Lessons from Nelipot Cottage

It began with a film. Twenty executives struggled their way up a mountain in an enormous gale. One member of the team got hypothermia and had to be heavily assisted. Against all odds, they made it to the summit. Once off the mountain, almost at the end of their tether, they were picked up by fishing boat, given a single black bin bag and told to strip off and swim to land. The executives rebelled, so the instructors jumped, leaving the rebels to man the boat. The executives were from Rockwater, the place was Ardmore, and the chief was John Ridgway. The film, although focused on the Rockwater team, was dominated throughout by Ridgway, a man as known for his eccentricity as for his achievements. The question was “Does putting these people through hell make them better at their job?”
Six months later I walked into Ardmore to begin a university summer job as cook and assistant instructor. I had no relevant qualifications and precious little experience. I had simply written a letter telling Ridgway how the documentary had inspired me, and I was invited to run into Ardmore for an interview. They asked me if I could cook- the answer was ‘No’! Did I know what food should taste like? Yes! OK then, you will learn. Did I run? No! Never mind, you will, would you like to join the team. Ridgway seemed a giant of a man, his adventures legion. He had rowed the Atlantic with Chay Blyth, sailed around the world, followed the Amazon from source to sea, the list went on…even his daughter Rebecca became the first woman to canoe around the ferocious Cape Horn. His wife MC had been with him nearly everywhere and his younger daughter had been rescued and adopted from a Peru ravaged by the Shining Path. They are a family of survivalists, setting long odds and overcoming them as a way of life.
Ardmore itself is unique. The adventure school is set on a remote peninsula in Sutherland, high on the North West coast of Scotland. From the sea and the hills around, Ardmore shines out as a small patch of jewel green grass perched on the edge of a sea loch; there is no way in by road. Visitors must walk or run in, the stores are dropped at the far end of the loch and picked up by boat, the postman does a three mile round trip on foot to call daily. On a fine day the sky is dominated by mountains, Ben Stack, Suilven, overwhelming, mighty Foinaven. The loch mirrors these giants, and smaller sleeker shadows: English Rose IV, sailed single-handed to Brazil, English Rose VI, once the fastest around the world, the Patagonia Express, the Avon inflatable used to sneak up on the Gran Campo Nevado ice cap. All are still in regular use. On wild days, the loch was lashed by horizontal rain, the mountains vanished and the rigging sang like demented banshees in the mist.
Life at Ardmore was about survival. Ridgway is a scathing perfectionist: instructors are never late, always prepared for any eventuality, are neat, run between buildings, don’t fall over, ever, never have to retie their shoelaces….we had to be superhuman, the example for the courses to emulate. The three principles were self reliance, positive thinking and to leave people and places better than you found them. No lapses and no mistakes. It was hard enough on a normal day to perfect all the details. Halfway up a mountain in a gale with a full 24 hour pack and miles to go before even the prospect of sleep, to enthuse and inspire others then…There were many jokes: “ the right way the wrong way and the Ridgway”, “I used to be terrified of John, now I’m just careful”, all with a sting of truth. There were many quotes, usually bellowed across a hillside: “Engage the brain”, “Are you being effective?”, “A sense of urgency, please”. These still haunt me today.
Days began at 6am with a run if we were home, as early as 4am if we were out and about. I had never run before either, but was immediately expected to beat all the girls on the course and a couple of the men! And the clients would try very hard to beat us! During the children’s courses we would be out most nights, bivvying or camping on the hill or hunkered down on Survival Island. Activities included hillwalking, climbing, sailing, canoeing, and the more educational initiative tests, team building exercises, Search and Rescue drills, and lectures on local flora and fauna. The executives came only for a week, had no lectures, only one night out and also expected gourmet catering. Activities were worked into exercises to improve teamwork, communication, and the three principles. They also had to be fun. Debriefs were extensive and designed to teach, for the participants and for us.
For we instructors the season was an endless summer school. We were a group of incredibly disparate individuals, mostly in our late teens, with little in common bar Ardmore. The lads were mostly preparing for their army boards, often after initial rejection. For many months I was the only girl in the barracks at the bottom of the hill. Priorities changed. No telly, no money, no freedom, no time, no privacy, no beer, no fresh milk. Treats were parcels, strangers, visits to the doctor, end of course concerts, the sunny day, the jokes and the craic. Strange to go through so much with folk and then to part still as relative strangers. Part of the magic was that nobody knew you- they took you as you showed yourself to be, and there was simply no veneer left after a hard day on the hill. There was no place to hide the flaws in your character on the bad days.
We had to work together effectively to keep the course safe and smooth; most often the problem was too many chiefs. We too were extensively debriefed. Positive thinking; after ten weeks of rain…self reliance; dry clothes after ten weeks of rain…leaving people and places better; this was the best bit, the part that for me made it all worthwhile, planting an idea, the debrief that may galvanise that child into a lifetime of achievement, watching the shy grow in confidence and stature, watching the team become greater by far than the sum of its parts.
There are magical places in Sutherland that still haunt my daydreams. I can still remember the frustration of walking up the slipping sliding slopes of Arkle, the ultimate demonstration of entropy, the hill that will one day be a flat featureless boulder strewn plain. The scene of Ridgway’s test for me: simple enough now but a challenge then. A solo ascent of Arkle, alone on my day off, and be back in time to cook supper. The weather was poisonous that day, gale force winds, swirling mist, rocks slimey with water on the cusp of ice. I still think of that as the day I truly learned to navigate, looking for the 4th stream which was our way down off the hill and onto the path home. Wild days are often the best. The perfect compact bothy at Lone, scene of many a restless night, set on the flanks of Foinaven, surrounded by salmon lochs and Highland garrons. The glacial cirque overhanging Strath Dionard, surely a place of power, it is geologically the oldest valley in Europe, the wildest campsite with the best view, a magical eyrie for looking out over the wild wild hills. And the favourite of all, the tiny bothy caught between the countless lochans in Ceathram Garbh, deep in the heart of the lonely quarter, where the otters ran in the stream in the mornings.
I learned much while I was at Ardmore. I learned to cook! I finally learned to navigate properly, and to time and distance. I learned to negotiate with the Scottish hills; winter is still harder there than anywhere else but now forboding rather than forbidding. I learned to run and to love running. I learned to love the peculiar life; the military routine, the chaps, the lethal doses of testosterone and endorphins in the air, being superfit, living out in the mountains. I learned to live within myself, through solitude, silence, storms. I learned that there is always more in you; climbing mountains with a full pack and a bunch of men who were determined to prove they could beat an instructor, I often had to dig deep, but there was always a little sliver of steel there somehow. I learned to teach, and to love teaching. I learned to lead, and to enjoy leading well. I learned by analysing others’ performance to closely monitor my own, I learned to spot the telling detail. I learned, above all, that anyone can do anything. Ridgway is extraordinary for his determination, his endurance and his dreams, but not necessarily for his talents. We could all do great things; it is just a case of wanting to enough. I can only hope that when I look back again in another fifteen years, I too will have done good and worthwhile things.

It’s more than 15 years now…MD FRCS PGCME, head of department, 500 cancers, E3, WI5, BE100, almost a finished advanced horse…not running much though- sorry John.

St Andrew’s University Sub Aqua Club went through a phase of great activity in the early 90’s. We had some great members and some good friends from Southport SAC with excellent kit, like boats that actually worked in rough weather. And we had some great adventures. We like to think that at that time we were at the cutting edge of adventurous sport diving. I’ve certainly never met anyone since who could better what we were doing at the time, and before the age of internet forums, word of mouth was the only certain means of communication. Some of the adventures were foolish, some ambitious, some would seen reckless to others, but my memory is that we were quite simply young, fearless and at the top of our game. I do remember hearing a complete stranger telling one of my stories to a mate in the pub, as if it had happened to him, which I guess is some measure of approbation. He did have the grace to look slightly sheepish when I had to tell him I didn’t remember him being there!
We were doing fast drift dives, deep dives, fast deep drift dives, and deep dives on underwater pinnacles that most will never have heard of. And we were doing them on air. We were all students, the kit for nitrox and trimix was quite simply beyond us at that point. Not so now, the boys have a mixing panel in their garage but I bowed out when the kit got too complicated and the emphasis changed to serious wreck diving. The West Coast of Scotland offered a wealth of opportunity for the intrepid dive team with a good RHIB and a willingness to burn gallons of petrol. PeteT’s Glen Uig Inn was the starting point for many a weekend’s frivolity. Muck and Eigg both have deep vertical walls guarding the entrance to their harbours, with a perfect current that takes you along the wall at your chosen depth and speed with no effort required, although it does make scalloping a bit more challenging. The mighty Bo Fascadale, a dramatic volcanic plug, 16-65m, rearing up from the seabed like a tower block covered in sea life, with a cave at 65m in one face that I never managed to find. Elizabeth Rock, the elusive companion, deeper, harder to find with an echo sounder and first generation GPS, before the descrambling, when the closest you got was a 50m margin of error. Glen Uig itself is an amazing community of musicians and poets, a tremendous pub where a ceilidh springs up whenever the wind turns. We took Dave, previously a champion piper, and nearly lost him there for ever. I can still hear the pipes swirling around the bay as we tinkered with the RHIB and Dave took himself off up the hill. To truly understand the magic of the Highland great-pipes, that is how they should be heard, unstinted, unfettered, full volume, echoing between sea and sky and precipice, calling the ancients to life, calling the tribes to war, calling the mountains themselves to song.
DaveA used to pop valium before dropping us in to the Grey Dog Race, Cuan Sound or Dorus Mhor, all roaring tidal races that we did faster and faster, racing along the sea bed, mostly alone, as the current took you and your buddy off in different directions, tumbling in the turbulence, swirling up as well down, the computer screeching alarms as the depth changed too quickly to calculate stops, watching your bubbles spinning around, up, down, the torch beam spinning in the murky green gloom, the adrenaline pumping until the sudden feeling of release when the current joined the open sea again and the run ended, and you had to work out which way up the light was, put up a marker buoy, start doing stops, flag or torch ready to be found by the boat, often over a mile from the start of the dive and still travelling at a few knots.

Dorus Mhor was the most serious, it just got deeper and deeper and the spit out at the end was from 40m into bottomless green murk, completely disorientated, swirling, panting, watching the air gauge going down with each uncontrolled gasping breath, watching the marker buoy go down and down before heading for the surface, and then doing the loneliest stops in the world, floating in mid water, counting the minutes, doing frantic useless sums, still drifting quickly further away from the boat, 20 minutes of stops, how will they find me if that buoy didn’t hit the surface, have I got enough air to do these stops or am I going to be fizzing on the surface waiting for the search team tomorrow? We did lose people occasionally!

One memorable occasion was the weekend Ken invited me to join the BSAC Advanced Instructors and Area Coaches on a fast drift diving weekend on Dave’s boat. Bearing in mind that this was our specialist subject at the time and went against everything BSAC taught! I was the only girl, was not an AI or an area coach!

Ken picked me up from a ball in St A’s at 4am and we drove across the country, me still in my dress and heels, planning to change on the pier to start the wind up in good style. Except when we got there Dave was sweating already and I snuck off around the corner, the gag just as likely to backfire. We inevitably lost one of the Advanced Instructors- he didn’t follow instructions, didn’t get his marker buoy up at the allotted time and so surfaced out of sight after doing all his stops. By that time he had gone a good mile or two, and it took us a couple of hours to find him. Dave didn’t swear often!

The SAUSAC favourite drift dive was the Falls of Lora, under the bridge where Loch Etive tumbles into the sea. Jam and I went there once to dive it on slack as a shore dive, only slack never happened, the Falls just turned around without stopping and we sat there for two or three hours waiting for the thing to slow down. Although it was still going full speed we got bored so we decided to jump in anyway-not the best run through I ever had but certainly the fastest! I used to love boat handling there, scooping the terrified St A’s novices out of the raging torrent after their first go at a proper drift dive!
Port Appin Pier on New Year’s Eve at midnight. Black as hell, vertical, bottomless. JM did 100m there one year after a fight with RA who officiously thought he was too drunk to get in the water. I did 72m, one night, the depth of the year I was born, taking care to lose my buddy at about 40m, carrying on down into the dark, fighting the narcs, keeping it together, true rapture of the deep, just like the Big Blue. Then the moment you always forget about, when you turn around from free fall position to fin for the surface and all the blood redistributes from your core to your legs and you go light headed and dizzy just at the moment when you most need to keep it together, inflate suit, start finning, regulate breathing, work hard but not too hard, beat gravity, beat free fall, beat momentum, beat nitrogen, swim and live.
An Chailleach, the pinnacle beneath the whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, the most beautiful and notorious tidal race of them all. In Gaelic, Chailleach means the hag or witch, and this infamous patch of water certainly inspires immense terror. The “un-navigable” race runs between Scarba and Jura, the standing waves reach 10m high, the whirlpool can be seen from a perch on the hillside of either island and underwater there is a sharp pinnacle at 30m. At the time, the only known dive on the pinnacle had been a navy diver who got swept off the top and down into the depths before being spat back up again and living to tell the tale. His depth gauge apocryphally read 200m, possibly the deepest bounce dive recorded on sub aqua kit. We thought this must be pressure effects, you surely couldn’t survive that depth, but the seabed does drop off one side to that depth, so who knows?
So started months of meticulous planning. Neap tides, unusually for this group that normally chased the fastest tides, the best neap tides of the year, a team of 12, all capable, all self sufficient, all self reliant, not so easy when the BSAC buddy is drummed into any budding diver like a mantra, all with computers, pony rigs, buoy, flag, torch, well versed in doing open water stops, all used to deep diving, going down an endless shot-line into the gloom without losing the plot. I wish I had made a list of the team on that first day, it was the most perfect day, and it is only in retrospect that I have come to realise how truly special it was and how perfect. Me, Jam, JM, DA, KA, KS, GK, MK,PH,AC—2 missing or were we only 10 divers? Dave chewing pills like gum as he drove us into the sound, listening to the roar of the standing waves at the other end, feeling the whirlpool catching and snagging the hull, feeling the inboard that had taken us everywhere strain against the force of the spiral, hearing it splutter occasionally, as we sounded for the pinnacle. The first cast with the shot line missed, the current too fast, having to haul the 40m of line back into the boat, all tense, the timings crucial. Let it go again, watch it catch, over again with the echo, 34m but right on the edge of the drop off, meaning we can’t pull it on the way down or it will come off. Kitting up, waiting for the buoys to surface at slack, still with the roar in your ears, still the boat pitching and tossing, it seems inconceivable that the tide will turn and the whirlpool stop. Some days it doesn’t, it simply reverses, the surface water and the deep water turning in opposite directions until the inexorable tide wins again. I remember sitting on the edge of the boat, heavy with kit, light with fear, staring death in the face. Not a certain death, not even a likely death, just one of the possible permutations of one of the ways the day might end. I may have faced more objective dangers since, but I have never since chosen to actively embrace them in the same way. But hey, 30 looked old in those days!
The timing was perfect, the whirlpool did stop, 40minutes of slack predicted, buoys on the surface at 30minutes please, chap and chapesses, and please no more than 10 minutes of stops, all to be back on the boat at 40minutes. Running down the shot line, letting it slide between finger and thumb, chasing Jam, always the quickest to the bottom, like a rat down a hole, the familiar blue to green to murk, then to glow as you switch the torch on, all so familiar yet so alien that day, everything heightened by pure adrenaline. The top of the pinnacle was amazing, swept absolutely clean by the force of the maelstrom, nothing grows on it, yet in the crack teems the most abundant, colourful, varied life I have seen anywhere in Scottish waters, in over 1000 dives. Jam and I floated over the edge, resisting the pull of the depths, not going for free fall today, just poking around, counting colours, marvelling at fish and squidgies and at the tranquillity that can be hidden beneath the turmoil above.
As we did a time check and started finning lazily back towards the surface of the pinnacle, we found an amazing rock cavern. Like an open air theatre, the size of a small room, roughly round, with a flat bottom, and walls about 15feet high. We lay on our backs on the floor of the cavern, torches playing over the walls, which were plastered with jewel anemones and nudibranchs, in colour coded patches like a paint card. I remember Jam’s eyes smiling through his mask, the little bubbles that come with giggles of pure glee. I think we both looked down at the same time and realised the floor of the cavern was made up of perfectly round smooth flat boulders. We looked up at the light above and both computed that there was only one force that could have polished those boulders to that shine, and got out of there quick!

Finning over the summit of the pinnacle, the current was just starting to tug impatiently at our fins. Buoy up, push up, take your leave, reluctantly, slowly, barely ascending, torch panning over the rock until the visibility ran out and the gloom won again. Hitting the surface, the boat on top of us, huge kerfuffle, up the ladder, in the corner in a heap, bottle off and all in, the boat powering away just as the roaring started again. Looking back at the standing waves, rearing up to full height almost instantly, just where we had been moment before.
The perfect day, for many reasons. A close-knit team had a wild dream, and achieved something that hadn’t been done before by civilian recreational divers. So as far as we know we were the first team to do a planned dive on the pinnacle of the Gulf of Corryvreckan. It’s certainly not common place now! The flawless execution of the plan- the timings were spot on, the tide calculations worked, the dive itself was amazing. We did go back, the others have been back since looking at a wreck off on one of the sides of the pinnacle, but nothing ever matched up to the pure perfection of that first dive. There is of course, finally, the whole thing about places of power.

There are only seven major whirlpools in the world. Were we really lying on the floor of the hole that had been formed by the vortex itself? I don’t know for sure, but it certainly could have been. Modern science has demystified so many things, as has the internet. On UK diving there is a perfect topo diagram of the underwater pinnacle and the boulder holes, but in my head the vivid fragmented impressions are more real and magical and still have a hold over me many years on. So now, I remember and cherish a little privileged minute in time when I rested in the centre of the maelstrom of An Chailleach and counted the colours.

I remember those miles of beach so clearly. The biting East Coast wind would cut through my forehead with the most intense searing pain. The dog and I used to run along the golden sand every morning, freezing and shivering and dancing in the waves, Zoë ripping the kelp to shreds in frenzies of joy. The first time I saw a Vettriano picture, it tugged at my soul with an intensity belied by the kitsch of the subject matter. It was the quality of the light that I recognised and yearned for again, the absolute translucence of the pure Northern air, the thin clear skies. Ridiculous pictures really, the fairy tale couple, the outlandish dinner party, and the butler holding the parasol for the couple dancing on the sand. Except that I have memories that mirror those images; sheltered beneath the castle walls, the French count (sorely missed, the world a more dreary place without your eccentricity) on May Day with his ancient gramophone, winding the antiquated horn covered handle to listen to scratchy jazz against the surf and the crackle of bonfires, dancing in a ball dress in the sand with my shoes in my hand, walking down the pier after a night on the town to be battered by the fiercest of waves and wind swept spray in a proper Scottish hoolie, aghast at the power and the ferocity of the water.

On other days we would go scuba diving along the outflow pipe, watching the crabs scurrying around with their purely organic fed bounty. I used to watch the ripped guy from my class (also RIP) bouldering on the ramparts that defined Castle Sands, poetry in motion, a dance that excited all the primeval instincts, an alpha male at the top of his game, beautiful, sculpted, sharpened muscles flowing as I memorised their names and the actions. When things weren’t so good with the Keep Britain Tidy man I used to climb around the corner of the castle ramparts, to howl at the wind and cry into the salty sea; from there the town faded and all that was left were the ancient walls and the indifferent waves.

I have a vast store of kinaesthetic memories, running along the Chariots of Fire beach, after the summer at Ridgway’s when running had, as the madman predicted, become a way of life, a necessity, a drug, without fail going that bit too far. It was always easy running away from town as the prevailing wind was at your back, and the shock and the effort and the pain of turning around and battling back home was a superb preparation for the pain of kicking to the line in all the races I never ran. Running became my meditation, the cruising absence seizures that kept me sane in those heady days of hedonism. I ran in the hail, the rain, but always the wind, and nearly always the sun, the liquid sun that would creep up over the expanse of treacherous mercurial sea and light up the magical towers in the mornings. Running past the Laird’s house, another imbecile man who was too keen on freedom, commoner and Laird, what fools we both were.
The beaches of St Andrews define so many of my memories.

The young South African, another tortured soul, idealistic as only a teenager can be, had run from his father, the mayor of apartheid, all the way from Johannesburg to London to Aberdeen. I don’t think the North Sea howled wild enough for him, used as he was to the freezing Atlantic, the cruising sharks and the monstrous surf of his homeland. I learned my lessons well that winter, about all kinds of betrayal, friends, lovers, beliefs, oneself. Maybe most of all, I learned about the power of dreams, and the power of freedom. He was a child of privilege, the English South African, the “selt poel” as Dennis used to call them, because they had one leg in England and one leg in SA and their dick dangling into the salty waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The young South African realised, possibly quite late in life that blacks should be free and equal and have the suffrage and he joined the ANC, an angry teenage rebel trying to change the world. I don’t think his father was a bastion of apartheid at all, but he was the mayor of a small coastal town near Jo’burg. I understood, reading between the lines, that the mayor felt the best way to change the country was from the inside, via the political route and the position he had been entrusted with. I never knew how deep the rift between the young South African and his father went, but he went travelling, as they all did and ended up in the house in London with Dennis Goldberg, the last true radical, the philosopher, the intellectual, the most humane man I ever met, and the wisest, who had finally come to believe that bombs as well as words were needed to free the black South Africans.
I remember the day the young rebel stopped stock still in the high street to watch me jaunt past, on my way home from work in the fancy dress shop, my twenty pounds salary burning a hole in my pocket. He came into the pub that night, by chance I presume although you never know but I preferred to think of it as fate. It was the week before I left for university. We had an intense week of passionate debate, fuelled by some of the strongest fags I had ever smoked, a truly intellectual affair. I was his intellectual sparring partner, a widely read coffee coloured girl with the words and the wit to argue my points. In our own way we were all discovering freedom, free thought, all those tortured middle class rebels all kicking off the traces of suburbia and running off around to change the world.

Intellectual doesn’t mean devoid of passion, as I found out screaming at the sea in rage the night I went to knock on my friend’s door because he hadn’t arrived off the train from Aberdeen that Friday. I remember walking through the West Sand dunes with him, wrestling with his conscience shortly after my so called best friend had seduced him, this inferno of a man who had followed me to Scotland for a glimpse of a different future, proving, to his chagrin, that no matter where you are and how high flown your principles are, it is the basest instincts that win in the end. He told me, that, like Clinton, they had never “had sex”, but by then I was already a little less gullible. The irony was that for all his talk of equality, the girl he fancied the most was an English rose. He had too much passion for St A’s, the small town with the narrow mind and the loosest of tongues and the mess he made was just irreparable and he ran away for keeps, first to the dour greeking granite of Aberdeen and the adrenaline of the oil fields; he trained as a paramedic and went offshore. Then he went home to Jo’burg to scoop up the injured and the underprivileged in the machete versions of the war against apartheid. I wonder if he ever sold out, bought the house, got the mortgage.
The beach always offered an escape from the latest reality, in a thousand different ways. Bless the Captain! The police girl and I used to hack his polo ponies out for miles, always well over an hour, all over Wormit and the hills beyond. We could never understand how he always happened to drive past in the Landy, miles from his nearest farming interest. They were as fit as fleas, those ponies! He boxed us down to the beach and we three rode as far as we could away from the town, not quite turning the corner to the Eden estuary and turned their heads and raced the wind back to town. Four miles long that beach is….we couldn’t have raced that far! And Cince the Argentine Criollo pony didn’t have a hope really, those massive quarters gave us a huge burst of speed over a hundred metres but no stamina, it was the blue racing blood in the thoroughbreds that won out and the Captain and the police girl beat us by miles. We carved perfect figures of eight on the sands, prize winning circles, flying changes, we stick and balled with a plastic beach ball, bolting up the beach for goal, but having to turn back as the wind caught the over large ball and stopped it in its tracks. The sand was perfect: you could stop and turn right on their haunches without a fear of a slip. Cince was always the best to stick and ball, nippy and neat and balanced, chasing the ball for you to tap into goal. All the while the watery April sun cleaned the air and the grey stone of the town glistened like the sea, the spires reaching up to greet the start of summer.
Stop and turn; the central move of polo….full out gallop, dead stop, wheel around, well on the haunches, fast as you like, strike off again always into full gallop, always on the correct lead or they will break a leg with the pressure of the take off. Hours of practice down the fence line, first one then the other, all on the neck rein, cowboy style and all in the weight from the back not the arms. Full out, full stop, don’t look down, look around as you spin around, then they will choose the leg, close your eyes, don’t think, again and again until it is instinct, until when the ball flies over your head it isn’t you turning the pony but simply your body, your extended body turning on a sixpence and haring back down the field to get the ball back.

That same year, working down in Ascot, I found a pony that would stop and turn so well you could tie the reins around her neck and show off with a gin in one hand and a fag in the other. Guillermo liked his horse so sharp that it would spin you off, you being the mere mortal English girl groom. “Again” and “again” he would shout, the fence posts coming down from five to three to two, until G-force won and the pony deposited you in a heap at the fence post. Then Guille would fall over laughing, pick me up, dust me off, cat leap into the stirrup and tap a ball off into the middle of the field. And I would hop onto PT and practice down the long side, watching the Argies spinning the ball in the air, the pony a part of them.

No matter where I lived in St Andrews, I always walked home along the beach last thing at night. I have enough memories of West Sands to keep me going for a barren century away from the sea. I cherish a different view now, of rolling hills and changing forests, always seen between a pair of neat black pointed ears but a sniff of salt or a trick of translucent light is enough to put me right back on the Fife coastline, leaning into the wind and dreaming of distant shores.

There are parts of the Scottish coastline that I know better than the back of my hand, both above and below water. The myriad days at sea were the greatest privilege and the wildest gifts experienced during those crazy diving days. The North Sea and the Atlantic in all their moods, serene, frenzied, flattened by the peculiar horizontal Scottish rain, howling and swirling, every journey an adventure. I was a land lubber, a city girl, the sea a late discovery, a vivid shifting backdrop to my changing growing years. The boats that piloted me through those turbulent times are like the chapters of that life.
First, the Clockwork Orange, St Andrews University Sub Aqua Club’s fibreglass dory. So foolishly named by some vain intellectual with no thought for the poor coastguard or the hapless soul who would have to make the weekly call, announcing plans, spelling the name in phonetics, ad nauseum, the chuckle of disbelief never far from the surface despite the formality of radio speak, impatience crackling over the air waves on the VHF. We seemed to talk to the coastguard pretty regularly those days, at the beginning and the end of the day, and occasionally half way through! The university minibus could barely tow her, the tiny trailer winch was worn out and retrieval was always a comic epic. She had a hull full of waterlogged foam, the least reliable outboard in the civilised world, and gung-ho inexperienced students flogging her out to May Island or the Breda in all the weather. She took a dozen divers and her kit easily, for space was never a problem in the huge hollow expanse gaping between the high fibreglass gunwales. She wouldn’t go up on the plane with more than four though, so chugging was usually the order of the day. There was no spare power to get you out of trouble and someone had to bail constantly. The engine broke down regularly, at which point everyone would have to paddle like demented neoprene Eskimos. She was a pig to get back into; I always had to hand everything in before finning like mad to clamber over the side and then still often needed landing like a fish, gasping for breath and safety, often easier when the sea was rough for the waves would just throw you in. Trying to retrieve the petrified novices out of the Falls of Lora was always a two person job, doing 3 point turns in Crail harbour for the boat handling exam more like taking an HGV test. She did us proud for many years though- I have one lovely photo taken from the Creran Bridge of the Orange flying through the Narrows, planing proud, a squad of grinning youth blowing in the breeze.
Through the Southport connection via RA and JM and a few kisses along the way, we got access to Southport Diver 1 and 2. Proper Offshore rigid hulled inflatables, the dogs cajones, the power ratio in our favour, engines that roared at the flick of switch, (a novelty in those days in cars and boats alike) and pushed the streamlined hulls along on their tails and both were light enough to retrieval with only a small army. I haven’t yet calculated how much petrol we burned in those days, how many trees I would have to plant to redress the balance, but those two boats took us all over the West Coasts of Scotland and Ireland, in good style. Southport Diver 2 was my favourite, the little boat, she turned on a sixpence, perfect for four divers and full adventure rigs, you could tow her with a car, then once on the water she was the perfect lady, a fast planing boat that even I could crawl back into wearing all my kit and then drive across the world.
JM’s own Sorcha was another fine RHIB, bought once he started work, a few years before the rest of us medics and scientists- ever the pragmatist, JM chose law and now has the biggest debts of us all, and will be the richest one day. Sorcha came secondhand, but looked neat and fair, the high Delta nose kept off the worst of the weather although it made the waves a bit harder to read- I dropped her off the top of a wave so sharply once that I broke DM’s nose, anaemic with his Crohn’s he could barely afford to lose a single red cell and there we were swimming in the stuff. And then of course the yellow pram, GB’s spring loaded little Avon with the genius canvas hood stretched over the bows for his son and wife to hide from the weather. Some days we were a small Armada, the interwoven wakes slicing through the navy green waves, each boat appearing and disappearing in turn as we dipped in and out of the swell.
I used to love the RHIB days. Often the dive was incidental. The whole perfect process of dropping your boat into the water, loading up and setting off on a bearing into the great wide ocean, roaring out into the wild unknown. I could drop you on any particular part of the wreck of the Liberty ship Breda on transits, show you the congars out on Dunstaffnage, take you to play with the seals off May Island, drop you into the Falls of Lora on flood tide and know where to wait for you to surface, bug eyed and spluttering, an instant away from oblivion. The best runs, the wildest days, surfing the Atlantic swells, learning life and tide and moon and memory; the patterns are etched in my brainstem.
I cherish sharp cinematic memories of the day AJ and I collected the monster loan RHIB from Uist. We left the slip at 7pm on a midsummer Scottish evening and drove up the West Coast, poking in and out of the islands to Oban, AJ and I taking turns throwing the boat around and laughing manically, standing the boat on its tail for fun, chucking buoys “man overboard” to catch each other out, as the mercury sea changed from caerulean to navy to jet and the sky never quite got dark. Skimming over the waves in the semi light, the phosphorescence lighting up our wake, was pure magic. The other best run was in Sorcha, from an isolated slip on the edge of Skye, a slip that I could find by road although the name is forgotten, out into the Little Minch, looking for a rock that broke the surface at low tide. GPS really is remarkable technology; we drove for 12 miles, to find a foot high iron spike marking a rock the size of a dining table that dropped off to 40m on all sides. The seals were already in residence but very friendly really, nosey and nibbling fins as we all dropped in to join them, the squidgies were amazing and the scallops huge. I boat-handled for second wave at complete peace with the world, dozing on the tubes in the sun, listening to bubbles and seal song.
There were other boats we knew and loved, DA’s Porpoise, PT’s fishing boat, another stout workhorse, no fancy toys but a monster inboard that pulled like a tractor, Captain Jim’s variety of live-aboard sheds that would only escape the clutches of the Falls of Lora on the right tide, leaving you on the pier at Oban at midnight after the pub had closed with no sign of him, shivering and cursing and resigned to sleeping in the car. There was the selection of wooden fishing Dories at Ridgways, each fitted with a pair of oars and a Seagull engine, no planing or roaring or racing there but you could fix the thing with a penknife and an elastic band, and often had to. I can’t think back to the last time I drove a boat now, though surely you never forget. I like to think that one day in my dotage I will fetch up on the shore of Loch Erribol, in the low-slung gas-lit crofthouse that the last of the ancient bachelor brothers died in, (the three of them having left a million in the bank with no surviving relative to gift it to). I will have a wooden Dory on a running mooring with a Seagull engine to pull my creels and fish for mackerel and dive for those enormous dinner plate scallops that AC and I lived on once for a week, and I will potter in and out of the enormously complicated inlets and skerries until I can’t remember any names any more….

Some friendships are based on words, on letters, on knowledge, on a turn of phrase, the choice of reading, the furious discussion over ideas or theories or ideals. Other friendships require different sustenance; the chance drinking partner, tuned into the familiar rhythm of the regulars in the bar, the life-strong friendship forged on the end of a rope, or from falling backwards over the side of a boat, bubbles racing the mess of flood tide, eyes wide, fingers round in a big OK, torch playing over the bottom of the alien underwater world.

There are intellectual sparring partners, action friends in constant motion, there are friendships forged through fire, ice, adversity, heartbreak. Our particular friendship has elements of all of these but was truly sealed in that visceral sweet spot between speakers, the booming bass reverberating through our ribs, at 120 beats per minute, arms in the air, smiling with strangers, in the happy clappy dance crazy warehouses of the 90s.

My favourite memory is the time I drove down South, to the crazy commuter town that lived for the wild, wild weekends. I pulled up outside your house and you grabbed me out of the car and tipped a glass of champagne straight down my throat. The quaint little house was already pounding, literally shaking with deep bass, you ran me a bath and washed my back, all the while administering the perfect cocktail of alcohol, nicotine and caffeine as we got dressed for the night. Standing in the queue for Clockwork Orange, surrounded by the beautiful people, I felt like a right Hicksville special. The bouncers were choosey but something about our motley crew must have shone with the devotion to dance and we were picked out and ushered through.

Then that moment, the best moment of the night, the moment I still crave in my dreams, when you step through the door and are stopped in your tracks by the wall of heat and light and music, pulsing so loud that it’s palpable. The flashing lights and the smiles and the shapes all coalesce into one enormous adrenaline rush as you step out onto the floor, morphing into the tribe, hips starting, feet sliding, smile growing, until you feel the beat in your heart and that little background buzz turns into a full on high, just endorphins and anticipation, and your hands go up for sheer joy.

You danced on the podium and the dragon on your back, the amazing dragon, based on the line drawings from the Hobbit, the beautiful greys and blacks and blues, danced with the sway of your hips. There was our motley crowd, the gambler, the gardener, the geek, open-mouthed, eyes wide, arms waving, following the dragon, they were our tribe, our family, and our soul mates. House music took us around the country; Clockwork at theCross, the Honeycomb, Cream at Nation, Renaissance, the Hacienda, Heaven at the Arches, Sex at Garlands, but for me it was always back to Cream. Dance was our church, where we found redemption and release from the mundane confines of daily life, breaking out from the gilded cage.

I don’t go out dancing often any more, but there are other sorts of hedonism, many other ways of recapturing that bliss. The body is an instrument, use it every way you can, and when you tune it and play it and learn to exalt in it, life can no longer grind you down.

Rock dancing, the perfection of pulling through a move that looked implausible, as feet push and arms strain and tendons scream and all the while the heart is slow and the breathing centred, as you pull down and live again.

Snow dancing, putting down a perfect set of tracks in powder, knees popping, thighs burning, floating on the edge of control.

Cloud dancing, skipping along Crib Goch on an inverted winter’s day, the horseshoe spread before you, smoke from friends houses tangy in the air.

Or the nearest feeling, on those rare days when running is easy, when legs and heart and arms and lungs all pump in time, when the ground falls away and trees glide past, when effort becomes meditation and every fibre of your being resonates with your heartbeat, that is the closest feeling to dancing.

And in those moments of hedonistic bliss, I can still catch your eye, thousands of miles away across the world, I feel your smile as the tempo rises higher and we step it up a beat, and I am once again dancing with the dragon girl.

copyright Dec 2009

For Annie- I wrote this for you in my head yesterday, yomping over Elidir Fawr with the whole of Wales spread out beneath my feet….. I miss you sweetie!!!

Chris has a way of looking up at you, her head cocked to one side, eyes partly hidden by the uncontrollable fringe, and perfect teeth shining in a cheeky smile, that invariably means adventure, often in glorious weather and always in good spirit. I do so hope that wicked grin will continue to get me into trouble and out of it again for many years to come!

The first ski touring trip to Chamonix was a revelation. The joy of being on skis again, combined with panic and sheer bliss when you step over the col to the other side of the mountain and leave all the ants on the piste in their safe controlled world and we in our little band of friends found ourselves alone amongst the giant hills, coldly beautiful in their winter raiment, familiar and yet strangely forboding. These were not the friendly hills of Chamrousse, curves learnt and drawn as a child, on ski and on foot, not the playground where I had discovered my love of air beneath your feet; these were the giants of mountaineering legend, where champions and heroes had trodden and faltered and not all had escaped from the winter vault.

Skinning uphill brought a familiar pain, remembered from summer at Ridgways, lungs bursting, legs burning, count the steps, suck for breath, a pain that focussed and purified, a kind of redemption, the view from the summit the salvation and release. Learning that there really are a hundred types of snow, off the packed groomed piste, that footing could change with every hollow and nuance of terrain: there were moments of floating glorious bliss, but there was also much fighting, for ground, for turns, for verticality. I fell in love, with the steeps, with the ever changing views, with the promise of adventure around every corner. I vowed to get stronger, better, faster, to be more worthy of the challenges surrounding us.

It was meant to be a skiing trip. I had brought collapsible walking crampons, a couple of short screws for crevasse rescue, an antique Vertige axe, donated to the Frodsham gear store by Deano before he left for NZ. I was feeling the love, enjoying the dance, I hadn’t even thought about ice. Until Chris turned to me one evening, guide book in one hand, wine glass in the other, with her particularly wicked grin
“Do you fancy a route?”
What a question! There I was, completely intimidated by the vastness and wildness of the Alps, reading about snow and weather and slope angles and avalanches, wondering if I could haul my sorry ass out of a crevasse if I missed a turn due to the difficulties of a whole new variety of snow, and Chris effortlessly upped the ante! I am sometimes stronger than Chris on rock, bolder, braver, foolish above gear, and in those days before my Achilles objected to road running I was possibly as fast and as fit, but on skis she whoops my arse consistently, and she also excels at suffering. I had done one ice route on Aonach Mor, eventually, after sliding about 300m after losing my footing popping through the cornice, and a week of water ice in Le Grave. I had loved the water ice, I was pretty strong, bold although crap at placing screws, and I loved the fact you could make your own holds on this weirdest and most ephemeral of media, but the thought of sneaking up to one of these mountains and daring to scratch at its sides, well that psyched me out completely. There was only one answer
“What you thinking of? Oh and I’ll need to scrounge some gear!”
By one of those strange twists of fate, Andy had broken his leg the day before, winding through the trees on the way down to le Buet, the icy runnels, hairpins and his complete lack of skiing ability had got the better of him. He had thoughtfully brought his brand new technical ice tools on holiday with him. We mustered a selection of 8 screws from the assorted group, and Steve and Rob were keen to do a climb too. The objective was the Chere Couloir, a “modern” ice route on the Tacul. We packed sacs, counted gear, checked the weather, couldn’t get online to book the first pherique, didn’t have enough quickdraws, started splitting slings, the constant blur of activity serving to drown out the clatter of butterflies wings churning in the pit of my stomach. Food was impossible that night, I felt too sick, a little wine eased the nerves but didn’t bring sleep until the early hours, just enough to make the alarm the worst form of torture. Porridge for breakfast, forcing it down for fuel, tasteless like chalk, then the inevitable faffing that always occurs when Chris and I team up. We are never first out of the gate, needing another coffee, we were late for first pherique but we somehow scrambled into the third.

You could cut the atmosphere with a knife in that bin. There were nervous piste skiers off for their day out on the Vallee Blanche, unfamiliar harnesses cramping their stylish ski suits, pedestrian tourists terrified by the exposure, as the cabin clunked and swung and swayed through the stanchions. And then us, toughing it out, laughing and joking, the piste bashers and the lift men always have a smile for girls with axes, flirting and grinning and waving us through, to the best spot, the best view, grabbing skis when juggling sacs and skis in the hustle and bustle of tall jacketed padded men all got too confusing. I still get off on the glint in their eyes, these hardened macho men never fail to be taken in by the novelty of mountain girls with gear, I am that shallow that I love that moment when they clock you, check you out and wave you through….and hey, it saves queuing!

The cold at the top, the jostling for the ridge, crampons on, skis on sac, race down the ropes, then skis on to race down the slope, slightly sobered by the first big crevasse that sits on the convexity off to the left of the descent, eying up mountains, features, the Gervasutti frowning at us, and then the first view of the Tacul, the triangle acting like a sun clock, reminding us we were already late. The weather as perfect as promised, the game was on! The skin across the bowl to the base of the route was hell. My altimeter kicks in at about 2700m, it was raving hot in the sun, we were late, we were racing other parties, we hadn’t eaten enough, hadn’t drank enough, weren’t strong enough, didn’t have enough gear, must be mad, must pack in the fags…the voices in my head were doing overtime. I plodded on, mind over matter, will over won’t, one foot in front of the other, still not very efficient at skinning, but very good at suffering in silence and counting steps, keep moving, you always get there. I hoped that once I was climbing, the pain would recede. Steve and Rob so far ahead of us now that their gallant promise to look out for us was as useless as we wanted it to be- this was our day, our adventure.
Chris led off. I was still trying to remember how to breathe without vomiting, from fear and anticipation. There were parties ahead of us but they were reasonably tidy, the ice didn’t seem to be raining down. Chris led like a fiend, the nerves that sometimes afflict her on trad routes don’t seem to apply when she’s swinging axes and kicking for joy. I remember a little groove on the first pitch, bridging out, points scraping though thin ice, no purchase, hooking and torquing, short screws, not where you wanted them, nothing like the fat water ice I had learned on the year before. The discovery of bolts at the belay, not mentioned in our guide, were both a relief and a betrayal, the route immediately less serious, retreat an easy option, the wilderness diminished by the loops of tat; others had been and we knew where we were going. Setting off on the second pitch, the glint of metal and the red knot of tat clearly visible 60m of clean ice above, my nerves vanished and I started to enjoy myself. Climbing in touring boots surprisingly easy, Andy’s crampons were lighter than mine but the boots rigid enough a platform to make up for the difference. His axes were unfamiliar, weighted entirely differently, they needed a strong swing, unlike my Quarks which swing themselves, I cursed his homemade leashes, just a crab through the eye of the axe. In those days I had to start screws off with both hands (I still do mostly) so I didn’t put many in! The amazing artificial rhythm of ice bashing, thunk thunk, pull, kick kick, breathe, thunk thunk, pull, kick kick, breathe, breathing suddenly coming easier now there were four working limbs involved, the spectacular views of familiar faces unfolding on either side. I had never expected to meet these mountains in the flesh, at the sharp end, from a height, I had always thought I would crawl beneath them like the ants, deferent, worshipful, bent at the knee at the altar of my gods, I had never thought to have the temerity to penetrate their icy defences. With each swing of my axe I felt my confidence grow, we would be allowed to prevail, just for today, just as a rare gift, these mountain gods had chosen to smile on us today.
Swinging leads, swapping smiles, cold in the couloir but with the whole world lit up by the spring sun, we picked our way ever upwards. Slow but sure, the angle easing, the ice improving, time was ticking away but we were living the dream.

Checking our watches at the top of the runnel, we abandoned all thoughts of a Tacul summit bid and chose to ab the route. Rob and Steve had waited for us at the bottom, there wasn’t enough snow to ski to Cham and we were going to miss the train. Flush with success, in the days when the exchange rate was in our favour, we decided to head for the Cosmiques, for dinner and wine and a leisurely ski down the Vallee Blanche in the morning. None of us had done it before and we wanted to make the most of it. Swimming up the snow slope to the hut was purgatory immediately ameliorated by the carafe of vin rouge that Steve had waiting on the balcony. As we watched the sunset light up our route, Chris’ phone rang. It was Bryan, left behind at work, usually the least spontaneous man in the world, he had decided to join Chris in Chamonix as a surprise! Only one problem, we were up and he was down, funny in retrospect, fully hilarious then…I don’t think he has ever done anything off the cuff since!!

Chris decided to get first bin down to meet him, and then Steve decided not to ski the VB, another who couldn’t ski yet then, this was unusually cautious and probably wise. When we had skinned up to the Leschaux hut to show Sally the area where Mal, her dad, had been killed, Steve had left a perfect trail of herringbone ‘pieds canards’ up to the hut! Which left me and Rob, whom at that stage I had hardly spoken to, and certainly didn’t know, to ski down together. We packed the sacs again, offloading as much of the hardware as Steve could carry to the telepherique; as he is awesomely strong on his uphill legs, this was nearly all of it….have I thanked you enough over the years Mr Grove?

Rob and I became friends on that magical morning, friends in the sense that only good fortune and shared adventure can bring about. We left the hut at first light and skied the VB as the sun came up to greet us, lighting each layer in sequence, setting the granite spires ablaze, warming our backs but never overtaking us, as we skied down on perfect spring snow. The absolute silence was overwhelming, we didn’t share our enchanted morning with a single other living soul, not even the choughs were up so early. We took our time, revelling in the experience, ticking off the stages slowly, cautiously, carefully, step turns on the Geant slopes, the crevasses ‘non bien bouches’, the consequences of a slip nagging at our lonely shoulders, our mutual responsibility along with the weight of the sacs pulling us off balance. The final straight, gliding down beneath the Dru, looking back at the Shroud and the Whymper, they’ve been climbed by a girl, I wonder .…could I, should I, what a route to dream of ?
Skipping up the steps to Montenvers, ransacking the sacs for emergency stashes for breakfast in the sun, dozing the hour away waiting for the train to start, the enchantment has never receded. If I hold my breath I can still put myself back there, afoot of the smiling giants, listening to the roaring silence, eyes feasting on the cathedral of dreams.

Copyright Dec 2009