Georgie and the Pies,
by Bridbeast
If you want a pasty, roll or pie.
Heated up, the price is high.
But if you should be short of brass
You’ve now joined the cold pie class
So you wanted something warming
Forget it son, George is transforming
Our tax system for the wealthy
And who cares for warm pies in Chelsea?
But seriously.
After the horrific killing of 16 Afghans by an American soldier, I was reading this article on the Russians in Afghanistan. One quote from a Soviet veteran stood out:
“The thirst for blood … is a terrible desire. It is so strong that you cannot resist it. I saw for myself how the battalion opened a hail of fire on a group that was descending towards our column. And they were our soldiers, a detachment from the reconnaissance company who had been guarding us on the flank. They were only 200 metres away and we were 90 per cent sure they were our people. And nevertheless – the thirst for blood, the desire to kill at all costs. Dozens of times I saw with my own eyes how the new recruits would shout and cry with joy after killing their first Afghan, pointing in the direction of the dead man, clapping one another on the back, and firing off a whole magazine into the corpse ‘just to make sure’ … Not everyone can master this feeling, this instinct, and stifle the monster in his soul.”
I was also thinking about the depressing pattern of these events: My Lai, Amritsar, the French in North and West Africa, and on. In his essay “Shooting an Elephant”, Orwell wrote:
“With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism…”
And he was a liberal.
On Saturday I bought a second-hand portaledge. On Sunday I took it out to Bowles Rocks in Sussex for a test.
So what do I do with this then?
Quite easy to put together, on flat ground.
Managing to cope with the exposure.
Lovin' that Nineties shade of purple.
Cosy. Is it supposed to be that bendy?
Conclusions? It’s okay to put up but will need plenty of practice before I can do it in the dark on a hanging belay. I need to suss out how to use the fly properly. I definitely need to spend a night in it this spring. It’s very heavy but surprisingly small. There’s no where to hide on one of those things. Getting on it and imagining living for several days on it reminded me of sitting in the Apollo command module when I was little and we went to Cape Kennedy. That thing was tight!
More to the point, it’s made going to Yosemite and doing a wall feel real rather than just something in my head.
Going through a stack of old files yesterday I found a set of CDs with lots of scans of old slides on them. The pictures are a random mish-mash from about 1990 to 2008. I’m going to post a few of them up here over the next few weeks. To start with are a few pics from places which are a bit more off-limits these days than they were then.
Farmer girl by Euphrates, Syria
Mahmoud, Painter and Artist, Pakistan
Woman, Kabul, Afghanistan.
Porters descending to Hispar glacier, Pakistan.
Re-reading my last post, it is obvious that I need to Man the Fuck Up. And how better than an inspirational video? I think I have found just the thing (even if us goray are the badies).
However I don’t think I’ll be incorporating the “catch a chicken” exercise into my training plans just yet.
Every single public space in London at the moment is full of Olympics adverts featuring sculpted athletes exhorting the populace to run faster, jump higher, train harder. Honestly, it’s like some Communists have decided to decorate the place, only with better graphic designers.
What the posters don’t give away is just how bloody boring athletic training is.
The last few weeks I’ve spent a good proportion of my spare time at the climbing wall, slogging away at improving my fitness, doing loads of laps on routes which is very dull. Afterwards I feel spent and tired, come home and eat, sleep for eight hours and then look forward to doing it the next day. And this is only training for my very modest amateur efforts, not the Olympian heights of 9a+ sports climbs.
I don’t mind bouldering sessions, in fact I really enjoy them, but then they are mostly resting between problems. However I want the stamina this year, so I have to work for it.
Sunday was the first day out climbing for 2012. We went to Dancing Ledge at Swanage, that superbly reliable winter venue. Typically we were down to t-shirts at one point, which seems to happen on nearly every winter visit I make there. I came very close to flashing a F6c, albeit one I top-roped a year ago, and got it easily second time around, despite feeling tired. So hopefully on track for some of my sports climbing goals and generally feeling reasonably fit for January.
But… I’m at the fourth week of the training regime for the new year and already it’s time for a rest! I’d planned this out, it should have been the fifth week but that didn’t work with the time I’ve got, so three weeks on, one off it is.
It feels like a good thing. My hands were beginning to get really stiff in the mornings and I could feel my tendons straining a little, but that’s disappeared. I think I’ve been a little too lazy – must go for a run tomorrow and do some proper stretching – but overall it’s been good. I’m ready for the next bout.
That means more stamina training and some strength stuff, but hopefully also starting learning some big wall techniques. I’ve bought a “how to” book by John Long and John Middendorf. They’ve plenty of experience and a way with vivid images which cements ideas in your mind. Keep your shoes clipped in at night:
“Drop your only shoes, kiss your feet goodbye. It’s happened, and the survivors walk with a cane to this day.”
Gulp.
It’s that time of year again – putting down in writing a few of the things I hope to achieve this year.
I’m planning a year of two halves. For the first six months, it’s time to get as good at cragging as possible. Pretty much like last year, really, and some of the aims remain the same, ie I didn’t tick them last year:
Sort out niggling shoulder problem.
Get my onsight level up to F6c. I’ve done this a couple of times last year, now I want to be able to do this regularly.
Redpoint lots of F7a (say five to ten routes at this level), mainly at Portland or Cheddar. Try a 7a+ or possibly 7b.
I’m going to the Verdon at Easter, target routes include: Riviere d’argent, Debiloff, Durandal and Le Demande. Given the tough grading, spaced bolting, massive scale and overall in-your-face scariness of the Gorge, I’d be very pleased to get any one of these routes ticked.
Continue to improve at British trad climbing. Climb some classic Pembroke E2s such as Deranged or Silver Shadow, if I get really fit then I’d like to get on one of the E3s there, Pleasure Dome or Space Cadet. On the grit I’d like to do the likes of Billy Whiz or Insanity before attempting a solid E3 crack such as Gates of Mordor, Sentinel Crack or Emerald Crack.
That in itself seems quite a lot. Obviously I don’t think I’ll get it all done but that’s the sort of thing I’m aiming for. Then in July/August I want to go on a road trip to the US. The rough plan at the moment is to climb in the high-up areas during the summer: Rocky Mountain National Park, the Needles, Tuolumne, Lake Tahoe and the High Sierras, working on my crack climbing and getting fitter for long routes, before hitting Yosemite Valley.
In the Valley I want to do some long free routes and beginner walls, such as Leaning Tower, culminating in an ascent of El Cap. I’m flexible over which route: the Nose, Salathe, Zodiac or Tangerine Trip are the main ones I’d be interested in.
So, some big ambitions. Lifetime stuff in fact. I’m not sure how much of this is outside my ability or will be done with some hard work and scary moments. In addition, I want to see if it’s possible to mix an athletic life with a writing one. In 2012 I want to read some of the classics I’ve never got around to, Dickens, George Elliot and so on, and to start work on some of my own stories. That’s a bit vague because I’m not sure exactly what I want to do, and unlike my climbing plans, I feel a need to keep my writing ideas to myself for the moment. They’re too fragile for the scrutiny of the wider world right now! In the meantime, here’s a few photos of El Cap.
Salathe headwall © Duncan Critchley
Tangerine Trip, El Capitan © chrisbevins
Back in January this year I wrote out a list of goals for the year. Now it’s the last day of 2011, time to see how I did:
I’d like to fulfil the long-standing goal of climbing F7a again, and onsighting F6c.
Ticked the F7a in Catalunya in November after coming very close around Easter time. Flashed a couple of F6cs but not quite an onsight. I think that’s 3/4 of a tick.
More unlikely is climbing F7a+.
Yes, that was unlikely. Fail.
Trad climbing – I’d like to get up to E2 and possibly E3. Something steep and safe at Pembroke or Gogarth. Pleasure Dome is on the list, maybe also Ocean Boulevard or Soul Survivor at Swanage. Some steep and savage grit cracks, with the ultimate aim of doing Sentinel Crack at Chatsworth – ouch!
A bit ambitious this one, given that before this year my trad climbing was seriously out of shape. I hadn’t taken a fall onto my own gear or climbed an extreme in years. I was reasonably on it this year, with my best lead being Brown’s Crack at Ramshaw. E1 in the guide but E2 on UKC, it is most definitely steep and savage. I didn’t do Sentinel Crack but this was a step in the right direction. Tick.
Unfortunately my dreams of E3 at Swanage or Pembroke didn’t materialise. I think that was a bit too much. Fail, but rematch for 2012!
My idea of fun.
Places to visit: Cornwall, Verdon, North Wales. Spend much more time at Swanage and Portland to get fit.
Didn’t go to Cornwall or North Wales as my plans of long weekends away were scuppered by getting a new job. I did go to the Verdon even if it was too rainy to get anything properly done. Went to Swanage and Portland a bit, but perhaps not as much as I’d envisioned. Still, mostly a tick.
Actually write a short story. Try to write a radio play.
Big fat fail on both these aims.
Get at least one article published in the national media.
Got a ghost-written piece into the Huffington Post. Half a tick I think.
Looking back on it, 2011 was a pretty good year. I did loads of climbing, chopped and changed jobs (hopefully for the best), got tattooed and had a great visit to Sri Lanka. I’m unhappy that I failed in any of my writing aims but I’m hoping for a better year in 2012 on that front. I’m also keen to realise some big, lifetime climbing goals in 2012. Bring it on!
The mighty El Capitan. ©ChrisJD
Big wall climbing on the Capitan. ©Enty
I had a deeply depressing conversation last night. My cousin started a course at the London School of Economics this year and reports back that all of his contemporaries want to become investment bankers. Even his friend, a physics undergraduate at another London university, has in the space of months changed her ambitions from academia to finance.
I suppose part of it is youthful skittishness and enthusiasm. Bless them, they’re barely a few months away from school and A-levels and all of a sudden they think they’re ready for Goldman Sachs. Partly it’s the sense of entitlement that comes from attending fee paying schools and arriving at an elite university.
But it still troubles me.
They’re smart kids who’ve lived through the biggest financial disaster for 80 years, the result of a credit bubble whose formation was mainly due to the actions of the financial sector and the politicians who pandered to it. All they have to do is read a newspaper for a week and they’d discover that Britain really doesn’t need too many more bankers. Instead we need innovation and science. We need to nurture our creative companies, whether they’re creating green technology or world-beating TV formats. We need the smartest kids to teach our most disadvantaged to raise up the dismal standards of education and productivity.
But no. Already the talk is of internships, of preferring research to trading, of how they’ll only do it for a few years before getting out. As D said of his friend: “She wants to do research in physics, but she doesn’t want to be poor.”
Well no one is claiming you’ll make big bucks as an academic, in fact given the effort to get there it’s shoddy. I found this in a few minutes this morning, and whilst the upper thirties is hardly a great salary for someone with seven or eight years of higher education plus a bunch of experience, it’s not poor.
Poor is the ladies who serve in the university canteen, or the cleaners who vacuum the office blocks of Canary Wharf in the dead of night. Poor is the white van man pulling £250 a week and trying to raise a family on it. Poor is the dole and JD sports and spliffs at lunchtime, the waste of smart kids who can’t get a foot in the door and go quietly mad with frustration, poor is two jumpers from November to April and reusing tea bags.
What poor isn’t, is an intellectually demanding job with a good salary that unfortunately happens to be ten times less than that offered by a bank.
Perhaps I’m expecting too much in the way of imagination from what is, essentially, a school for technocrats. Perhaps I’m expecting too much from kids, barely a few months away from school and A-levels, to resist these warped temptations, or to understand that right now something different is required of them if our society is to recover from this disaster.
I’m a real sucker for psychological types and classifications, as you’d expect from someone who came out as an INTP on the Myers-Briggs personality test. Systems and classifications, that’s my thing. Apparently.
A lonesome drive to Swanage recently gave me a few ideas for climbing archetypes.
Gnarly Old Gits
Balding, with massive biceps and tufts of back and shoulder hair showing through slightly retro vests, the GOGs are the veteran troopers of our little world. They’ve been everywhere and done everything. They’re done with campussing (tried that back in 92 and got six months off with injured elbows for their efforts), they first went to the Verdon back in the 80s, they might even have been at the Hacienda the night someone pulled a gun out.
GOGs will climb with anyone, as most of their original climbing partners have had kids, got into cycling or given up. They all want to climb 8a before they are 50. Or 60. Or perhaps as a retirement project. Either that, or they are stuck in some hellish multi-week siege of a 40ft crimpfest with the suitable magic number attached.
The Young Dudes
These little Tiggers live down the wall or the crag, bouncing around from problem to problem and route to route. In any random sample at least 10% will have dreadlocks (even today!). Tendon problems are a thing of the future which is a good thing because they worship at the Temple of Strength.
They’ve never heard of Buoux – Catalunya and Magic Wood are where it’s at – but then they’ve never heard of the Stone Roses either. They all want to climb 8a, of even 8A, but they are easily derailed by love, drugs and finals.
The Natural Geniuses
These are the true stars of climbing. Natural climbers with immaculate technique, they’re the sort of people who will throw in a drop knee on their second ever boulder problem. A lack of height or strength doesn’t hold them back, their natural creativity helps them overcome such workaday restrictions, and they take to highballing as if fear of falling were an alien emotion.
Surely these intuitives are rare comets in the climbing firmament? Far from it. I see hordes of these mini-masters every Sunday at the wall – when the kids introductory climbing sessions are in full swing. Could they climb 8a? Probably one day, but I’m not sure if right now all of them can even count to eight.
