Teeth

In my new show, rather than just telling funny stories about my latest holidays (the last one, Cold Mountain, was all about Antarctica in 2014), I thought I’d try something different.

This tour still has the laughs, but it goes a little deeper than gags about crapping in wag bags (though there are still a few of those). It looks at the lessons I’ve learned after forty-plus years of climbing—big lessons, small ones, the kind you only see in hindsight.

Trying to work out what those lessons are has been revealing. Each climb led to the next. Each mistake, each success, seemed to be instructing me—showing me who I was and who I might become. Often while I was literally being gripped.

The stories range from dropping my boot off the Frendo Spur in winter on my first alpine climb, to making ten days of water last fourteen while soloing the Sea of Dreams, to battling to survive a winter storm on El Cap. Each one carries a lesson.

But I also started thinking about earlier lessons. The ones you absorb as a kid. The things you see and hear before you even know they’re shaping you.

I remember my best friend’s dad being killed in the Piper Alpha disaster. The compensation meant they could move off the council estate. Some people said they were lucky. As if they’d won the pools. But even at that age I knew money could not fill that void.

I remember my mum refusing to do something criminal because she had “principles.” Someone told her, “You’re too poor to have principles.” She replied, “No one’s that poor.” It sounded like a line from a Hollywood film about single mums. But she meant it.

And then there was another lesson. One that probably shaped my view of the world more than I realised at the time. It came from a place far from ideal, full of adults and kids you’d never see on Terry and June or The Good Life. A world where people had little or nothing.

I remember it clearly. I was about ten. I was in a stairwell. I got kicked in the balls. And in that moment the lesson landed.

Kindness is often seen as weakness by people who feel their only power in this world is their bite. And if you want to survive, you learn to hide a kind heart behind bared teeth.