More Mountaineering

I am just re-reading the book about Alison Hargreaves, the young climber who died on K2, on the way down, leaving two young children without a mother.  It has an irritating title "Regions of the Heart" (by David Rose and Ed Douglas), but is well worth reading. She was harshly judged afterwards, for taking such a risk, K2 being much more of a killer than Everest.

It reminds me of that Scottish verse, where the two rivers grimly compete (I don't know who wrote it):

"Tweed says to Till
What gars ye rin sae still?

Says Till to Tweed
Though ye rin with speed
And I rin slaw
Where ye droon one man
I droon twa."

Everest and K2 could have much the same chat, if they wanted.

But, having read the book, I understand the dilemma Alison Hargreaves was in - why she felt she had to climb K2.  And it was not to do with her not thinking or caring about her children. Quite the reverse in fact.

Yesterday Butterfly Mark rang early and the box of sandwiches and the Captain disappeared shortly after.

There such an interesting sunrise this morning that I went and woke up Col, and he came sleepily through and photographed it.

A Symphony of Light

This morning it is overcast, lots of cloud, but lots of light too. The sea is a pale shining blue with dark edges, there is the soft red glow of the rising sun in the corner of the clouds, the green is very green, with white seagulls swooping across it.  The balcony geraniums are waving bravely.  It is a symphony and I have just thanked Jehovah for it.

This blog post is a sort of thanks too I hope.

If I am on the earth a million years from now, as I hope to be, I will never have seen another sunrise exactly like this one.

Colin and Butterfly Mark are off to an Insect Exhibition today, and I must get back to the dusting, tidying and polishing as we have a visitor from Expatworld next week.

We had a wonderful evening with Jackie last night. She has had some very good news. She is about to become a granny for the 8th time!   And she becomes a great granny for the second time very soon.  She cooked us a roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings, including crispy roast potatoes. And we had choc ices for dessert.

The beautiful colours of the morning have reminded me of that lovely passage in Proverbs chapter 8 where Jesus speaks directly to us.   “Jehovah himself produced me as the beginning of his way, the earliest of his achievements of long ago. From time indefinite I was installed, from the start, from times earlier than the earth."  He is God's only-begotten son, the only one created by Jehovah alone.  Everything else was created by Jehovah with Jesus working beside him as a master worker.   Jesus says:  "then I came to be beside him as a master worker, and I came to be the one he was specially fond of day by day, I being glad before him all the time,  being glad at the productive land of his earth, and the things I was fond of were with the sons of men."

He loved, and loves, his Father's creation. The beautiful earth, floating like a jewel in space. And he loves us too.  So,as Proverbs goes on tell us: "Happy is the man that is listening to me by keeping awake at my doors day by day, by watching at the posts of my entrances.  For the one finding me will certainly find life, and gets goodwill from Jehovah."

As we go door to door, with our Bibles (not that I can at the moment, sadly), we are trying to get people to listen and to find life and to get goodwill from Jehovah.

There has just been a lovely lovely sunset, to end the day.

"The Ascent of Rum Doodle" by W.E.Bowman

I have been re-reading all my hospital/convalescence climbing books and have been getting hysterical over Rum Doodle.

This is from Bill Bryson's introduction:   "I just love this book.  Everything about it is nearly perfect - the names  of the characters, their mannerisms, their sulks and squabbles, their comfortingly predictable haplessness in the face of every challenge."

Yes.  The names - of both terrain and people - are so right.    Spoiler alert (as if anyone is going to read it for the plot...). The hapless expedition does manage to place one man on top of the mighty summit of the previously unclimbed Rum Doodle (just after all the rest of them have climbed the wrong peak).  Due to the Yogistani word for "mountain base" being exactly the same as the word for "mountain summit", apart from an esoteric gurgle, the Yogistani porters misunderstand the command to return to base and they all trek to the top.  They take with them the one member of the party who isn't on the wrong mountaintop. In fact, one of the porters simply tucks him under his arm and carries him there.  So he becomes the Conqueror of Rum Doodle.

The name of the Yogistani porter who carries him up and down again?   Perfectly, is is Un Sung.

All I can say is that I enjoyed it even more on the second reading.

I listened in to the meeting last night.  The Society has just issued a new, updated, English-language Bible translation. We should all get one in a month or two.  So much work must have gone into that, but, English being a living language, I can see why its so important.

My shoulder is still really painful. No pain killer seems to help.  I hope I am not in for yet more joint operations.  I don't know how many more I can cope with.

To Jackie for supper tonight.

The New Knee Versus the Old

My knees are not working in harmony at the moment and I am hobbling about very lopsided, having occasionally to revert to crutches/zimmer frame. And my physio is sick and has had to cancel her visit today. I can have someone else in, but think I would like to stick with Diana. She is lovely. And also I know how busy they are, especially with someone off sick.

The sun glinted through the gloom this morning and there was a swift rustle of wings, a blur of cameras, the disappearance of the box of sandwiches from the fridge, and Captain Butterfly is nowhere to be found.

I am still mired in butterfly paperwork - I have a production line going on the kitchen table, and hope to get everything parcelled up today.

It is really sunny now.  A lovely Autumn day.  The balcony geraniums are blazing away - red and lilac, though our indoor plants, the orchids are not doing so well at the moment.

An Odd Thing

Its an odd thing, but my culinary triumph last night was not the stir fry ginger chicken and the egg fried rice, which took me quite a bit of time and trouble,  it was the cheese straws that I hastily made at the last moment, as I realised I had forgotten to put crisps/nuts on the shopping list I gave the Captain.

They didn't look elegant, but they tasted lovely - though I says it myself as shouldn't - and every single one was eaten.

A fun evening, but it always is with Jackie, even though nowadays, we find ourselves talking about the strangeness of finding ourselves in old age.  But we always agree that, much as we would love to be young again, we would only go back knowing then what we know now.

Of course that is what I hope for us all, that we will be restored to perfect health in the Paradise earth - we will be living instead of dying, as we are now.

I am just about to go and dial in so I can listen to the meeting - lovely Watchtower article helping us to continue putting spiritual things first, with a public talk to start with - Why we should live by Bible principles.  It is a beautiful sunny day so far which is good as Captain Butterfly has his Treasure Hunting cap on, and is off out into the Sussex wilderness with his metal detector and packed lunch.

We will soon be adding to our ring pull hoard.

The Song she was Singing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-243946

This is about the recent tragic siege in the Kenyan shopping Mall.  The article begins:

"During the Westgate siege in Kenya last month, one of the iconic images showed a mother lying on the floor, protecting her two children. Her name is Faith Wambua. She was in the shopping centre with her nine-year-old daughter Sy and her 21-month-old son Ty when the attack happened.

Faith spent four-and-a-half hours playing dead in the mall while keeping her young children quiet, before they were all finally rescued by a Kenyan policeman, Iyad Adan. She spoke to the BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse about her experience that day:"

The article tells us that:

"At some point when they came too close and I could smell the gunpowder and I could hear the bullet casings dropping on the ground, then I knew we were finished.

That's the point when I started singing a song about the resurrection because I thought we were all going to die"

On the BBC News yesterday, the little girl sang us a bit of the song, and it is this, from the Jehovah's Witness songbook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I02_nlwAFns

It is based on Job 14:13-15:   

"O that in She′ol you would conceal me, That you would keep me secret until your anger turns back, That you would set a time limit for me and remember me!  If an able-bodied man dies can he live again? All the days of my compulsory service I shall wait, Until my relief comes.  You will call, and I myself shall answer you. For the work of your hands you will have a yearning."

The chorus of the song is:

He will call; The dead will answer.
They shall live at his command.
For he will have a longing 
For the work of his own hand.
So have faith, and do not wonder,
For our God can make us stand.
And we shall live forever,
As the work of his own hand.

I always think of my parents and my granny when we sing this.  I hope that Jehovah longs to see them again, as I do, and that He will call wake them from the sleep of death once the earth is restored to Paradise.

How thankful we all are to Jehovah that our sister, and her two children - our young brother and sister - did survive. And we hope that God will remember all those killed, and they too will wake from the dreamless sleep of death when the time comes for the resurrection.


Captain B went to a reunion with old school friends in London yesterday.  And Ron and Lawrence, two of my brothers, visited me (with a bottle of wine!).  Lots of phone calls too - including two from Audrey.  The next load of Butterfly paperwork arrived.

Unfortunately I have regressed a bit healthwise and was back on my zimmer frame this morning.  I have had an arthritis flare up, so now my "good" leg is not operating well either.  I did manage to hobble about and get the chicken made for supper with Jacks tonight.  I have a stir fry rice to make this evening, but hopefully I will be a bit better by then.

More Armchair Mountaineering - A Woman's Place

I am also re-reading Arlene Blum's book about her all woman Annapurna expedition.  Many years ago I read Maurice Herzog's account of his climb.  Was that the first successful one?  I must just trek off into the net and find out - yes, it was, and he was also the first to climb a peak over 8,000 metres (or litres, or whatever it is we have to call them these days).

How tall is 8,000 metres in real money?

What a difficult mountain it is.  So prone to avalanches.  One of the heroes of the 1996 disaster on Everest, Anatoli Boukreev, was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna.

And, tragically, while Arlene's Blum first group do make it successfully to the top, it has very much the same sad ending as the Chris Bonnington book - "Everest, the Unclimbed Ridge".   The second summit team, Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz and Vera Watson, died.

They are last seen climbing towards camp 5 - are within 20 minutes of it before it becomes too dark to go on filming.   Radio calls to the camp that night go unanswered.  The next day, and the next, there is silence. And nothing is moving on  the mountain (beyond the avalanches).  And  here is the problem. Clearly they are in trouble up there, but everyone else is too exhausted to mount a rescue attempt.

Finally, after 3 days, some of the Sherpa support team are recovered enough to go. And they find them. They obviously fell just before they made camp 5, so just after they were last seen. They fell a thousand feet, still roped together.  Their bodies were left on the mountain.

There is a memorial to them at the base of the mountain.  And I hope that they remain in Jehovah's memory, and will live again when the time comes.

However, all my reading, fascinating though it was, has underlined the fact that mountaineering is a gamble with a precious human life.  It doesn't matter how skillful you are, how careful you are, how experienced you are, you can be swept away in a moment.

Should I be buying books about it and reading them?   Why am I?  Partly perhaps it is the climbers themselves. They are fascinating people, and so different from me. They are so brave. Whereas I am a wimp, and would probably stay at home all the time, wrapped up in a box of cotton wool, on my sofa - if it weren't for my fear of cotton wool poisoning, and of falling off my sofa face down into my cup of tea.  I must remember never to climb on to it unroped.

Actually, my life is pretty ideal for a couch potato at the moment, in that I still can't do all that much, without getting completely exhausted.  i am hoping that, IF Captain B is free for chauffering duties I can get to the Meeting on Sunday.  I was planning to go tonight, but he has put his foot down, firmly. And he is my carer at the moment.  He has just bought me my morning coffee - purr purr - and my breakfast (oats with apple).