Everest the easy way

As a young reporter on the Yorkshire Post I was invited once to accompany a team of climbers to Everest base camp. Among the team was Al and Adrian Burgess, twin brothers from Holmfirth who I had come to know through reporting their climbs, not to mention drinking their home brew.

The twins were among the finest climbers of their generation but did not always get the recognition afforded to others with whom they climbed such as Sir Chris Bonnington and Doug Scott.

In return for the invitation they were seeking just £200 sponsorship from the Yorkshire Post. Had I had the confidence to walk up the corridor to the editor's office I'm sure it would have been forthcoming. As it was I approached the news editor who dismissed the proposal out of hand.

I suppose it's just as well. I'm sure I would have gone farther than base camp and that might not necessarily have been a good thing. The Burgess twins were climbing before chequebook mountaineering destroyed the free spirited ethic that had flourished briefly within the alpine-style teams, sandwiched as they were between military-style assaults and commercially guided climbs.

Even getting to base camp was a challenge as my wife, Gill, discovered in 2004. But whatever majesty the mountain has left the Chinese seem bent on destroying in building an asphalt road to its base on their side. Is there nowhere on this planet safe from the meddling "improvements" undertaken by people? Not that the British are above such crassness on a smaller scale.

Do the Chinese think they are to be admired for carrying out this project? Domesticating the wild places in this way is wrong. Given the chance to climb Everest today with those same young legs I would shake my head and go elsewhere.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Driving back from Yorkshire yesterday we called at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I've been coming here since I was a youngster, indeed before the sculpture park was opened some 30 years ago. I used to go swimming in the lake.

I always thought it was a great place to display the sculptures of people like Henry Moore and Dame Barbara Hepworth. Much of their work was made for the outdoors. But my favourite sculptor, who, if memory serves me right, has been exhibiting here almost as long as the park has existed, is Andy Goldsworthy.

Goldsworthy sculpts from nature, usually in the place that he finds his materials. Invariably his work is lost as the elements take over. Sometimes he uses shards of ice, other times twigs or tree branches. Some of his work involves arrangements of stone; some uses leaves, arranged in interesting compositions.

The exhibition of his work running at the park until January 6 is superb and should not be missed if you are heading up to Yorkshire in the next few months. In one room is a curtain made from leaf stalks; another room has cracked mud walls and another features a wood-lined chamber.

One of the reasons I like Goldsworthy's approach so much is that he is not precious about his work. He has not cashed in on high gallery values as others among his contemporaries have done. His work is transient, often preserved only in photographs like these.

Another favourite inside the Park is the Deer Shelter by James Turrell. Inside is a square roof opening, revealing the sky. It's a peaceful place to sit and reflect on things for a while.


If you're one of those people who prefers to look for an alternative to Motorway service stations on a long drive, this is worth the detour and there's a good restaurant and cafe overlooking meadows with mature trees and grazing sheep that complement the sculptures. The park is at West Bretton, five minutes away from turning 38 on the M1.

Dope test

The Labour Party's confessional box was overflowing last week as cabinet ministers and MPs engaged in a collective purging of past indiscretions in smoking cannabis.

I couldn't help noticing that there was almost a formula to every confession. Typically it was something they "tried at university", suggesting that it was a few puffs of a spliff a long time ago that now, with maturity, they realise was a mistake and rather regretted.

As each sin was washed away in the sea of public indifference you could feel the envy of colleagues who had never tried the weed. Such is the cache attached to previous experience of dope that I can imagine that prospective parliamentarians will insist that in future space should be made on their application forms for "past cannabis use."

Spaced out

Failure to tick the box would lead to rejection for fear of any future embarrassing revelation that a minister might have passed through university without once sampling a joint.

It would have been refreshing to hear a minister confessing: "Oh yeah, I was spaced out for the whole of my second semester, loved the stuff, couldn't get enough, still like the odd puff when chillin' after a tough speech." But that would be to overstep the unspoken "three joints and you're out" rule. Neither should historical experimentation be mistaken for acceptance of any current proclivity. Perish the thought.

Ibble Dibble

I noticed I was scooped here by The Philanderer (aka my mate Simon Weathers - see "Three Fingers Please") in his observation that Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, had partaken in the drinking game, Bunny Rabbits. I always preferred Fizz Buzz myself (but was never any good at it). Another good one was Ibble Dibble, played with a burnt cork.

We've played a few of those sessions down the Red Cow in Richmond after rugby internationals, all a long time ago, naturally. There was a stripping off and press-ups version once until the landlady intervened. Happy days.

Water blogged

I couldn't help noticing while watching both ITV and BBC news reports on the flooding last night that both news channels seem to be trying to outdo each other in "total immersion" TV coverage.

If they weren't up in their helicopters they were thigh deep in brown water. Wellies and a mac simply aren't enough for the intrepid flood reporter. But why stop at thigh waders? I'm surprised that a BBC requisition for breast waders hasn't gone out yet to get its news teams even deeper in to the story.

A smug ITV reporter stole a march last night, however, by reporting from his canoe. I'm wondering, given the BBC's reputation for honesty, whether there might be extra crew among the outdoor units with wind makers and buckets of water to ensure weather extremes on camera.

The BBC even had its weatherman out on the streets of Gloucester yesterday. Is this a kind of punishment, the sort that shoots the messenger? I can imagine the producer saying: "You gave us this bloody weather so get out and get under it."

Rain not fair

For the first time in 49 years the Country Land and Business Association Game Fair has been cancelled. Rainfall on the estate of Harewood House where the fair was to be held has been so heavy that the organisers have been forced to call it off for fear of turning a beautiful landscape in to a quagmire (or an average year at the Glastonbury festival).

The cancellation cost in terms of the expected spend, both at the fair and in the surrounding region is estimated at £50m. But in terms of lost business and product recognition for exhibitors I would put the figure even higher. To say I'm sickened is an understatement. The Game Fair is a great chance to catch up with old and new friends all in one place.

This year I was looking forward to learning a little more about shooting and to trying out a whole series of salmon rods. OK, I will save on all the discretionary spending that would have undoubtedly lightened my wallet - it doesn't take much to convince me of the need for a new bit of fishing gear. But that's not the point. This is the place to get ideas and to find out just what's going on in the world of field sports.

What to do now? I expect I'll go fishing.

I-ronic?

A good friend sent me this link. It speaks for itself:

I-rack

Elf and safety

I thought that Boris Johnson and Ed Balls were yesterday's blogs until I saw the carping column written by Johnson in today's Daily Telegraph complaining that Balls was shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted on playground safety.

Balls was only acting, said Johnson, "after 10 years of elf and safety lunacy". That's not quite true. The "pirates" game I mentioned here was banned many years ago, banned, possibly before Boris was fitted for his first tailcoat at Eton. Whether it was banned under a Tory or Labour administration, I cannot remember.

The point I'm making is that health and safety concerns have been a creeping trend in schools, playgrounds, workplaces, public places, you name it, for more than a quarter of a century. And it shouldn't all be blamed at the government.

Ask yourself this Boris: Why are you told to put on a safety belt when you climb in to a plane, even when you go for a snooze, when the same doesn't happen on a train? On every flight there's the same routine about emergency exits, life jacket, whistle, drop-down oxygen masks, when we know that our chances of surviving an air crash are pretty slim.

On trains, where crash-survival chances are much better, there is no-one to tell you about the hammer for smashing the windows - you need to work that one out for yourself - and there are no seat belts. Why?

The answer, I believe, has something to do with human irrationality. People are more afraid of flying than they are of train travel and the safety routine has a soothing effect. Air safety has been much better managed with lessons learned from previous disasters. Train safety has improved also, but it has never extended to cocooning individual passengers.

There's a good book called Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, that outlines a theory suggesting that some of the things we do for protection, such as roping up when descending mountains, can be a bad thing because we become overdependent on the safety measure when we should take more care as individuals. It's worth reading.

Where I did agree with Johnson in his column was his point about degree status expected for nursery-school carers. Why should everyone be expected to have a degree today? I don't have one and I've brought up a family of three kids. Mind you, that might explain a few things.

Today I gave to a beggar

Today I gave money to a beggar. I rarely give to beggars yet I never walk past one without some stinging guilt at the sight of an outstretched arm and pleading voice.

I'm well off and they are not. Yet I opt to hide behind the work ethic - the belief that they could be doing something useful - anything - to help themselves. Why not sweep the streets?

If I give them money, I reason, they'll only go and spend it on drink. At Waterloo station today a beggar came on the train and told people he needed £4.60 that would buy him enough shelter for the rest of the week. I didn't believe him but I gave him all I had all the same, which wasn't quite enough if he was telling the truth.

Instead of feeling good about it I felt guilty again, partly for breaking ranks with fellow passengers, partly because I'm sure there are others who deserve it more, and partly because it wasn't enough; it never is.

Most of all though, it's the feeling that giving to beggars is not going to end poverty. Creating a society where family values still matter, where a social safety net is an entitlement, not a gesture of charity. That's the solution.

High sounding words but not much use to the train beggar. The station authorities say it's wrong to encourage begging. They have a point but what I do with my own money is my business and today I gave some to a beggar. What he does with it now is his business.

Troglodyte

Troglodyte

Feel the pressing blast of tunnel warmth,
Read the last dishonest billboard line,
Hear the building electronic whine,
Smell the fetid, dense, metallic fumes,
See the tired, pallid, neutral faces,
Taste the oil and dirt and sweat,
Touch the greasy, yellow plastic pole,
Climb the furrowed, shiny moving stairs,
Gulp the noisy city air in heaving, tortured lungs,
And dive again.

Written on the Jubilee line between Green Park and Waterloo Station after a good lunch, 18.7.07

Great White wants Red Ken's lunch

Let me say from the outset that I am a big fan of Boris Johnson's columns in the Daily Telegraph. They are written with alacrity, great humour, marvellous inventiveness, and demonstrate some fine literary dexterity.

He nails his colours to the mast every time, often just before it is shattered by some unforeseen canon ball, leaving Boris scrambling up off the deck and dusting down his braids and hat.

Flawed genius

Boris is a flawed genius who wears his flaws like campaign ribbons so that people warm to him all the more because to err is human and Boris Johnson knows how to err probably better than any other British politician.

Now he wants his party's blessing to run for Mayor in London and the newspapers cannot contain themselves at the slapstick potential in a Boris and Ken show running all the way to the May election in the best traditions of a Brian Rix farce.

Johnson is living proof that it is possible to benefit from a good education, to be articulate, to be able to quote the classics, to put forward a cogent argument, and yet still be a buffoon. His father, Stanley, puts it differently: "Underneath the buffoonery is a very clever man - a scholarship boy who went to Eton; he makes me laugh and that's a good enough tonic for me."

Buffoon sandwich

Stanley is right, certainly about the humour and the cleverness. But I worry that when you strip away the layer of buffoonery, exposing the unquestioned intellect, there may be lurking underneath yet another layer of buffoonery: the intellect packed in to a buffoon sandwich as it were.

Even as I'm writing this I'm wondering if this matters. After all, Boris is entertaining. He lightens up our days. The House of Commons needs such people. The newspapers need them. But does the Government, and, more to the point, does the Mayoralty of London?

Whatever you say about Ken Livingstone and I'm no fan - I would much rather share a dinner with Boris - he has demonstrated that he is a conviction politician who gets things done.

No, I don't like bendy buses and preferred the old Route Masters that you could hop on and off at traffic lights. But there's more to running London than bendy buses. Road charging was unpopular but it eased congestion considerably. Laissez faire Boris no doubt would remove all the road signs and yellow lines and make way for a free for all. I'd like to see that but I don't think it would work.

Slinging stones

Johnson is a populist who craves ever more popularity. He works best on the outside slinging stones. He's not a detail man. He says he wants to be like the town mayor in the film, Jaws, giving us the freedom to do stupid things if that's what we crave.

I'm all for giving people the scope for stupidity if they don't harm other people. So Boris should run and you should vote for him if you must. The Monster Raving Loony Party should pack its bags and disband. We ain't see nothing yet.

Hard Balls

Congratulations to Ed Balls, the UK Government's new Schools Secretary, for promising to tackle the fear of law suits that has led to playground bans against games such as marbles and tag.

I played in the FT football team with Ed who was centre forward and probably our best player after centre half Alan Harper, a much missed photographer who in 1991 was killed in Kuwait with David Thomas, another fine FT journalist.

As school secretary, Ed has his work cut out if he is to reverse the trend towards ever more sanitised playgrounds. I blame mothers who want to wrap their kiddies in cotton wool as much as I blame the so-called "compensation culture."

Pirates

This trend started years ago. I remember playing "pirates" in the school gym when you could swing from ropes and jump over all the gym equipment until some official banned it as too dangerous. It was a great game, of course.

I was less enthusiastic about British Bulldogs where you had to run from one side of a field to the other while some in the middle tried to pick you off your feet. I couldn't run very well so was useless as a chaser and was easily caught when chased.

There was another game - "finger, thumb or dumb" we called it in the Scouts - where three of you crouched in a line against a wall and others would leap on your backs. That one was a bit rough too.

My old school, Carlton Road Junior School in Dewsbury, was typical of its type with asphalt playgrounds, one for the juniors and an adjoining one for the infants. A new headmaster called Gordon Hirst came to the school intent on improving our cricket performances. We didn't even have a school team.

Canon balls

He introduced a "corky" ball in to the play ground. These balls were hard and black with a brown cork outer. They whizzed up off the asphalt like cannon balls. It wouldn't have been so bad except that we didn't wear pads in the playground. You can imagine that those brave enough to bat became good at hitting the ball pretty quickly. There was no choice.

Sometimes a ball would be cracked over in to the infants' playground, flooring some poor tot who had been playing ring-a-ring of roses, fell down, then didn't get up.

The upshot was that we won the Dewsbury junior schools cricket cup for two years running. At the same time we cleaned up on the swimming trophies too. My cousin Andrew and I were good swimmers and I have already mentioned Melvin Holmes, the third member of our swimming team, here.

Should we go back to the old days? It never did me much harm. A much greater evil in playgrounds is bullying and sometimes the rough games worked against the bullies where they were exposed, away from their little gangs. It's remarkable what you can get away within an organised game - an elbow here, a set of studs there. There would be retribution later but sometimes it was worth it.

Shellfish behaviour

Humiliated in a pub quiz at the Britannia Inn, Elterwater in the Lake District. The plan was to be home by now after a week on the Isle of Skye but bad traffic in Scotland forced a change of course. My God there are some scruffy areas on the outskirts of Falkirk.

We diverted to the Lake District and the Langdale Hotel. The pub meal was fine but we were kicked out of one room that the waitress told us was the "restaurant" where prices were 10 per cent higher. I think she was a bit irked when she found me laying our table after I had ordered at the bar. It's a pub. You go to the bar in pubs. I hate pubs with pretensions to be something they're not.

The upshot was that we ended up in the backroom with the locals who seemed to have a far better grasp of general knowledge than we did. I wouldn't have minded but the quiz marker even went so far as to add an "Sp" in brackets after a misspelling. I get better treatment than that from the FT sub editors. It was like school.

We were rubbish.

It's teeming down outside - exactly the weather we needed in Skye to provide a much needed spate that would have sent the fish up the river. The only fishing I had up to Saturday was an afternoon in a boat at sea fishing for mackerel and Pollock. Sea fishing is pretty messy.

We filleted our catch in the evening and barbecued it over an open fire by Neist Point Lighthouse where our friend, Jane, had just been celebrating her 50th birthday. There were a lot of lobsters, prawns and langoustines and plenty of champagne. Not a bad party all in all.

The trestle table featured in the pictures collapsed under the weight of Jane's son, Jack. Jane bruised her foot jumping off a wall - as you do at 50th birthday parties. Otherwise no major incidents.

From the cliffs we watched basking sharks and Minke whales feeding in the rich currents that work around the headland.

It was cloudy most of the time with the sort of fine drizzle that works in to your clothes but which doesn't soak anything. On Saturday there had been just enough rain to provide an outside chance of a run so I fished the river Snizort. The result was two small sea trout and a good pull which I'm sure was a salmon - I saw the fish - but which I didn't convert in to a catch.

The best, and saddest, story I heard in the week was that of the fresh-water mussel, once prolific in Scotland but now endangered. These wonderful creatures live up to 140 years, each purifying 50 litres of water a day while eating waste matter from salmon and trout

But they have been hunted almost to extinction for their pearls. It still happens illegally among locals who use glass-bottomed buckets. Historically the freshwater pearl was once so prized that Julius Caesar cited it to the senate as one of the reasons for invading Britain in 55 BC.

I always wondered what it was that brought the legions far in to the north of Scotland near rivers such as the Tay. It must have been the pearls.

The mussels need salmonids in their reproductive process since the gills of the salmon and sea trout host the juvenile mussels for a few months until they drop off in the headwaters of rivers. Today salmon and trout runs in many rivers are so sparse there is much less chance of spreading mussels and extending populations. Many mussel populations don't have reproducing adults anyway, just stately old mussels seeing out their days in a few spots out of reach of mussel hunters.

A few years back a clump of 800 80-year-old mussels was plucked from its habitat during so-called "river improvements". That's 64,000 years of life destroyed in a matter of minutes.

We need to know about these things when we fish. No species survives in isolation.

Snooker in Rishon LeZion

Sometimes - not very often - I write poems. They lie around unread for the most part although this one, written in 2002 and inspired by this event, was published in a travelling exhibition. Sadly, it remains timely. It's called:

Snooker in Rishon LeZion

Hanif blessed the martyrs one by one,
His gristled brothers bathed in perfumed flesh,
Beyond the rubbled, choking Jenin slums,
Bulldozed, blasted, soused in manic hate
For shops and glass and shining steel,
And burnished bargain counters selling dreams
Of Nike, Coke, Mercedes-Benz
And hanging Cotswold gardens, sauna clean.

His sister kissed his neck and finger-stroked,
The adolescent down above his lip,
She tucked the wiring underneath his shirt,
And out of sight she hid the plastic switch
Assembled in Taiwan and dispatched just-in-time
To unionised assembly plants in German towns
Surmounting crusty layers of wartime waste,
Creating penance work for muscled sons.

But not the life of Masefield’s galley home,
Of strutting peacocks, ivory and wine,
More the drudge-like state of Kurusawa’s Ikiru
Where cancer-riddled paper-shifting slaves awaited death,
And not like Tel Aviv’s uncertain crowds
With cue arms poised, their worries lost in play,
A green baize veil across their painful world,
Horizons fixed on cushioned rubber walls.

Koranic verse begins to warm his parching lips,
And bare-armed virgins beckon, chins thrown back,
Forbidden sisters dancing in the mist,
As others danced beneath in strobe-flicked rooms,
Their animated gestures clasped in narrowed time
For one more gambled coin and empty chugging breath
Of life as Hanif cries his mother’s name,
And sends this new Gomorrah straight to Hell.

Shark bait

John just sent me a picture of a Great White shark following a canoeist. Great picture if it's real, I said. The trouble with so many Photoshop images today is that it's hard to tell what is real and what has been doctored. Then he sent me the full magazine article so see for yourself. Would you test the benign tendencies of a Great White in your little canoe? Personally I would have been paddling fast enough to take off.

There's some interesting examples of picture doctoring alongside some genuine photographs here at Snopes.com.

Finger picking

I was thinking about rude gestures the other day - I don't know why - and something occurred to me. When was the last time you saw anyone in the UK waving two fingers in anger at anybody?

The V-sign was common in my youth but in the past five or 10 years, most probably as a result of US TV culture, the middle finger gesture has taken over. Upset another road-user and what do you get? Yes, the middle finger.

I don't use either gesture, of course, but if I did I think I would struggle with the latter since raising my middle finger simply doesn't come naturally. The vital moment would have passed and there would be a danger of simply waving a bunch of fingers Ted Rogers-style which would look rather bland and inappropriately inoffensive.

The two-fingered gesture, on the other hand (that's the expression not a literal reference), is more easily executed and carries with it a greater sense of defiance in my opinion.

I thought it had a longer pedigree too until I read this piece. I'm wary of Wikipedia articles that reference web sites, particularly one that, rather than debunk a story, simply casts doubt on it.

I still find it credible that the English archers at Agincourt would have raised their two fingers at the French, even if the threat of having them cut off is an elaboration. If the article is correct, however, it seems that the middle-finger insult has an even longer pedigree with origins in Roman times and possibly earlier.

Whichever way you look at it, therefore, the two-fingered gesture seems more fittingly British than the imported single finger. So I'd like to raise two fingers to the middle finger gesture. Send it back where it came from.

And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Sitting around a log fire at Camp Dick a week ago we sang Eric Bogle's classic song, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. It seemed a strange coincidence, therefore, to find myself last night sitting around another camp fire, this time in Newfoundland, when one of our group started playing the same song on his guitar.

The "Newfies" love a sing song. They were still singing around the fire by the side of Deer Lake at 3 in the morning when they decided to head home across the lake. Their boat almost overturned when it hit a wave and lost its motor overboard. Another boat had to rescue them. I had turned in earlier for an early start to the fishing.

We're Heli-fishing. A helicopter takes us to a river each morning and picks us up in the evening. we've seen moose, caribou but, sadly not many fish. The runs are late because of a cold winter. I've had small grilse but nothing else. Other than that there has been a 10lb salmon and another grilse which we cooked and ate with bacon and caribou meat at the riverside camp on Main River.

My fish took a "bomber" fly fished on the surface in a dead drift. Everyone here fishes this way and the fish do go for these flies when they're "on".

The more I get to know the Newfies the more I like them. They all seem to be hunting and fishing mad. If they're not after the fish they're after moose or ptarmigan.