I was in the basement of Waterstone’s at the west end of Princes Street. Three young members of staff, one female and two male, were talking loudly. The males were teasing the woman in a deliberately petty, repetitive fashion. I was quite distracted by this incessant stupid chatter, and although I was in a public place and we can’t expect the silence of a library in a high street shop, I was irritated. I think I was justified:

1. Different standards and conventions – loose codes of conduct – apply on different floors of a bookshop. We do expect a quieter, more peaceful atmosphere on floors other than the ground floor.

2. There are chairs on these floors so that you can sit and read. In general, the shop itself creates the peaceful ambience or the expectation of it.

3. I’ve been in this particular Waterstone’s many times and the basement is normally very quiet and peaceful. This is probably one reason for my frequent visits.

4. On this occasion, there was no other sound in the room, so their loudness was unnecessary, uncivil and discourteous.

5. This loudness was just one aspect of their swaggering manner, in which they showed a disregard for the customers, acting as if we were not there and as if the whole room belonged to them. This was manifest in their movements and bearing, the way they would talk across the full width of the room even if there were people in between, and so on.

In any case, I was irritated. I was trying to choose between two books based on what I could gather from their prefaces about the standard of knowledge required to read them. The unpredictable monkey-like noises of the staff – interspersed with their occasional macaw-like screeches – made it difficult to concentrate.

Transformation

But then something unexpected happened. There was suddenly a new noise: whispering, between two customers, a middle-aged man and woman, who must have just come down the stairs. That someone should think it suitable to whisper was absurd enough, given that the staff continued to dribble out their inanities for everyone to hear; but, worse than that, the whispering was loud, considerably louder than most normal speech. I don’t have proof of it, but I’d guess that if they had talked at a normal, quiet volume, I would hardly have noticed them.

If you’ve never heard loud whispering, let me tell you: it’s bloody irritating. I think this is partly because it’s so stupid, more than because of the intrinsic qualities of the sound.

Anyway, there I was, trying to read a preface to a book on mathematics, my ears buffeted by irregular waves of jungle-like cacophony coming from the staff and scoured by the rasping voiceless speech of the whisperers; and I wasn’t irritated any more. I just smiled at the wonderful absurdity of my situation.

Everything was in alignment. The Gods had spoken. I had no choice in the matter: it was Fate.

On Tuesday, I looked at my calendar and saw that there was to be be a full moon on Thursday. I checked the weather and it was predicted to be completely clearing up on Wednesday evening. I checked the sunset time: 8.05pm. The moonrise: 7.05pm. Perfect! I must go to my favourite spot on the coast for photographs after work. I would not have to worry about getting back from the sea to the road – an hour’s walk – before the last light of dusk faded, because I would have the moon to guide me. I walked the route in late twilight with no moon a few months ago, and I wouldn’t knowingly repeat the experience. It’s a wide open place with a disorientating topography, no dramatic features, several identical-looking paths leading off in different directions, and many bogs. But with the moonlight, I’d have no trouble. I couldn’t miss the chance so I finished work early yesterday and found my way by bus to Aberlady Bay nature reserve, a windswept estuary and stretch of coast in East Lothian, with golden beaches, sand dunes, salt marshes, grassy plains, mud flats and the wrecks of a couple of midget submarines.

I got there at about 6.45pm, and already I had the feeling that I didn’t have much time. The light was glorious, so I could hardly just rush past everything on my way to the rocks at Gullane Point. Because I got my camera out long before reaching the sea, I didn’t in fact reach it until a few minutes before sunset. Right from the start I had felt rushed and desperate, and I hadn’t been taking time over shots. This annoyed me, because I knew that I should just make a firm decision to do one thing or the other, instead of trying to cover everything, running and stumbling about in what must have looked a comic fashion (fortunately there was nobody about, except a group of deer, who didn’t notice me until I was almost upon them.) If I have the camera out, I should take my time, I told myself. And it was no way to be acting on such a lovely evening.

So when I got to the beach I decided just to stay there and make the most of it, rather than walking the additional half-mile to get to the rocky points and headlands, even though they had been my original destination. Well, the one thing I hadn’t checked was the tide. It was out. In many places a long, long way out.

But then I came across the resident tyre of Aberlady beach and I was happy for a good while.

High dunes separate the beach from the plains and marshes, so I couldn’t see the moon that was shining over them. I was looking forward to stepping up to the crest of the path over the dunes and looking out over the spectacular moonlit landscape.

And so it turned out to be. The only visible electric lights were far away across the bay, and the sky was still rose and russet and gold. The crossing vapour trails that had been in the north an hour before lay glowing across the moon, now shapeless and thin like teased out cotton wool.

At this point I hadn’t expected to be in a hurry, but I really didn’t have much time. This was on account of public transport timetables, not of the darkness. The full moon shone blindingly and lit my way just fine. It was an unforgettable experience, walking across open country on a spring evening with only moonlight and starlight to guide me. Sometimes I could hear the muted, odd night-calls of odd night-birds, and the general quiet was pierced every so often by the shriek of an owl. As the residual sunlight faded, the stark beauty and drama of the moonlit landscape became much clearer, every tree and blade of grass delineated sharply, everything casting long, unfamiliar shadows.

I don’t remember ever having been out in the country under a full moon on a clear night. I recommend it.

You might think that in these conditions I’d want to take a few photos. Well I only took one, and it wasn’t good. I packed everything away and decided not to try again. And then I said to myself: “How can I walk through all of this majesty without at least trying?” The answer was “I just want to get back home.” And then: “Is that what life is all about? ‘Getting back home?’” And still I marched onwards, and eventually came to a much less self-reproachful view of the matter. Apart from anything else, although the moon illuminated my way, it was still pretty dark. It’s almost impossible to execute the kind of shots I wanted when neither your eyes nor your auto-focus can find anything to focus on, and you didn’t bring a torch.

I thought about attempting a drawing of one particular scene, one of many that I passed by. A relatively tall tree, windblown and leaning like all of the other trees around Aberlady Bay; a silhouette like a monstrous hand reaching up to clasp the moon.

To describe nuclear power as clean might seem perverse, given that some of the waste produced is so dangerous that there is no containment material that won’t be destroyed by it, and that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

But last week the government finally said yes to the construction of up to ten nuclear power stations, at least some of which might be up-and-running by 2020. They’ve put off the decision for a long time. New Labour, motivated for so long by the desire to be liked, refused to face the impending energy crisis. Now that the closure of many of our existing nuclear power stations is fast approaching (several over the next twenty years), and now that they have the fortifying experience of not being liked, they’ve bitten the bullet.

Generally, my main concern is for progress, for economic development, which I believe is the basis for a society of free and equal people, living fulfilling lives. A wealthy, technologically advanced country like Britain needs base load power stations, ones that provide a constant flow of power. It looks like renewables cannot provide much of this, so the answer must be coal, oil and nuclear. Given the need to reduce CO2 emissions, this means we need to go for nuclear or clean coal – or both. From this perspective, nuclear power is very important, because clean coal is still in its infancy.

Nuclear can be considered clean because it does not pollute the environment. Although the high-level waste is extremely dangerous, in practise it doesn’t actually harm people or the environment, if stored correctly. And there isn’t much of it. Ten new nuclear power stations with a lifetime of sixty years would produce 40,900 cubic metres of this waste, which is half the volume of the Albert Hall. (1) The projects for the waste’s short-term and long-term containment look good: Managing our Radioactive waste Safely (Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, PDF)

Nuclear is now one of the safest, cleanest ways we have of producing energy, but it got a bad name for itself in the eighties and nineties. This is partly owing to scientific ignorance and a mis-perception of risk, but the nastiness of the nuclear industry couldn’t have helped either. “The nuclear industry, for most of its life, has been, to put it at its mildest, economical with the truth” (2)

While I’m broadly supportive of the new plans, I can sympathise with those who aren’t and who know how despicable the industry has been in the past. It’s been run by a secretive cabal of shamans and priests, jealously guarding their power against outsiders. I don’t know how much it has changed, but can we afford to hold things up while they get their act together? We certainly need a completely open, honest and unapologetic nuclear industry, not one that will reinforce the perception of witchcraft. But we also need to get started on the new stations now.

My fondest childhood memories are of living in the little village of Fairlie, a mile or two south of Largs, on the North Ayrhsire coast. In this part of Ayrshire the towns cling to a narrow stretch of land between the sea and a big lump of uninhabitable high moorland, now called Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park, extending from Greenock in the north to West Kilbride in the south, and inland to Lochwinnoch and Kilmacolm. And with Cumbrae, Arran and Bute enclosing the Firth of Clyde, this stretch of coastline has a sheltered, cosy feel to it. It’s dramatic and picturesque, but not overwhelming (I’ve only just realized that I have this knowledge, or appreciation, after having been away for a long time.)

View Larger Map

Hunterston nuclear power station faces across the bay, from underneath the cliffs at Portencross, to Fairlie and Cumbrae, and it was part of my childhood world, along with the huge ore terminal. The memory of seeing Hunterston “A” – the old Magnox reactor, now being decommissioned – illuminated at night, is strong. I visited it once (although it was probably Hunterston “B”, the newer but less attractive station just next-door), as part of my physics class, and I was struck by how empty it was. Self-centred cynical adolescents we may have been, but even we were awed by the caverns of concrete and steel, and the cathedral-like proportions, and just the thought of that massive hidden power was enough to convince us that we could feel it under our feet and buzzing in the air.

A few dozen metres out to sea are the intake and outlet stations for the cooling system. I remember being struck by the sight of the big bubbling patch where the warmed water was returned to the sea. You can see both the intake and outlet very clearly on the satellite image. The white blob is the latter.

Now that I’m in Edinburgh, my local nuclear power station is Torness, on the coast of East Lothian. You get a good view of it from the East Coast Main Line railway. A couple of years ago, one of its walls became a projector screen for Europe’s biggest art installation, Lumin de Lumine by Ken McMullen. See a picture of it here on this particle physics website.

(1) The Future of Nuclear Power, DTI, May 2007
(2) Reporting the Nuclear Industry: Sorcery versus Common Sense, The Uranium Institute

Government go-ahead:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7179579.stm

It has been many weeks since I returned from Canada, and whilst it was full of some of the most stimulating experiences of my life, I am painfully conscious that I still haven’t blogged about it, and my several hundred photographs languish unseen. It’s perverse.Of course, it’s the very richness of the trip that makes it so overwhelming to think about putting together a blog entry. Not to mention that we moved to a new flat a few weeks ago, and that we have no internet connection. The answer is to fire it all out in isolated little bullets of wonderment and fascination, rather than in one big indiscriminate bombing raid. We were in Canada for over three weeks and it cannot really be treated as a single holiday. It was a series of trips and visits, and it makes sense to blog about them individually. Let me just start by saying thank you to Laura’s friends and family for being so welcoming and for making the trip so enjoyable. I was very relieved to find that, like Laura, you are all wonderful people.

(To my British readers: please forgive any emotional effusiveness here. I do try to retain the traditions of reserve, cynicism and grumpiness that come so naturally to people on this little island, but I fear I may have been corrupted by Canadian niceness)

(To my Canadian readers: please forgive any emotional restraint here. I retain the traditions of reserve, cynicism and grumpiness that come so naturally to people on this little island; despite the influence of Canadian niceness, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks)

(To my Italian readers: Ciao!)

Following are the characters appearing in the forthcoming blog entries.

Tavin
Laura’s best friend, whose dry sense of humour doesn’t conceal her warm personality, and who provided the best steak and corn I’ve ever tasted (Alberta sirloin and “peaches and cream” taber corn)

Mary
Laura’s aunt, Judy’s sister, with a wicked sense of humour and excellent eclectic cooking skills

Greg
Mary’s man, Laura’s uncle, with a never-ending fund of stories to tell (or should that be a fund of never-ending stories?)

Judy
Laura’s lovely Mum, another great cook (I have to say that now, don’t I? I should never have got into all this personal stuff) Hope you can make it over to Edinburgh.

Dave
Judy’s man, Laura’s stepfather, a world class conversationalist with whom we spent some hugely enjoyable wine-fuelled evenings (thanks for the CDs – they work fine and they’re great)

Alan
Laura’s Dad, who showed me how to canoe and bought clothes for me (looking forward to our next paddle on Thetis Lake)

Jeannie
Laura’s sister, a warm-hearted person with a disarming smile, and a great cook

Richard
Jeannie’s husband, a mischievous young fellow, and a very good and exciting guitarist and songwriter – but a terrible cook

Lilia
Jeannie and Richard’s daughter, a curious wide-eyed good-natured baby

Joe
Richard’s canine sidekick, what I might call a “real dog”, with, unfortunately, a life-long self-destructive mission to dig up large rocks and drop them a few metres away

Pat
Feverish and fascinating musician and engineer, somehow both at home and out-of-place in tranquil Gabriola

Dinah D
The spirit of Gabriola, and a great singer/songwriter

The two photographs in this post show different sides to British Columbia. At the top you can see floating logs being transported across the sea, probably to be pulped, and in the background, the mountain range that dominates the coast of mainland BC. In fact, BC is pretty much all mountains.Below, one of the figures in the totem pole that stands outside the Royal British Columbia Museum. Although there are many token totems around BC, the Indians still seem to be struggling to adapt to the modern world that has overtaken them and surrounded them.The museum, which has many totem poles and dioramas illustrating everyday life in the BC First Nations (formerly tribes) prior to the arrival of the white man, is a treasure of knowledge and artifacts, and grand, as all my favourite museums are (if a building’s important, it should say so in its architecture, in its atmosphere – that’s why classical architecture is so fitting for museums). The important elements of BC – native history and culture, natural history, and the story of European colonization – are represented here beautifully. But perhaps what I will remember more than all that is the huge screen near the entrance on which a film played constantly on a loop, in which various states and countries were superimposed on a map of BC like jigsaw pieces.

http://www.viewpointmotel.bc.ca/european.htm

The image above gives a rough idea of how big BC is in comparison with European countries. But! The combined population of the UK, the Republic of Ireland, France, Germany and Switzerland is 218.7 million, while BC’s population is only 4.4 million. In fact, Switzerland on its own has a considerably higher population, with 7.5 million people, but only about 4% of its area. (figures from Wikipedia)So it’s big. Too big to comprehend. And it’s just one among the ten provinces that make up Canada. It is young, wild, free and innocent, a land of opportunity – or so it seemed to me. But please, ditch the pancakes!

A serious disagreement threatens to bring to an end the very successful hillwalking duo of the Robinson brothers (Stu and me). We’re both passionate, committed people, so it’s no surprise that it happened; and it’s more of a challenge to resolve it than it is to struggle up a steep slope of scree or navigate over boulder fields in thick cloud.

I won’t explore the ins and outs of the argument on this blog, but the whole thing is quite interesting. The crux of it is that Stu is an arrogant, selfish little – no, just kidding. The real crux of it is that my photography can slow us down sometimes, and on two recent walks (not our most recent walk, described later in this post) Stu has found himself far ahead and alone.

Until now we’ve been able to accommodate our differences quite easily. He generally has an eager, impatient temperament, while I am unhurried and leisurely. Also, our reasons for walking, while they do overlap, are different. I won’t presume to try to list Stu’s reasons for hillwalking, but we probably share the following ones:

Enjoyment of camaraderie and good conversation
Brotherly bonding
A shared sense of freedom
The shared experience of testing oneself
The challenges and satisfactions of talking through problems and coming to decisions, with a similarly-motivated intellectual equal

The argument flared up in an email coversation after the walk described below. At the time of writing I don’t know where things stand, but I feel that the partnership is too good to come to an end only three years after it began.

And besides, he’s got the car.

Ben Vorlich and Stuc a’Chroin

Starting from Ardvorlich on the south bank of Loch Earn, we went up Ben Vorlich and then up Stuc a’ Chroin, which lies nearby. Except for the first and last hours we were in cloud the whole way, and this partly explains why I kept up with Stu throughout the walk: I didn’t take many photographs, because my camera couldn’t see any more than I could.

Regular readers will know that on the previous walk we were reckless, complacent and ill-prepared. We made up for that this time, and never have preparation and careful navigation been more important. The poor visibility was continually challenging, and even with the map and compass we were close to going very badly wrong on one occasion, as I describe below.

The climb to Ben Vorlich from Ardvorlich was very easy, mainly because it was on a good path all the way to the top. It seems a rather tame peak because of this, and yet it does have that special high peak feel right at the top. Fenceposts marked the way between the summit of Ben Vorlich and that of Stuc a’Chroin, staying on or near the tops and ridges and the crest of the bealach between the peaks. It had no fencing wires between the posts, but I suppose that in the past it demarcated the border between land estates.

It was difficult to find our way on the bealach, a much more complex feature than it seems from a distance and much more time-consuming to traverse than expected. We were unsure of which way to go a couple of times, before we realised that the fenceposts would be a good guide. Stuc a’Chroin rises up quite suddenly, especially when you’ve had no warning of its proximity. The decision at this point was crucial. Should we climb this peak at all, given that it was a scrambling route on wet rock with little visibility? We didn’t know about any other route, and we couldn’t go wandering off to look for one in those conditions, so the choice was to scramble up or return to the car. It looked dangerous, because:

If there was no path, then navigating on a scrambling route would be very difficult;
We could easily lose each other in those conditions, and it’s surprising how the mountains can just swallow up the human voice;
The rock was all schist, which is slippery when wet;
There was a lot of loose rock, and it was obvious from the rubble at the bottom that it was a very unstable cliff;

So I was inclined just to return to the car – an attitude I justified with these concerns about safety but which was really just laziness: after doing one Munro I’m sometimes not in the mood for another heart-busting workout, especially if there’s some unenjoyable terrain to cross, in this case a field of angular boulders littering the foot of the cliff. This retiring reluctance always passes, however. In this case Stu suggested we walk up for some distance to see what it was like, which I agreed to, and we found that it was easy enough, with a path of sorts most of the way. There was loose rock all over the place, and on one occasion I dislodged a big one and sent it hurtling down the slope. We both stared at it, willing it not to hit any of the people below, until Stu realised how useless that was and shouted “watch out below!”

http://www.mrsbrowns.co.uk/acatalog

I was energized on this part of the climb by some pieces of tablet. And while I still think that the mighty little Chomp is the best chocolate bar there is, henceforth on the mountain it’s got to be tablet, or perhaps kendal mint cake. It must be the sheer sugariness of it. Chocolate – especially those posh dark chocolate buttons from Coco that I had on the day – is far less sugary and therefore less effective as an energy-booster.

The route up the cliff ended abruptly, opening onto a small flat summit with cairns and an engraved stone in memory of Donald Stuart, founder of the Falkirk Mountaineering Club. Though we could see nothing, we together worked out that this was not the top of Stuc a’Chroin, as we had presumed – that would have been too easy. As Stu likes to say, the Munro always makes you work that bit harder.

It was a gentle climb along the broad ridge to the actual summit, where we stopped for a short while to rest. My concern was not about our present situation, but about navigating across the moorland to get back to the glen, once we had descended from this peak. All we had to do here was retrace our steps to the other end of the ridge and wind our way back down the cliff. So we set off back along the line of fenceposts, and after about fifteen minutes they began to veer off and head down the side of the mountain. There was a path here and we figured this might be preferable to retracing our steps all the way, which we always try to avoid. But I sensed I was losing my bearings (I didn’t know the half of it) and looked at the compass to find that the direction that was supposed to be south was actually north. While my mind was still reeling I told this to Stu, and he was equally bewildered.

I studied the map and after a while discovered the truth. It was a truth so obvious once accepted, but, prior to this, so outside the field of normal expectations that it eluded us for many minutes. Setting off from the summit, we had followed the fenceposts in the wrong direction, south instead of north. A spectacular mistake, the realisation of which stunned us into head-shaking and self-admonishment. It was a further few minutes before we came upon the best – really the only – plan of action: we had to return to the summit, so that we were guaranteed to find our way again by following the fenceposts in the right direction. This was uncomfortable, because in that fifteen minutes we had descended quite a way, and there was a tempting-looking route skirting northwards around the summit. But it had to be done, and this way we avoided getting lost.

And so we learned another rule: In bad conditions, before you set off again after a stop, consult the map and compass to establish your bearings and work out where to go next.

This is by no means obvious and doesn’t occur to one naturally. Only a mistake such as this could have taught us it.

To conclude, an appeal: if you want to help us preserve our hillwalking relationship, and thereby also the quality of these blog posts, please send in your messages of support. Also, any independent diplomacy or arbitration would be very welcome.

Not for us the richness of the lowland countryside in the throes of the climactic consummation of spring. Upwards!

On a warm and beautiful day such as yesterday, only at the top of a mountain would we get the chance to experience miserable weather, cold winds and physical hardship. Only in the alpine zone would we escape the thick masses of hawthorn blossom, the acrobatics of the newly-arrived swallows, the frolicking lambs, the pervading air of promise, and the excitement of a holiday weekend as a whole people comes out of hibernation.

Tell me again, why do I do this? Let’s see…

Stu, my brother, and I stayed at the Kingshouse Hotel on Friday night and set off at dawn to tackle two Munro peaks on the Blackmount, Creise and Meall a’ Bhuiridh (that’s kreesh and meel a voorie for all you – and I’m including me in that you – Lowlanders and Sassenachs). They’re both over a thousand metres, and the Blackmount is an overpoweringly large and complex massif with the same kind of proud unshowy stature as Bidean nam Bian. I was expecting a hard walk.

I’m glad I had prepared myself mentally because it was tougher even than I had expected. It took two-and-a-half hours longer than planned, and that had been a deliberate overestimate. If we hadn’t taken the chairlift down to the foot of the mountain on the descent (I’m not embarrassed about it and I don’t accept the views that underlie your outrage) then we would have been substantially later.

Several factors combined to slow us down, and it’s not a matter of blame. Yes, I am currently rather “geriatric” (Stu’s words), owing to bacchanalian overindulgence and lack of exercise. And I do like to take a great many photos, but I need plenty to choose from when I’m doing these blog posts, which Stu enjoys as much as anybody. So we should ignore the things we could have done nothing about. An initial outline postmortem will help.

Starting from Blackrock Cottage, we had a long walk through a peat bog to get anywhere close to the slopes of our mountain;
We didn’t actually start at Blackrock Cottage, but at the Kingshouse Hotel, meaning that we had to walk some way along the West Highland Way to get to the Blackrock Cottage;
We didn’t have a map (I sense more outrage, but again I don’t accept it)
It was very misty up there until mid-afternoon
I hadn’t researched the mountain by reading books, or online. (That we went up without a map and without doing any research is perhaps deserving of a modicum of outrage)
Owing to these failures we went the wrong way at one point. Later Stu calculated that this added nearly two hours to the walk

In the end Stu got us out of trouble, and, to be fair, he had brought a photocopy of the relevant pages of his Munro book. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We got to the Kingshouse Hotel on Friday evening, had a great meal and some great conversation over a few pints of ale at a table outside, as we looked over at Buachaille Etive Mor (a bit like bookle etiv more). I took this photo from the car just before we turned off the road. I always find this view tantalizing, looking down into Glencoe. I know what’s down at the other end of the glen and this sight makes me yearn for it: sunset over the sea.

Those who have been in this area will know that it has outstanding scenic beauty; from the vicinity of the Kingshouse, what Cameron McNeish says is one of the finest mountain panoramas in Scotland.[1] Stunning photographs of this landscape proliferate in calendars, on pub walls and in poster shops – especially of Buachaille Etive Mor – so I need not trouble you with my own puny efforts. If you’re just snapping, what’s the point in taking a photograph of the Pyramids, or the Taj Mahal, or Niagara Falls? It’s absurd: just Google it and you’ll find a better picture. My own photos in this blog support the text, and capture things that interest me and visual compositions that please me, which are sometimes transient. I’m not going to take photos of famously beautiful places that have been photographed a million times before, by people willing to spend thousands of pounds on the best cameras, lenses, filters and other paraphernalia; and willing to spend whole days, day after day, year after year, capturing the landscape in its most revealing or awesome aspects.

Having said that, here’s a picture of Buachaille Etive Mor:

Incidentally, it wasn’t the best weather for landscape photographs, so the expansive views I had hoped to capture from up high were largely obliterated by the haziness. And the quality of light at dawn was not of the highest. The cloud was just in the wrong place. It was an odd combination of summery haziness and wintery dullness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just that specifically for photography it wasn’t great. (Excuses excuses)

As we left the West Highland Way and set off past Blackrock Cottage, the unmistakeable hydrocarbon sheen on the surfaces of the pools told us that we were entering a peat bog. There are several reasons for wearing gaiters, but one of them, perhaps the most obvious one – to stop mud and water going down the top of your boots – hadn’t impressed itself upon me much in my preparations of the previous day, so I hadn’t brought them. To begin a walk with wet feet is momentarily very depressing, and later on I had blisters between my toes.

We walked round to Glen Etive and then up the rocky slopes of Sron na Creise to the ridge of peaks that leads to the highpoint of Creise summit itself. It’s described in the books as the scrambling route, and it certainly lived up to that description. The climb was very steep, much of it on stable rhyolite, which is a great rock for climbing because frost-weathering makes it form angular blocks with convenient steps and hand-holds, and it can have a very rough texture.

Polished rhyolite: http://www.howlatm.com/tumbrhyolite.html

I’m coming to realize that rock identification is more about appreciating the origin and history of rocks than classifying them according to how they look today. There seemed to be a great variety of rocks on this mountain, but I now know that the light-grey rocks, the pink rocks, the green rocks and the multi-coloured rocks were all rhyolite: they formed in the same kind of way and they have similar mineral constituents. I can now see that it’s less important to know the name of a rock than to put it in the context of its surroundings and its history. The name – the species classification – helps in doing this, but it should not be the overriding concern. This is, in a way, akin to the change in biology when taxonomy came to be based on evolutionary ancestry rather than on the arbitrary classifications of old (has wings = bird, has fins = fish, and so on.)

So the rocks on this mountain are mostly volcanic and magmatic, with great variety of colour and character even amongst the same rock species. Glencoe is what’s left after millions of years of glaciation and weathering have acted upon the remnants of a caldera that was eight kilometres across.

The signs of spring are everywhere, even high in the mountains. This young frog would have remained unseen had it been able to resist leaping over Stu’s boot. Even after Stu pointed it out to me I struggled to find it. But as you can see, I managed to convince it to pose for the perfect shot.

I didn’t see a water vole, but I know there was one close by, because its droppings are unmistakeable.

I discovered later that I had rather too many shots of Stu’s arse, so I’ll try to keep them to a minimum in this post. In this shot he’s tackling a steep gully.

Sorry, here’s that arse again. You can see what we were up against, and looking at it here it does look daunting, but rocky ascents are actually energizing, if you are the kind of person who is comfortable on rock and unafraid of heights. The stimulation of scrambling more than makes up for the greater physical effort it requires: it really does seem easier. The picture shows a lot of fallen rock, but much of the climb was on good solid stuff.

It’s good when you see you’re gaining some height. The sweeping slopes of Buachaille Etive Mor looked very fine from this vantage point, shrouded though they were.

It didn’t seem long before we gained the ridge. As we climbed its gentle gradient we crossed the uppermost extent of the last glacier, above which the rocks are shattered by weathering into fields of rubble. After a kilometre or so we reached the 1100 metre summit, but without a great view to show for it, as you can appreciate from the picture above.

In lieu of a breathtaking view, here’s another rock.

After the summit of Creise we continued along the ridge. Along it there were substantial walls of snow in the north-facing corries.

Thinking about it afterwards it’s clear that it was when we set off from Creise that our bad navigation skills got us into trouble. I think we both just expected to be able to follow an obvious ridge, so we followed the obvious ridge. One of the things I learned yesterday is that with visibility in some directions better than in others, without a map you cannot just make assumptions about where to go from what you can see. If we had had the map we would have known to look out for a junction of ridges, where we would have had to turn left. And if we had been able to see in all directions we would have seen Meall a’Bhuiridh’s ridge sweeping upwards in an arc.

I was too relaxed, and happy to leave all of the navigation to Stu. He presumed that I would have a map, because I usually do. Knowing this, and in those conditions, I should have been far more alert than I was. I even caught glimpses of other mountains and didn’t stop to wonder what they were, which is uncharacteristic. I was having fun, and perhaps I was complacent because of the mildness of the weather and the security of another nine or ten hours of daylight.

After what seemed like an oddly easy second Munro (because it wasn’t the second Munro), we continued on the ridge, which began to curve round to the left and east towards Rannoch Moor. After following this for a while the clouds began to lift, and I was happy that we would be returning in the afternoon sunshine. But Stu had some nagging doubts. He couldn’t work out where we were, and kept asking “what’s that ridge over there?”

“That ridge” could only have been the ridge that we had been walking along, which he found incredible: “did we really walk along there ?” He was troubled that he couldn’t recognize any of its features. As it turns out, there was a good reason for its unfamiliarity. In the left-hand picture above he’s thinking “wait a minute, so that’s…no, it can’t be…but it must be, cos…well, the only alternative is…”. In the right-hand picture the truth has dawned and he’s just about to say “we’ve come the wrong way – that’s the Munro over there.”

This was a crushing blow. For a few moments we considered continuing, and descending by this unfrequented, unknown route. But in any case it would have taken us many miles away from our destination. The only option was to backtrack, to retrace our steps back to the junction of ridges that we had completely missed, and the location of which we still at this point could not understand.

I didn’t accept for a long time that I would have to climb another Munro, after thinking that I had already done two, but in the event the climb was easy, over boulders, rubble and rocky steps. I found I had more energy than I had expected, and here I would again like to thank Cadbury, the makers of the Chomp, the best – yes, I’ll say it again – the best chocolate bar in the world. I don’t even begrudge them that extra 5p they’ve added to the price. 15p is a small price to pay for – well, anything really. And please don’t mistake my ingenuous enthusiasm for product placement or anything base like that. I don’t get a penny from Mr Cadbury and I wouldn’t take it if he offered. I would say, “No Mr Cadbury, I believe in this product.”

Because I wasn’t paying much attention to anything except nice pictures, and hadn’t done any preparatory reading about this route, I didn’t know that the descent would take us down through the ski centre – the Glencoe Mountain Resort as it’s now called. It has been diversifying recently into mountain biking and various other summer activities because of climate change, and while there is still some very good winter sport to be had, it seems to be quite variable year-to-year. The actual ski slopes certainly looked run-down and abandoned, but they probably always do out of season.

Even down here there was still some snow. In this picture you can see the trail of my bum – I couldn’t resist a bum-slide. To give you an idea how fast I was going, this photo was taken from the spot where I finally came to rest.

I’m sure that most hillwalkers would agree that the descent is, all else being equal, the worst part of a walk. I find myself saying things like “wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could paraglide all the way down.” This time I had been saying “wouldn’t it be amazing if we could take a chairlift down.” Stu said he wouldn’t do it because it wouldn’t be right: it would be a kind of cheating. But we didn’t think for a minute that it really would be operating, and when we saw that it was, Stu ditched his principles without any hesitation at all.

Partly because it was so unexpected and bizarre, partly because it was intrinsically exciting, and also perhaps because deep-down we knew we would remember it with fondness for the rest of our lives, it made us irrepressibly happy.

Birds seen on or around the mountain: ptarmigan, raven, buzzard, golden plover, wheatear, grey heron

I was a bit worried about how I’d manage on the mountain yesterday, considering that:

I’d hardly exercised at all since September (our last mountain walk);
I now had not one but two dodgy knees;
I had a cold;
I was feeling pretty run-down from all the commuting and staying up late;
It was February and I had no ice axe or crampons.

But I needn’t have worried: although it was hard-going (it always is) there was no doubt that I’d make it safely to the top, and there was barely any snow around – I was forgetting about how relatively mild it’s been this winter. In fact it was warm enough to strip down to my shirt, and it was only the cold wind at the top that forced me to add some more layers.

We walked up from the west bank of Loch Lomond at Inveruglas, where Sloy hydro-electric power station was waiting in eerie silence for the mountainside pipes to feed its turbines. I’ve always had a queer fascination with – and awestruck fear of – hydro-electric power, at some unfathomable psychological depth. Damns; mysterious underground pipes; giant sluices, valves and channels; pitiless pressures; forbidding, deadly stillnesses. And all of it big – big enough to swallow you up and drown you or crush you or mangle you. When you look at those massive structures, chambers and churning pools, none of it is nicely signposted for you, by way of explanation. The imagination runs riot: what would actually happen if I fell in there? Where would I end up if I was sucked down that overflow? In one respect it’s all designed for humans, but in another it couldn’t be much more inhuman.

But, as I say, it’s not just fear. It’s awe and wonder too, and an affection for it as an impressively mechanical, spectacular, clean way of producing energy. Which is why I can’t agree with the people who say it’s a “blot on the landscape”. There’s something about these schemes that matches the power and grandeur of the mountains and lochs themselves.

The water was black and still, as if unimaginably deep. Each of those windows has a huge turbine behind it, and the four together provide 160 megawatts of power for the Glasgow region. The energy is from the water that comes down from Loch Sloy through Ben Vorlich in a tunnel and down the side of the mountain in four huge pipes, one for each turbine. The station can go from standing still to full load in about five minutes, so it’s used for big surges in demand. Apparently, its refurbishment in the 90s ensured its operation for the next 30 or 40 years. To all you damspotters out there (yes you!), there’s some info on the web but not a great amount.

That’s Ben Lomond, showing a very different profile to the one we’re used to seeing from the south.

A cloud in the process of smothering Ben Vorlich. You can also see the dam at the head of Loch Sloy.

The great thing about winter is that the beauty of morning still hasn’t faded when you start your walk.

The rock is mainly metamorphic, showing twisted contorted layers with frequent veins of quartzite. In the language of Richard Fortey in Earth: An Intimate History, this rock has suffered.

A pose, not of a conqueror, but of a modest adventurer. Little does he know he’s about to be swallowed by a cloud that seems to be hunting him by stealth.

The choice of black and white was not subtly artistic: his shirt was a quite garish shade of red. A good photo of Stu though, I think.

Another picture of Ben Lomond.

Clouds were dancing and spinning together as they came over the mountain from the north-west and met on the other side.

The tiny figure amongst the random monumentality is Stu, distant enough not to cause visual offence with that shirt.

And this is the top, with a peak in the background which looks higher but probably isn’t. The pond was shallow but it wasn’t quite frozen solid. Remarkable in the middle of winter.

Another two views from the top.

Stu in a relaxed mood after lunch. Incidentally, I happened to bump in to Craig Black from Largs near the top of the mountain. I hadn’t seen him for years. What are the chances?

On the way down, a different kind of cloud appeared, much higher.

I recall that it wasn’t long after this photo was taken that I caught up with Stu, and we got to talking about his job, in which he examines people’s ears, tests their hearing, recommends hearing aids, and – if he’s done a good job – sells them the hearing aids. Part of this process is taking an impression of the ear. This is basically a mould of the ear from the outer bit to the drum, made using some kind of setting resin. Afterwards, he sends it to the hearing aid makers. I suggested that he take two impressions each time (he could explain this easily enough with a white lie), so that he could keep one for himself. He could then build up a collection, each ear impression mounted on a little varnished mahogany base with a brass plaque engraved minisculely with the name of the donor. Displayed on a series of shelves, this would certainly be a conversation-starter when they had guests. But why stop there? Displayed in an art gallery the collection could command a high price, as long as it was backed up with a few inarticulate statements that began with things like “I was trying to represent our ambiguous relationship with…”, and “It’s a metaphor for the way that society…”

On conceptual art, I’m definitely open to persuasion and I do try to judge works individually without prejudice, but I’ve got some serious problems with this kind of art that I can’t imagine will just go away. In case you think I’m some kind of philistine armchair sceptic when it comes to art, throwing my Daily Mail at the radio in outrage, well: above is a painting I did. It maybe ain’t much, but at least I’m trying, and I like it more than giant egg-slicers. It’s of the Quirang in Skye, or at least a doodle inspired by the memory of my walk there with Ann a couple of summers ago. It’s an odd, bewitching place on a scale small enough for the eyes and mind to take in.

We were overtaken on the way down by a young woman. She didn’t greet us in the usual upbeat, friendly way, but sarcastically, saying “nice view of the pylons eh?” This was a real downer – sarcasm like that is dark and cynical. Did she expect utter wilderness 40 minutes’ drive from Glasgow? Above you can see the sub-station and the pylons. I don’t think they’re ugly, and they’re so much a part of this area that they don’t seem out of place. I certainly do have an urge to explore the wildest wildernesses, such as Fisherfield in the far north, and the Cairngorms. But usually the marks of humankind – dams and paths and sheep – are not totally unwelcome in the Highlands, being, in any case, sparse and inconsiderable.

Padlock.

I was still in this phase when Brian told me his theory. I’m worried that I won’t do him justice here so let me just ask: Brian, if you read this, kindly correct me or elaborate on this in a comment. Essentially the idea is that simply because of the configuration of the city, different kinds of people live on top of each other and must be nice to each other to allow the city to run smoothly. Edinburgh, in contrast, has distinct, discrete geographical areas, each inhabited by one or two social classes – Southside students, New Town posh, small-businessmen and tradesmen, and so on. With the possible exception of Leith, there isn’t much mixing going on because the city’s configuration doesn’t enforce it, and there is a certain ghetto mentality. In Glasgow it’s very different, though I’ll leave it to Brian to explain exactly how.

So the upshot is that in Glasgow, because of the close proximity of people from different backgrounds, everyone is forced to get along, otherwise life would be unbearable and awkward, so in the pubs you will find students talking to electricians talking to lawyers talking to cheesemongers talking to professors of computer science. This makes for a wonderful atmosphere.

Yesterday Stu and I climbed the peaks comprising the Beinn a’Ghlo massif (three munros and a top). Quite a feat for us and so satisfying, because it didn’t defeat us as Bidean Nam Bian did.

I’ve realised that whatever else happens, walking in the mountains with Stu every few weeks is a constant. Between the last one and yesterday’s walk I have broken up with my girlfriend of seven years, moved to a new home, and started a new job. But the walk was the same as always. That might sound dull, but it’s not that we always talk about the same things, or that we’re not changing as the years go by; it’s that we can talk about those different things in the same way, pick up from last time and put the changes into perspective.

This is where I’m living, in Leith. A lovely flat, with a lovely flatmate, Laura.

Which reminds me: regular readers of this blog may know that I’m interested in novel expressions. Latest in my collection of extraordinary phrases uttered in ordinary circumstances is my new cunt is vacuous.

Perthsire, especially the area around about Blair Atholl and Pitlochry and the valleys of the Tummel and Garry, is quite special. It’s cosy and fertile, with rolling hills and masses of deciduous trees, and also happens to have a few mountains. The awesome topography and stunning ruggedness of the West Highlands is missing, but you can have too much of a good thing (in this case at least). As you can see from the photo at the top of this post, the resulting views have a particular beauty.

This is the top of the first munro, Cairn Liath. The climb I know pretty well, across a bog and up a steep scree path. On its own it’s a pretty uninspiring hill, but I saw it differently yesterday because we pushed on beyond it into the heart of the mountain complex: it’s not on its own.

Hasn’t Stu got lovely knees? Well, all is not what it seems: he’s been practising this stance, which – and I’m sure he won’t mind my saying this – miraculously hides their unfortunate knobbliness.

Here’s me on the climb up to the second peak, tired but determined. My energy never left me on this walk, so no matter how knackered I was I never stopped enjoying it, and exhaustion never set in. I thank Cadbury, the makers of the finest chocolate bar in the world:

Yes, I know that Lindtt 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate is exquisite, and that other grown-up chocolate bars are considered superior, but the Chomp takes some beating.

Incidentally, have you tried the sweets that are aimed at kids these days? They’re inventive and interesting, with sophisticated and varied flavours. Galaxy-eaters don’t know what they’re missing.

Lustrous umber under a clean September sky. How nice!

Stu balances on the edge of sunlight.

This is somewhere near the second peak, Bràigh Coire Chruinn-bhalgain, Brow of the Corrie of Round Blisters.

I’m guessing that these are the blisters, in the corrie down below.

In the branch of philosophy called aesthetics, some questions regarding beauty might be what is beauty?, are there objective criteria for judging something beautiful?, is aesthetic sensitivity learned or innate?, how much does the appreciation of a beautiful object correspond with the innate configuration of the object, and so on. The hills are the result of the forces of weathering and glaciation, and of the forces of Earth’s crust. The vegetation is the result of millions of years of adaptation in response to the environment, but essentially the result of the accumulation of tiny random and accidental genetic mutations that happen to allow the bearers of those mutations – the organisms – to be more successful. The fluffy clouds are the result of the dynamics of gas and pressure and heat and water in the crazily complex flux which is the world’s weather system. The light is the radiation from the star that we orbit, burning its fuel in a nuclear fusion reactor. We owe all this to the particular agglomerations of matter and energy that led to the formation of the Sun and the Solar System. None of it has purpose and it is not the result of artistic effort (though religious people may disagree). So why is it beautiful? Because of beauty, which belongs to man.

Stu on the way to the top of the third peak, the third Munro, Carn nan Gabhar, or Hill of the Goats. The boulder field was like a shattered wart on the top.

More rocks. When you climb over boulder fields and rocky outgrowths like this, it’s not scrambling, because you’re not using your hands at all, and it’s a very different experience from normal walking, so I’ve decided to call it clambering.

Before descending, looking back over to the first peak.

As you can see, Stuart soldiered on through the pain and discomfort after his arms were severed in a horrendous accident. It’s possible that his successful double limb regeneration was, if not entirely the result of, then certainly helped by, his positive frame of mind.

The descent was pretty short and easy, although it was followed by a long walk back around the mountain and back down to the car, at first following an uneven and boggy path, before reaching the landrover track.

The sun was getting low and I captured the short-lived glory around me in a few photos.

And thanks to everyone at Lettingweb for the binoculars. Well chosen. They’re a quality pair and just right for me. I was using them yesterday, although we didn’t see anything surprising: a red squirrel, a very close-by red deer and several grouse. And what are those little birds that try to lure you away from their nest?