Older, but no wiser

Englishmen must be perversely attracted to outdoor conditions that wiser folk avoid. It is well known that, along with mad dogs and Noel Coward, we venture out into the mid-day sun; lesser known are the strange ways in which some of the more eccentric of our number get our outdoor kicks.

Take hills. The majority may, with unimpeachable logic if limited sense of adventure, avoid them altogether. Hardier souls will, perhaps with a certain degree of masochism, enjoy the exertion, as with heart pounding they arrive breathless and sweaty at a summit cairn to take in the view on a clear sunny day. Then there are the committed walkers, out in all weathers, heads bowed against the wind and rain, enjoying the ten yard visibility all the way to the summit…

Walkers usually prefer to avoid water but accept that in the UK that’s rather like avoiding touching the ground with your feet. But if you can’t avoid it, you can at least exclude it. Who then in their right mind would seek out the ravines formed by streams tumbling down the mountainsides, and attempt to climb the hills staying as close as possible to the centre of the stream bed?

Well, me, for starters.

Anyway, why should that be considered odd? Why should convention constrain human locomotion to upright bipedalism along pre-defined pathways? Any twelve-year-old would understand the attraction of the alternatives.

I used to help run a scout troop some years ago. The lads loved the freedom they had away from their parents when we went camping. We took good care of them, but we allowed them a lot of independence also. We supervised, but not with a heavy hand. Boys of that age (ours was an all-boy troop, not having any female leaders) have a natural affinity for the basic elements of earth, air, fire and water. If there was water, they were in it, be it a puddle or a pond; air, they’d be flying through it; earth – they’d be covered in it; fire – playing with it (we cooked over open fires wherever possible – it’s more work for them to manage and is a source of endless fascination - all scouts are pyromaniacs - and so keeps them out of mischief for longer).

But I digress…

There’s something instinctively attractive – perhaps to the twelve-year-old boy in me – about clambering up the rocky bed of a mountain stream. Picking my way from rock to rock in the middle of the slower running sections, scrambling up waterfalls (a lot easier than it looks as any horizontal surfaces of rock are washed clean by the force of the water, in spite of being surrounded by treacherously slippery slime); balancing on rock ledges around deep pools. Ledges did I say? Boots poised at slipping-point on invisible half-inch-wide toe-holds whilst fingers are plunged deep into soil, gaining whatever purchase they can on roots of grass or heather, inching round a rock bulge that threatens to nudge me into the pool beneath.

It was a photo on the wall of my study from a couple of years ago, of one of my lads half way up rocky, mossy gully in the Lake District, that reminded me of all this. That, and Euan’s trip to South Wales today. I guess he will have found himself in streams tumbling down the hillside whatever path he took. It’s been raining steadily all day in London, although if he’s lucky it will have been falling as snow over the Brecon Beacons. At 8.00 last night I still hadn’t quite abandoned the idea of joining him, but then I remembered my tax return hadn’t been filed, and the deadline for online submissions is tomorrow. So whilst Euan was being a mad Scotsman up a mountain, I was cosy and warm tapping keys here. But given a free choice, I’d rather have been out there demonstrating my total insanity…