The cupboard
When I was a kid my brother once locked me in a cupboard in the kitchen, pulling out the cutlery draw so I couldn’t escape. It was then that I saw that I wasn’t in there alone, seeing a rat skulking in a gap between the unit and the wall.
We used to have a bit of a rocky relationship me and my brother Robin, well when we were becoming teenagers anyway. I talked to him yesterday. He was in LA and I was in Brecon. I always wanted to say “I’m in LA’, but Robin being Robin it didn’t sound like such a great place, like he was telling me he was in the kitchen. It was just a place. It wasn’t home - where he wanted to be.
Robin is in the RAF, working as a loadmaster on C17’s. I once compared Robin to a camo’ed up air hostess, which he didn’t find funny, and he was right not to laugh. Air hostess’ don’t have to strap down coffins, and keep an eye of horrifically burned and maimed soldiers, or get shot down while doing their job. I guess my brother is a good man who has a shit job he loves doing.
Anyway the cupboard. I was screaming for Robin to let me out, before I smashed the whole thing to bits to get away. I’m sure the rat was as scared me, probably coming in via the crappy central heating pipes that ran through the block of flats where we lived. Robin stood outside laughing, thinking I was making it up, but he let me out anyway.
Not sure why I’m telling you this story, maybe it’s because I was thinking about Francis Bacon, and how he used to be locked in a cupboard by his nanny, and how this had huge bearing on his later work. When asked about it later in life Bacon said that that cupboard “was the making of me.”
We don’t see each other very much, me and my brother, but I’ve asked him to do some writing for my next book (Cold Wars), which relates to the effects of my climbing on the people around me (Psychovertical being simply the reasons for it). Robin plays a big part in the story, and sort of aims to compare our lives (he did a lot of very scary stuff while I was climbing). Will it work - we will see.
Oh yes - also found out this morning Psychovertical has been shortlisted for best mountain book at Banff.
— November 01, 2008 02:56 PM
Do Lecture lecture
I had the pleasure of being invited by Howies to their inspiring and ground breaking DO Lectures last month. If you don’t know what the DO lectures are, then check out their website and see how you can go next time round (either as a stander or a sitter).
Anyway here’s my bit.
— October 29, 2008 11:12 AM
Help for Heroes
The last seven days have been a bit strange.
Hearing about the assisted suicide of Daniel James while on the road touring my girlfriend Karen Darke was very depressing. For those who don’t know, Karen’s in a wheelchair, paraplegic following a climbing fall when she was only 21 and so the sudden media interest in poor Daniel and his family had a slight edge to it. Personally I think assisted suicide - allowing people to die with some dignity - should be available in the UK, but I suppose the growth of more militant right wing religious groups probably means we won’t see it for many years. But like many, when I heard about Daniel’s suicide I thought about how soon after his accident this had come, and how, if you had a child suffering from depression, and who wanted to take their life, you would try and stop them until maybe they could see the light.
I suppose it’s easy for us to think like this with the privilege of normal lives, but Karen just said that we have no way of knowing how terrible and hopeless life without any real movement could be (Daniel was paralyzed from the neck down). Looking at Karen now, her life full of fun and adventure, winner the day after day, and never ending battle to live a normal life it’s easy to judge Daniel and his parents harshly, but visiting Karen’s mum and dad at the weekend the conversation was shut down with the single sentence from Karen’s mum “Don’t judge them - no one knows how it feels to have a child who has been paralyzed in an accident”.
When Karen talked about suicide I wondered if she had felt that same urge, all those years ago, when the initial horror of loosing almost everything she loved had hit her.
The yesterday I was in the climbing shop Outside, when a man came up and asked about me and karen climbing El Cap last year, and if I had any advice for a friend who had been paralyzed by a mortar round in Basra. Major Phil Packer is planning on raising a million pound for Help For Heroes, doing such things as the London Marathon. He’d been thinking about a climb in the UK to help rase money, but was unsure of how or where to do it. “I’ll climb El Cap with him” I said, half joking and gave him my email address.
On the way home I thought about how when we skied across Greenland in 2006, Anne Mccormack had said that we should make everything we’d learned available to other disabled people, so they could do the same, and how maybe getting this knowledge out, not to mention coverage that this things are achieved by disabled athletes. Maybe doing this could help take some of the darkness out of peoples lives.
And so when I got home I penned 4000 Pull Ups (how to climb el cap when you’re in a wheel chair) to do my bit.
Then I got an email asking if I was serious about going to climb El Cap with Phil.
I was.
— October 21, 2008 09:36 AM
4000 Pull Ups
I’ve been getting quite a few requests about the technque Karen used to climb El Cap last year, so penned this short article called 4000 Pull Ups. If you know anyone who may find this of help then please pass it on (you don’t have to want to clim El Cap to find t helpfull, as it also work for climbing trees!).
— October 20, 2008 09:15 PM
Talking technology
A few people have emailed asking how I do my show, as I mix video, still images and panning images with music. Well I used good old fashioned Mac Keynote (a slightly better version of Powerpoint, and the same program used by Al Gore in An inconvenient Truth). This is a normal bread and butter slide program that I find works well, and has a great interface for including video, allowing me to set when the video starts, which is a really useful feature. By using HD video, and high res shots, I can have what looks like a still image, suddenly begging to move, as I click and begin the movie (the still image is just a video frame). To create HD movies I used a fantastic program called FotoMagico (it’s a german program hence the Foto). This is by far the best slideshow program I’ve used BUT because it doesn’t work with video, unfortunately I can only make up short sections (some with sound, others just a single movie of one image), and export them as movie files, and so integrate them with my Keynote program.
Things have come a long way from a bunch of slides and a projector and a tape machine, but learning new ways of saying the same old thing is one of the most exciting parts of doing slideshows, and luckily the technology just gets better and better.
— October 09, 2008 03:04 PM
Bottling it
Four shows down and still over twenty dates to go I must admit I had a bit of a crisis of confidence last week. You see what I say and do on stage is an ongoing process of finding out what doesn’t work, what does, and what would do better. Standing there talking to people for two hours, people often ask me how I remember it all, after all there are no prompt cards, hidden dialogue written on my sleeve (like Marlon Brando in Superman), or men hiding in box’s mouthing me the lines. The truth is that it’s all in my head, and as some people know all to well, my head’s not always the most securer of vessels.
Some things come out that aren’t supposed to, and some things stay hidden when needed most.
I think this is maybe one of the things people like about what I do, in that it’s pretty fresh, and a little edgy at times, and that I only know what I’m going to say a few milliseconds before they hear it.
But, and it’s a big but, this unscripted approach does lend itself to utter terror sometimes, but they say that real comedy takes risks, and so maybe I’m fully throwing myself into it.
Anyway I had a big does of bad feedback the other day, from a middle aged woman who told me that she expected great pictures or great comedy and that I delivered neither. Feedback like that is pretty toxic, eating away at your confidence, and without that you’re sunk. And so I started second guessing everything I had done, probably ignoring the massive amount of positive feedback, and focusing on the one or two bad.
But then - out of the blue - I got a great email that put me right back on track, from a woman who came to my show expected it to be boring (she came with her dad), but ended up crying with laugher the whole way through.
“From the very start right until you left that stage, we laughed to the point of tears especially at the “Monkey Cum” joke. I bristled a little at this and dared not look in my Dad’s direction but when I saw his shoulders shaking with laughter we both sniggered louder, it was a great chance to share something a little rude with a man I have held high on a pedestal for a very long time.”
Thanks god for emails, and people who help keep you on the right track.
— October 06, 2008 12:00 PM
Mal weather on Mull
Monday morning and the weather’s not great here on Mull. Did my show on Saturday night in the soon to be finished Mull theatre (school chairs covered in paint, walls still bare board with ceiling beams still showing like ribs).
For a while now I’ve had a rule that I don’t do shows anywhere where there are either Bunsen burners (ie. Uni lecture theaters) or plastic chairs (school halls), well unless I’m talking to kids. The reason is that neither tend to be conducive to a good night, either because the venue is designed for a guy in a cardigan talking about particles physics (a twelve foot long, five foot thick work bench with sinks built in isn’t great stage furniture), or because the seating; folding wooden lecture theatre seats, or plastic chairs, tend to have even the most attentive audience shuffling within about twenty minutes.
And so, when I got to the Mull theatre - spoiled these days by fancy venues and big turn outs - and saw a half finished room, lined with about fifty schools chairs my heart sank, especially considering the big journey and expense in doing the gig (six hour drive, expensive ferry ride, two nights accommodation). When I asked George , the friendly and helpful tech guy from the theatre what would happen if more than fifty people came, he just said “we only have fifty seats”.
But you know what, sometimes you forget why you do this (especially when you’re tired after being on the road, sleeping in your car etc). It’s not about making money, or getting bums on comfortable seats, it’s about having the privilege of going to new places, and people coming to listen to what you have to say, Bunsen burners or not.
And so, when 8.00 o’clock came around people came, lots of people, in fact more people than we had chairs, maybe more people than had been to this tiny local theatre before, and I felt humbled that they came out on a nasty night.
And what about the chairs? Well luckily although we were thirty chairs short, a lot of people had braved the Mull theaters seating before and so brought their own.
— September 29, 2008 12:09 PM
The Kendal curse
I knew it wasn’t going to be a good day when my kids woke me up at 8.30am to ask if they were going to school. It was the first day of my tour, and I was due in Kendal that evening, but had a long list of jobs to do before I’d be able to strand up and do my thing. Waking up at 8.30am wasn’t a good start. Getting them dressed, finding there shoes (“where are you bloody shoes!!!”), and sorting out their lunch was achieved in record time, and they made it to school in good order, with other late parents still milling around (it’s always good not to be the only late parent). The next incident was when I got Alastair lee’s house to get some footage from our Winter Patagonia film (as you can see, the talk now a few hours away and I’m still picking up key components of it!). He’s got a couple of funny out takes that didn’t make it into the film (I’ll stick some on here soon), but being huge files we couldn’t fit them on my hard drive. Conscious I still had to sort out my show when I got to Kendal, I just said ‘Oh delete some of those folders, , which he did, which turned out to be a mistake, as one contained my show images…which I only discovered once I was in Kendal. One good thing was I was able to see the rushes of his new film Onsite, which looks like it could well become the definitive UK climbing film to date, with great climbing, great people and some really good footage. Nick Bullock comes across really well, and I;d love to see a feature just on Nick. Anyway if you haven’t seen it, then here’s the Youtube promo.
Arriving in Kendal with 3 hours to go I suddenly realised I’d fucked up, so started furiously reseting my slides in Keynote, only to have the program crash within a hour (I hadn’t saved it), so was back to square one with two hours to go. Luckily I had quite a few film clips, so that took the pressure off a bit, so all I had to do was construct my story around them. Soon it was time to go up to the theatre to set up, and even though I hadn’t actually finished, I knew I had time to finish it off once I was plugged in… ...Unfortunalty the unwritten ‘Last minute’ rule kicked in (the more problems you leaved unresolved until the last minute, the more problems become apparent as that minute draws near). Basically the MacBook wouldn’t talk to the projector. No problem, I exported the show as a powerpoint presentation, and the tech guy ran home for his windows machine. The problem was, when he arrived back panting, we found he didn’t have powerpoint. So hunt the computer began, with us finally finding a PC as people started coming in and sitting down (show still not finished at this point!). We ran upstairs to the projection booth to put the show onto the PC, only to find when we did that none of the film files played (Powerpoint doesn’t play .mov files!!!). A third of my show had gone. People where now sitting down and waiting for the show to start. Luckily I’m an expert at slideshow pressure, and quickly got together the first half, and left the second half to do in the interval, ran down stairs and began. Did it work out? Only the audience could tell you that.
— September 26, 2008 10:02 AM
Psychovertical finally hits the shops
Well after a year of writing (getting through about 2000 cups of tea and one apple macbook) my book Psychovertical has finally made it into the shops. It’s number 1 in mountain books on Amazon as I write this, which seeing as it’s knocking Bear Grylls off the top spot, it kind of makes it all seem worth while!
Anyway working hard on my new show at the moment, but here’s some background on the book taken from an interview with UKClimbing
Q:Tell me about your new book PsychoVertical
The book aims to answer that million dollar question: Why do we climb?, by telling a multi-layered story of one climb, and one climber, looking back at every climb and experience that led up to it. The main strand is my 12 days on the Reticent wall in 2001, with each chapter covering one day on the climb. In between each of these chapters their are the stories of growing up, learning to climb, and the climbs that led up to the Reticent, with the last climb leading in to the start of the Reticent. Luckily for me the crux of the Reticent was the second to last pitch, so the whole book builds nicely to this show down. Hopefully the result of this structure is that although people (i.e. Non climbers), may be wondering why I would set off to solo such a route, by the end they would know why.
Q:So what’s the answer to that million dollar question?
I’m afraid the answer is 95,000 words long, and of course only applies to me.
Q:Where did the title come from?
Silvo Karo and a Slovene team did a new route on Torre Egger called Psychovertical, plus it’s the name of my website, but for this book it relates to an incident on the last day when someone started shouting down the wall that I was a psycho.
Q:When did you decide to write a book?
I’ve had the idea for years, ever since I climbed the route. The funny thing is I never wrote about the climb, and it kind of took a few years to work out why I did it, as it was far beyond me at the time. I sketched out the structure of the story, but never really got down to it until last year, as any kind of creative writing took a back seat to gear articles!
Q:So what changed?
In 2005 I got a place on a three week writing program at the Banff centre in Canada. As it turned out Id already agreed to do a talk for the charity Porters Progress at the Royal Geographical Society, so had to turn it down, but being a believer in Karma, I hoped I’d get on the following year, which I did.
The program was very intense, writing everyday, with an editor checking your stuff, and with no kids or work to disturb me, and I was able to believe I could maybe finally write the book.
Q:Did you find it hard getting a publisher?
Simon Yates had given me the number of Tony Whittom, his editor at Random House a few years previously, and I’d send him some stuff to read. He’s been keen to meet up and talk about it, but I just let it sit and sit. I knew that any budding writer would sell their mother to have a meeting with someone like Tony, but I suppose I was both scared of following it through, and I think I knew I wasn’t ready.
Fate plays a big part in these things, and I found that Tony was my editor at Banff, so we worked really closely on my writing. Tony’s a climber, and has worked with a lot of climbers (Simon Yates, Jim Perrin, Andy Cave), so he got it from the start.
After Banff Tony was keen to publish my book, but in the end I got an agent and they shopped around for the best deal. It’s vital for any new author to get as high an advance as possible, not for the money, but so the publisher really has to work hard on promoting the book. In the end Random House got the book and then the hard part began. How hard was it writing a book versus writing for magazines?
I was lucky in that I’d been writing around 4000 words a month for about 4 years, so was used to the work load. The first thing I did was stop working for Climb, as writing my column (gear, A to Z and My life led up to this) would have been impossible, plus I felt I’d got to the end of the road with writing about gear.
Tony had given me a word count of 90,000 words, so the first thing I did was cut and paste all my old stories into my book document, which gave me about a 30,000 word head start, or at least that’s what I thought. In the end almost every thing I’d written, and was hoping to just shoehorn into the book, needed rewriting, either because it didn’t fit the style of the book, or because I just found it wasn’t as well written as I’d thought.
Q:How do you go from 4000 word articles to 90,000 word books?
Writing a short story is like building a shed, if you pay attention, and apply all you know, you should knock up something that does the job. Writing a book is like building a house, and a big one at that. If you make any mistakes it can affect the whole structure, and the house will be judged not by it’s best room, but by its worst. Very often in the writing process I completely despaired that I could do it, or that I was good enough to write the book that I’d wanted to write. I suppose I have always been my harshest critic, and eventually I just had to write it as well as I could.
Q:How did you write the book?
I spent a year sitting a cafés in Sheffield, mainly in Encliffe and Millhouses park, spending about six hours a day just writing. Actually my favourite place to write was the Yorkshire Sculpture park, good food, and a good view! For some reason I couldn’t write anywhere quiet, probably due to being used to two kids running round the house.
As for the writing itself, it’s funny but some chapters would be written in a day, while others took months, but whatever time it took it was always important to let it sit a week or two before going back to edit it.
Q:How did this affect your climbing?
I’ve always been a part time climber, so going for a month or two without climbing was OK. I went to Patagonia with Ian Parnell and Yosemite with Karen Darke, but where ever I went my Mac Book was always by my side.
Q:What do you think of climbing writing?
I think writing about climbing, and making it interesting is tough, especially if you’re writing to both climbers and non climbers. I thought early on that it was important to get a style that worked for me, and after many years of trying I ended up believing that a light touch was best for me, and what lay in the spaces between the words was just as important as the words themselves. Too many writers try and paint the full picture when it’s not necessary. One of the most important things I learnt about writing was you must never tell the reader how you feel, only the situation you are in, so that they can empathize with the writer.
Q:Who are your favourite climbing writers?
I’ve always liked writers like Ed Drummond, and think his dream of white horses book is great. I also like Andy Cave’s writing, and some of Mark Twight’s stuff (but not all). I guess I like an honest writing style, and ideally with the minimum of stuff about actually climbing!
Q:What are your future plans?
I always envisaged Psychovertical as part one of a trilogy of books, and have the next one all mapped out. Psychovertical deals with what motivates a person to climb, where as the next book deals with how this affects others. But before that I need to get my ass in gear and start climbing, rather than just writing about it!