Everything I've Ever Needed to Know I've Learnt from Climbing up Things: Commandment I

In the beginning there was a tendency to climb up on the roof any time dad left the ladder out to escape the confines of four walls full of noise. Then an accidental opportunity to climb Kilimanjaro while bumping across East Africa in the back of a truck with twenty other backpackers. And from there the ten commandments for women with altitude were revealed.

Commandment One
Thou shalt ascend only one way - slowly. There are those who will be found on any trek who will attempt to win the ‘first-into-the-huts’ prize each night. They can generally be spotted by the latest gortex gear and having all the right food - power bars, protein shakes etcetera. But don’t feel inferior because you have three day old bread and vegemite. Speed counts for nothing up high and those that try it shall be struck down – see Commandment Two.

Surviving Britain's Winter Storms: Tip 1

Settle in for the weekend with all six hours of the original BBC production of 'Pride and Prejudice'.

Oh Mr Darcy!

Negotiating Notting Hill

Each year after Notting Hill Carnival there is debate in media columns and talk back radio about whether the Carnival has outgrown its current site. ‘The streets of gentrifying Notting Hill can no longer accommodate Europe’s largest street party’, is one argument. ‘The Caribbean community has moved on and so should the carnival’ is another. On reflection, there are perhaps two deep seated fears being presented in these arguments: first, fear of the crowd, its sheer size and unpredictability; second, the fear of the stranger and his/her ambiguity.

The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s sense of transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.

Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel a sense of transcendence. There is at first a sense only of discomfort. There is a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.

According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown. (…) It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.

The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.

Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.

On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.

Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.

Electoral Reform in the UK

The UK has one of the most anachronistic voting systems I've ever had to use. First-Past-the-Post means that the current government, which had about 30% of the popular vote, has 100% of the power. So if you're interested in creating a system that is fairer, and that has the possibility of creating a democracy that actually incorporates representation and participation, feel free to check out the work of the Electoral Reform Society.

These boots were made for walking ....

I have included a picture at the end of this blog of what's left of my feet. It's not for the sensitive. It is what happens when you run, walk, shuffle, hobble for 15 hours, 53 minutes and 40 seconds over 50 miles of sodden bog in sodden shoes and sodden socks burning up over 6000 calories in the process. Some of you have already shared the sado-masochistic pleasure of an endurance event with me. And many of you have sworn you will never indulge in such pleasure again. But I ask you, like chocolate ... can you ever really have too much? There is always that little bit of a craving to go further. And so it is that yet again I'm giving up my Saturdays and several nights a week and pints of real ale and cleaning the house and a social life for 3 months to train for the great Lakeland 50, a run that takes in at least four lakes and as many Fells passes in the lake district of northern England. There is a 100 mile event run at the same time but that's just plain crazy.

http://www.lakeland100.com/
http://www.lake-district.gov.uk/

Now 'run' may be a bit of misnomer. Taking the middle ground like a good Buddha I figured walking the ups and running the downs and the flat would be fine enough. The fact that I wouldn't get to see the course before the event, that we had to be able to navigate at night, and my training ground was Richmond Park, London, not known for its Fell like conditions, more manicured trails and wandering stags, did not deter me from making predictions about my finish time. And anyway, the weather forecast was for dry and mild conditions.

Given a list of all the things that could have gone wrong, having deformed feet at the end of it all is not too bad. There was a moment when an early checkpoint ran out of water and bottles had to be filled with coca cola. There was a moment when, finally finding myself on my own on the fourth section, all map reading skills went the way of my cap in howling gusts of wind, and I managed to take the wrong path finding myself in a caravan park on the wrong side of a river. Worse of course is joining another team for a night section and insisting you know the way because you'd been right up to then and would have been right this time technically if we'd been in Chapel Stile instead of Elswater. It was fortunately only a ten minute detour. There was of course the weather. It had lashed on the poor 100 mile runners the night before and while we were spared rain most of the day the damage was done ... the trails disappeared under bog and puddles and raging torrents as the water made its way down the peaks to the lakes below.

But in return for these hardships, I got to see some spectacular scenery (when I remembered to take my eyes off the path to look up at the scenery although this risked serious ankle injuries as the path at times was just a guess that the rivulet running over rocks hidden under shoulder high bracken was heading in the right general direction). I got to eat some amazing malty fruity cake that someone's mum had made by the truck load to feed some 200 competitors at 14 checkpoints staffed by the loveliest volunteers that tired, sweaty, dirty competitors could ask for. I got to be inspired by fellow Fells shufflers in what is clearly a sport for the older generation. I hardly saw anyone under 30 years. I shared a seat on the bus to the start with Janet, a woman in her 50s at least who still runs sub 4 hour marathons 3 to 4 times a year and had just completed the Long Distance Walker's Association's annual 100 mile event. Finishing in 14 hours, 22 minutes, Janet passed me half way through the second section and that was the last I saw of her. There are also the eccentrics that only endurance sports can bring out. I wonder if the man and his dog made it? The mad Italian who registered in the 100 miles just in front of me eventually finished in 42 hours, 40 minutes and 31 seconds! Torelli Giovanni Battista, you are a legend!

But I think the real reason we do it is the that there is nothing more guaranteed to bring out the best in people than sharing adversity. Even a self-inflicted one. My utmost thanks to Shelley, Ellen, Allen and Tracey who adopted me at Chapel Stile, the second last checkpoint with 20 km to go through unmarked sheep paddocks, bogs and bracken. If they hadn't so graciously given me their spare torch and led the way, offering as much support to me as to their own team members, I would still be wandering around the Fells trying to get home without my head torch (which blew a fuse at about 1am), looking for a 'notch in the skyline' that marked the beginning of the descent into Coniston and home (seriously, that was the instructions on the route guide ... hello! it's night time guys!!!). And there is no better feeling than to share the experience in the pub or around the breakfast table in the guest house with fellow survivors, easily spotted the next day by their limping gait and bandaged toes.

For the statisticians among you, the winner of the 100 mile made it back in 22 hours, 46 minutes and 29 seconds. The winner of the 50 mile made it back in 8 hours, 29 minutes and 7 seconds. This would have required not only running up the hills but also making like the Man from Snowy River and bolting down the other side on slippery, rocky steep descents. Only one female 100 miler made it back, in 31 hours, 47 minutes and 3 seconds. In the 50 mile the first woman made it back in 9 hours, 51 minutes and 19 seconds ... 6 hours before I hobbled over. I'd like to think that I'm not that competitive, that it's all about just improving my own times, that it's just between me and the mountains, but bugger it ... I really wouldn't mind decreasing that gap next time. Or perhaps going that little bit further ... perhaps another 50 miles further ... :-)

Bad Karma, Bad

I know I shouldn't ... this is a meditation and yoga retreat after all ... but you know that tall, blonde woman, the one who always does her chores cheerfully, the one with the beatific smile on her face all the time in the meditation sessions, who moves with grace and composure during yoga, who has two perfect children and who doesn't have a crease or stain on her clothes despite camping in the field for a week, and who has been nothing but polite to me whenever we run into each other ... I really don't like her.

A few more hours of lotus position and a thousand Om Shanti Oms I expect should fix it.

Gone in 60 Seconds

Ever feel like you’re sixty seconds behind in a conversation?
Ever say ‘yes’ to things you really shouldn’t say ‘yes’ to?
Ever wonder what everyone was laughing at and only getting the joke ten minutes later?
Ever feel like you're regressing to childhood, with that familiar sense of humiliation when you not only get the answer wrong but answer a completely different question because you had no idea what the person was saying?

After almost three years in Europe I'm learning to live with my linguistic ineptitude and the looks of pity from European colleagues that slip gracefully between three languages in one sentence when conversing with each other. But the sense of loss at not being able to understand other people's life stories because I simply cannot understand a series of sounds that convert into a language was too much to bear.

So I have made it a project to learn French. My second year is almost up. I can read Le Monde .... well the giste of it anyway. I can ask for anything in a shop but have no idea what the response is from the shop keeper. I can find my way around French towns but have no idea where the lost French drivers, who always stop and ask me for directions, want to go. The words I painstakingly look up in my dictionary are gone from memory in sixty seconds, but the time delay between thought and speech and back again can make one sentence last an eternity.

When people speak to me in French I wish with all my powers of concentration that it will miraculously, osmotically, make sense. It doesn't. I speak with the best French accent I can muster but it is the illegitimate offspring of Crocodile Dundee. Despite my mum's best efforts and the expense of elocution lessons, we antipodeans are deafened at birth by a strine that could cut glass. And while that might be great at hampering any attempt at European pretension in an effort to enforce our sense of egalitarianism, it is by no means practical any more in a global world. It's time for drastic action and the compulsory learning of another language, preferably two, one Asian, one European. No common borders with any other country is not an excuse!

So off we go to spend some of my summer vacation at language school in Normandy, north-west France. And it's not all bad. It’s France after all and I get to eat dessert twice a day and have a glass of wine with lunch and then fall asleep in the next class. I get to drink my coffee from a bowl. I don’t have to do anything practical in the optional schedule and can therefore ignore subjunctive conjugations and choose modern French Poetry if I want. Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ is akin to Elliot’s ‘Wasteland’ to give you an idea of how much fun it was to translate. And I can eat my cereal with a teaspoon because that’s all they have in the refectory (the French being more into croissants for breakie so why would they bother having a stash of grandes cuillères pour les Anglais). Your man from Ireland threatened rebellion on the first morning unless he got a big spoon. Ah the narcissism of minor difference, Mr Freud.

At language school we can also learn to overcome the feeling of humiliation (except maybe 'big spoon man') because we soon learn, among the conjugations and reflexive pronouns, that there is nowhere else where all linguistic, syntactic and grammatical mistakes are forgiven. There is nowhere else where one can be completely and utterly joyfully lost in translation – because ignorance is bliss and completely free of all responsibility. And if all else fails, sign language and ‘merde’ are generally understood by all.