Home Again

Largely with the assistance of my unreasonably voluminous jacket pockets, I managed to take a total of 49kg of kit onto the flight home despite the 37kg hard limit. Apart from check in shenanigans, the journey was remarkably stress free, marred only by my superb organisation skills that left me essentially travelling without a nights sleep for 60 hours. Still I guess I can think of it as training for my next epic!

I had to make a decision in the last few days about a rather unpleasant matter. The question is whether to report something to the police when you are unsure if a criminal act has been committed and you are unsure if, on balance, it wouldn't be better for everyone involved if the matter was quietly ignored. Should you contact the police only if you are sure it is in the best interests of the majority? Is contacting the police the "right" thing to do even if, after the smoke has cleared, it is likely that most of those involved will be unhappier than they were before? If the act or actions are unchecked, might they be repeated in future? I don't pretend to be a particularly moral or righteous person but if I were, is there an absolute moral answer to this question?
(I am referring to something that should be considered seriously, not an unimportant "oh, that bloke in the pub is only 17" or "my mate stole a mars bar from Tesco")

Now comes the uphill struggle of finding a job, flat, mobile phone and hopefully returning my car to the road... and probably 100 other things I have forgotten. Best get back to it in fact!

Airports, airports, airports.

What arbitrary and ridiculous places airports are! Check in for a budget airline and they don't want to weigh of even look at your hand baggage, check in for a relatively nice airline and suddenly we are quibbling over a few hundred grams. 7.9kg is ok but 8.0kg is not (unless of course you have a laptop in which case you get more... I didn't inquire how much). 30kg is ok but 32kg is not. How much "not ok" I hear you ask, well, not ok to the tune of 70 dollars per kilogram. So back we go to try the packing game once more, the waterproof jacket has its pockets filled with yet more books, my trousers are stuffed with batteries, cards and guff till they are falling down and I decorate myself with one more fleece. Once more into the breach dear friends, once more... Now everything is fine, the asinine rules have been satisfied, the hold luggage is whisked away and the hand luggage is fully rule compliant for about 20 minutes until security is passed and everything can be safely put back in it.
And to what end? To what benefit? What comes next? Presenting each passenger who boards with empty bowels 100 bonus air miles? Letting me have 10 grams extra luggage if I bring a helium balloon with me? I'm not actually angry, I'm quite entertained, it helped that the pretty young check-in girl seemed almost apologetic. Well, that's enough tempting fate to smite me for one day. Time to face security and continue my journey.
If you are reading this in the UK then I'm looking forward to seeing you again soon :)

Ups and Downs

I have been putting off writing anything for some time now because of the total dive my mood went through after I arrived in Tasmania. I got half a days climbing done in a week, spent most of my time remembering Billie and became pretty despondent. I guess I have moved on into a flagrant attitude of casting around for some sort of replacement intimacy with generally negative fallout on all fronts. Thankfully the weather has been better and I started a slightly more healthy approach to life with a good deal of climbing on local crags and then went to Hillwood where I had an amazing day of sport climbing and remembered again what it is to love climbing enough that everything else ceases to be important.

The grades in Tasmania, I have been discovering, are somewhat unbalanced! Broadly speaking they seem to be 1 grade harder than in Victoria but there are also a fair number of climbs that leave one wondering if the grade was chosen in the same kind of whimsical manner as the name.

As I write this, I have just arrived back from a trip to Freycinet, 3 days which have left me with a grin wide enough to wrap round my head. Beautiful granite sea cliffs and warm clear ocean were the order of the day and the group from the university that I went with were a lot of fun to climb with. I even ticked off swimming butt naked in the ocean amongst the fish (sadly no dolphins). With a pair of goggles, the view under the water was awesome and, while no coral reef, the fish, kelp and rock were more than enough to get me excited. By the time I finally decided it was time to get out I had a hard time of it and discovered I couldn't really walk any more and shivered uncontrollably for about half an hour in the bright sunshine!

The weather forecast shows wall to wall good conditions for the coming week so I hope to get plenty more climbing done before being forced back to a rude and bitter reunion with the tail end of the Scottish winter.