else can you pour in whilst the lids off? Give me moonlight and narrow valleys, bring that musician back on I’m not ready for my tent.

Of course, I was more than ready for my tent, over ready. The race had been incredible, it lived up to all the build-up in my mind, five years of build-up in truth. It’s something I’ve thought about a long time, I’d escape into blogs about it in tougher times. Soaked it in, studied the route, learnt about old legends and battles that had played out over these hills. I’d follow the social media aftermath each year and wonder. Wonder how I’d fare on those last big climbs up Gable and Dale Head. It was hard work finding that out, and the best I can say is I didn’t stop! But the lovely run down the corridor route, the misty descent off gable and the surprise of finding I still had something in my legs to make places up through the quarry on the way back was fantastic. Parachuting down towards the finish field, excited, knowing I had finished one of the classics was fantastic. And although there was no Ali stood filming me at the line on her rabbit-eared phone, there were plenty of friendly faces, happy, welcoming faces keen to chat and share in the euphoria of being out there. I knocked about with Martin a while, got washed off in the river and ate Jam butties in the village hall, later as the sun dipped down behind Dale Head I sat easy amongst my new club mates. Barbecues smoked, kids raced about, stories flowed well like the beer and wine. Then to the pub, where I found out what Wharfedale Harriers are definitely the best at as they spilled onto the empty dancefloor like a bag of marbles and stayed there all night, seeing to to it that the day came to a fitting close.