Looooonnnnggg post

I have been alerted recently to my idleness on the blogging front and it's time to change that before I go an entire month without posting. First the short but sweet:

Mowing lawns for the council is remarkably good fun, it essentially boils down to being a paid gocart driver. Government work is often seen as easy work with fat contracts and much as it would entertain me to give detailed information on the work ethic of council employees, my contract forbids it.

I have been accepted for a teacher training position in Aberdeen! I think I did well in the interview a fortnight ago, the presentation certainly went well and the questions that had real meaning went well also. Towards the end I probably did less well on a few mumbojumbo garbage questions where the brutally honest answers might have been "wtf are you talking about??". Lets hope my interview panel never reads the blog what what? :D

As an alternative to the course I had been eyeing up a winter of dirt bagging and sport climbing in Spain but the motivation to get on and create some sort of career has been surfacing with ever more persistence recently so I was very glad to be accepted. I can only hope this worryingly rational side to my nature does not start harping on about marriage and children or I might need help extricating myself from the swamp of respectableness and middle age.

Now the episodic and bittersweet...

1) The Deer Episode (4 weekends back)
The whole weekend could essentially be surmised by saying that it was misty, cold and sometimes drizzling but we managed to get a few nice routes in the Cairngorms on mountain crags (which is victory in itself when you know anything about Scottish mountain weather at all). Up, that is, until the point we were driving back down on Sunday evening (after an epic 17 hours on the hill) and the car in front of us hit a roe deer*. I went to look for the animal brandishing a sizable rock and feeling a little intrepid only to find it was already dead (first time feeling for a pulse on a deer!). Not being a wantonly wasteful individual I quickly hefted in into the boot and sped off. This is how I came at 3am in the morning to be in my bathtub up to my elbows in deer blood and entrails attempting to follow gutting instructions issued by google. Top tips would have to include being careful with intestines, they break easily and when they do they made rather a horrible mess! I briefly considered keeping the liver and testicles but I dislike liver and decided that I actually didn't want to eat testicles so the only organ I kept was the heart. Having satisfied my need to prove my manliness I located a butcher to finish the job in a more professional manner and was rewarded with 8kg of free range wild venison for 20 quid. I am eating a dinner made from it this very moment infact :)
*NB. We did not hit the deer and take it home, that would have been illegal.

Me on Needle, E1 5b, Shelterstone.

Evening light over the Cairngorms.

...and the simply bitter.

2) The Helicopter Episode (2 weekends back)
Butchering a deer and eating its heart is a hard act to one up but I managed to all the same. Once again the weekend started peacefully with an ascent of Supercharger at Neist on Skye. I was in the mood for adventure however and quickly found an awesome looking line on the same cliff that was unclimbed (though it turned out to share a fair amount of ground with an unrepeated E6/7 from a quarter of a century ago). So it was on Sunday that we made the 100 meter abseil and committed to the line. Lasma led the lichen, grass and bird infested first pitch and we arrived at the base of the hard climbing on a soaring arete. I valiantly chickened out of the crux pitch (despite declaiming on abseil about how superb and within my capabilities it looked) and persuaded Topher to take the sharp end. He led a stellar pitch with a 6b crux to a hanging belay but alarm bells should have been ringing when, on second, I pulled a sizable hold off and found a big loose block. I was far from confident starting my pitch but after some well protected 5c/6a climbing, I was just moving onto easier ground near the top of the route and feeling success at my fingertips, then there was rather a different feeling at my fingertips.

The block I removed was the size of this hole

The block I pulled off was huge, as was my fall. Of all the lead falls I have taken, none has lasted long enough for a train of thought, always I have thought "shit!" then "oh, I'm off and hanging on the rope". This fall was slightly different, "shit!" was followed by "shit!!! I'm still falling", then "fuck!!!!!!! I bashed bits of myself, I think I'm spinning" and finally "I've stopped but I can't have gotten away with this, start body inspection, what is broken". I had fallen 15 metres, was hanging a metre below the belay and what was broken became immediately obvious - Tophers femur. I can thank my lucky stars that the block didn't land on his head, that the abseil rope was hanging right by us and that there was a veritable crowd of tourists watching us who were able to quickly summon rescue services and persons capable of dispensing morphine. I decided the least I could do to make up for dropping half the cliff on Topher (and thank him for holding the ropes through blinding agony) was to try a bit of rescuing. After a bit of faff and clusterfuckery I had him attached to me and abseiled to sea level platforms at the base of the route. Lasma joined us, shortly followed by a coast guard helicopter, a paramedic and a syringe containing morphine. I was told later that the pilot was flying particularly close to the cliff to effect the rescue but I didn't notice at the time because I was far too busy clinging to the ground under hurricane force winds while trying to breath through a salt water deluge.

When the excitement had subsided, our rescuers had left and Topher had been flown off to Inverness I probably accrued a fair amount of negative karma by returning to the cliff and abseiling a short distance to recover most of our equipment that the rescue services had been unable to reach.

My back will heal, the belay
device will not

Topher is recovering from surgery as I type and I am slowly healing a bruised back caused, I assume, by my belay device which definitely came out of the altercation worse:

There is a video of our rescue and hopefully I can post it in the coming days if I can obtain a copy.

...bringing us to....

3) This weekend
.... I sat in my flat all weekend...
Yes. Really. I mean, if things were spiraling out of control that quickly, what would you do? Sign up for the french foreign legion?


(3 weekends back didn't fit into my narrative but essentially involved watching rain and playing hangman at Creag An Dubh Loch for most of a day... Oh shit, that actually means the pattern demands that the four horsemen come for tea _next_ weekend!).