Sports enthusiasm may skip a generation. I rock-climbed and ski-ed, daughter Occasional Speeder watched soccer, granddaughter Ysabelle climbs and skis, much better than I did.
As to climbing I was limited to gritstone outcrops in West Yorkshire. Bella ascends specialised indoor walls and includes a bit of “bouldering” (ie, shorter, lower but often fiercer rock routes).
I climbed in the fifties, Bella does it now. The most spectacular difference between us is sartorial. Bella ties her hair into a topknot, wears things like ballet pumps on her feet, slides into a blouse that could be Lycra but isn’t, and clads her bum in what looks like rugby shorts.
My boots are huge; “big as coal scuttles” as the local argot has it. Given that modern-day climbers can support themselves on a foothold the size and shape of a tilted teaspoon I’d be ruled out as too cumbersome. As well as age, of course. For me a foothold would be a rock ledge which could accommodate a sofa.
Bella moves upwards sinuously and continuously. I used to pause after each move. The grading system - Moderate, Difficult, Very Difficult, Severe, Very Severe, Extremely Severe - terrified me and VD (the grade not the disease) was my highest aspiration.
Why did I climb given my incompetence? From reading Victorian tomes about the Alps, often written by vicars. The shabbiness of the gear also appealed.
Have you seen the terrifying films of free-climbers? People hanging from great overhangs by the tips of their fingers, with no ropes? My idea of a very bad dream.
ReplyDeleteI concur with Tom. Any rock climbing, anywhere would be the stuff of nightmares to me. I even need to crawl to a cliff edge to look down (even a parapet needs to be waist high for me to feel secure
ReplyDeleteI have never been scared of heights (have spent a lot of time on the top of church towers, etc.), just falling from them.
DeleteTom: I enjoyed Free Solo and Dawn Wall from a technical point of view, given both represented rock-climbing at the extremes of possibility. But I did occasionally ask myself whether what I was watching was the equivalent of reading a porn magazine - was I indulging in some grisly form of inner excitement.
ReplyDeleteFree Solo was shown during our local movie festival and the auditorium was full. Rock climbing is a minority sport and it was hard to believe that all the viewers were or had been climbers. Again, the pornographic aspects arise.
Avus: Given all that you mention, imagine nevertheless undergoing a strong temptation to enter into its horrors. As I was. I wasn't a very good climber but climbing - at a modest level - touched on some sort of urge within me. And before you rule me out on the grounds of insanity reflect on bike racing and, notably, the TdF. I wonder if there might be a sort of pornographic attraction in watching racers descend from the Col du Tourmalet with only 3 or 4 square centimetres of contact rubber between them and fatal disaster.
While a student in Leeds I was a member of the climbing club and the clothes that I wore were as you describe. We wore our hiking boots to climb in and much of our day, usually a Sunday, was in fact spent hiking to and then from the climbing spots. Only one of the boys, Pete, who could climb up anything, had a pair of 'new' lightweight climbing shoes. I was a novice, always well roped. I remember one time we were so tired with the fresh air and exercise that we all fell asleep on the train that was bringing us back to Leeds.
ReplyDeleteShare My Garden: I suspect one of the spots you visited was Almscliffe Crag, near the villages of North Rigton and Huby. We might well have met had there not been a generation-and-half's gap between our ages. Another possibility would be Cow and Calf Rocks at Ilkley. There's a steep but comparatively easy climb in the Quarry there called Fairy Steps. You would only have known in its later manifestation; I was responsible for radically altering its contours when I caused a large flake of rock (that had supported many climbers for decades) to break away from the cliff face and I - unroped - went tumbling into a small gully to the right. An event much blogged about subsequently.
ReplyDeleteNhu cầu vận chuyển hàng hóa Bắc Nam ngày càng gia tăng, cũng như vận chuyển container lạnh hay vận chuyển xe máy bằng tàu hỏa cũng nhận được sự quan tâm của khách hàng hiện nay.
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