Chew

Extract from 1001 Mountain Tips, Tricks and Thoughts

Sorry about the near radio silence on Substack of late, I’ve been deep into a new book, and it’s been sucking up all my time. There are a lot of climbs, where even before you’ve finished, you’re thinking about the next, and writing books is the same. It’s like a flywheel; it takes more effort to get going than to continue to go, and it’s better to take that energy from one thing to the next. By the time I finished the 3rd edition of Me, Myself & I, I had several other books mapped out or drafted or to finish (like the Bear Pit), and the process is to begin several books at once and see which one sticks, or gets its teeth into you. Finishing a novel proved to be too hard when juggling kids, as it felt like you had to immerse yourself in it entirely, from morning till night, and every day, not in little windows of time, a day here, a morning there. I suppose that’s the difference between being a technical writer and an artist. Real things, rather than made-up people, are much easier to pick up and put down. Another project I started, and even got forward written, was for ‘Lift’, the hauling cousin of ‘Down’, covering all hauling-related techniques, from big wall to self-rescue. This got to the draft stage, where I had all the parts mapped out. But it didn’t bite. Then I came over to Spain to solo a wall and sort of ended up here, but without my computer, just my wife’s iPad, making technical writing impossible or drawing illustrations (I thought I’d leave my computer behind, as it tends to always be speaking to me, calling me, and I thought this might remind me who’s boss, plus, it’s broken and I’m sick of broken computers). And so I needed a project I could work on on an iPad and could fit in with a stop-and-go life (my wife and kids invited themselves to Spain), and so, although it was not something I’d thought about as a future book, I created a spreadsheet I titled ‘1001 climbing Tips More’ and started writing.

I started writing 1001 Climbing Tips around 2011, I think, partly as an exercise, after I saw a Kindle called 100 Climbing Tips, and I thought, “I could write 1000 tips!” and I did 100 a day for 10 days. I made a Kindle version, stuck it on Amazon, and forgot about it. Looking back, I don’t think the book was even edited; I just spell-checked it; in fact, I never even read it. I don’t think many people bought it, and it was really just written to pass the time, as I was going through an odd phase in my life where I couldn’t get off the couch (people probably thought I was up a mountain, but I wasn’t, I was on the couch). A few years later, John Barton at Vertebrate Publishing asked me if I had any books they could publish, and I said, “Actually, I wrote this book, 1001 Climbing Tips; you could publish that?”. And they did, and did a great job, and the book sold well (they actually discovered there were 1005 tips) and ended up being translated into several languages, even Korean! But, once I eventually got off that couch (some might have thought themselves clinically depressed, but I’d just say I was organically fallow), I ended up doing more climbing and trips post 1001 Tips than I had in the previous forty years.

One funny story that highlights my relationship with 1001 Tips was when it won the Best Guidebook award in Banff, probably around 2017, and I was given a copy to carry on stage when accepting my award. I opened the book and started reading. I had the privilege of reading my own award-winning book like someone who’d never read it before because I hadn’t. I guess that’s what they call fool’s luck? I found some tips funny, some tips useful, and some tips daft or wrong (Paul Verhoeven was not Danish!), and I wondered how I’d write such a book if I wrote it again, knowing I never would.

Fast forward to 2025, and that’s what I’ve been doing. It started as ‘1001 Climbing Tips More’, but after writing the first 500 over a month, I decided to switch it to ‘1001 Mountain Tips, Tricks and Thoughts’, thinking the book could be written for a broader readership (by broad, I mean I could make more money from it), alpinists, mountaineers, walkers, soldiers, anyone who goes into wild places. What do people think?

Being a pretty eclectic person, this book will be an eclectic book, and the things it covers are more a reflection of me and my climbing life than a dry study of mountaineering. Like the first book, it's less formulaic, like 'The Best 1000 Songs ever written', but more like a Star Ship Troopers brain bug sucked out my mind and deposited it on the page, less thought map, more Rorschach test. In between all the stuff you'd expect in a book like this, like how to stop your goggles steaming up, baking bread in a pan, or surviving an open bivvy with a tarp and a candle, there's stuff about what to do if you lose your hire car keys, fighting off wild animals, and the amount of food Roman soldiers were mandated to carry (17).

To give you a taste of what to expect, here’s a snippet from the Survival section.

Tip: 358

When I was a kid, I was often given out-of-date British army rations by my dad, who was in the RAF. These were far from lightweight, as nothing was dehydrated and ‘just add water’; it had the water in it still: tins of chicken curry or solid blocks of ‘bacon’ or sponge pudding, even tins of dry rice (note: a tin of rice is far more than any camping pan could ever hold, or stomach). The cardboard box said there was enough for 24 hours, and if my dad was going to send me off into the hills by myself, he’d just give me a box or two and off I’d go.

I worked with an ex-Para in London in the 90s who told me they’d empty all the contents of the ration box into a heavy-duty plastic bag, like the sponge pudding and curry and biscuits and jam, etc, and put it inside their jackets as they marched along, so their own body heat warmed it up, meaning there was no cooking needed. Yummy.

The best part of the ration was the chocolate, something very British, like a packet of Rolos, which I’d have gobbled up Charlie Bucket style within an hour of setting off.

Amongst all the tins and packets, there were extra things, like matches, toilet paper, a can opener, and a small square packet of chewing gum.

I’ve never been a big fan of chewing gum, probably due to watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and was more of a sweet person (Cola Cubes or Chocolate Limes), but I’d eat it, as I’d already eaten my Rolos, plus the chewing gum was sugar-coated, spitting it out once the sweetness had gone.

It always puzzled me why a 24-hour ration would have chewing gum in it. Chocolate or dextrose tablets made sense, or amphetamines, but chewing gum? These were British army rations, not for the Yanks. Then one day, I was reading a book about the British fighting in the trenches in World War I, as I was trying to work out how they avoided hypothermia when wet for weeks on end (the answer was wool, and lots of it, as well as being fucking hard), when I read a small aside, how soldiers where giving chewing gum before going ‘over the top’, as this reduced stress.

It seemed odd to me, and at first, I put it down to this being some oddity of its time, like wearing Pith helmets to stop the rays of the sun from penetrating the skull or giving cocaine as a cure for impotence. But the more I looked into it; it seemed like it was one of those things people did in the past out of instinct that we laugh at, like burning rosemary to purify the air, that turns out to actually work; things we’d forgotten why we did it, and that modern science later re-discovers and re-figures out (a “told you so” moment). It appears that by giving someone a stick of sweet chewing gun, you immediately create a positive mental response in the brain, a little reward, but then, as you chew, you also reduce the production of the stress hormone cortisol and lower anxiety. How, why, I don’t know, go read a paper on it.

Chewing gum also increases saliva production (like sucking on a pebble does), with also reduces thirst.

But is all this true? Well, when you consider that Roman soldiers 2000 years ago also chewed tree gum on long marches to stop feeling thirsty, maybe they also did so in order to be less stressed about where they were heading. (I doubt the Romans even considered modern concepts like anxiety).

Wanting to test this out for myself, I started to always carry chewing gum in my pack as part of my emergency snacks, and I found that as soon as I broke it out, took it myself and started to chew, or gave it to another person, things perked up. Things didn’t seem so bad.

In relation to fear and anxiety, when I started climbing in Tuolumne meadows, which is world renowned for having scary run-out slab climbs, where you might go twenty metres without a single piece of protection, I started to eat gum when climbing. It seemed to work and soon became part of my checklist before I left the ground, but I also knew it could all be in my head. So, I used my wife as a guinea pig and started to offer her some chewing gum before she set off on her leads. I never told her about the British Tommy in his trench or Roman legionnaires marching towards the Persians, that it should make her braver; I just said, “Do you want some gum?”

Some days, I’d intentionally leave my gum in the car and we’d climb gumless or some A-B testing.

After a few weeks of climbing scary routes, Vanessa said me one day, “you know this gum, it seems to really help me not to get as scared”. She then said how she knew some old, bold Irish climber who also always ate gum when climbing, and wondered if this was why.

Maybe gum is like rolling a cigarette: it’s not the cigarette; it’s rolling that counts, the stopping for a moment. The same applies to “The Brew”; it’s not the tea, it’s the stopping to make it. So, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, maybe it works for some and not others, but a little box of chewing gum weighs almost nothing, so what’s the harm?

Notes: Try and find the little packs of suger coated gum in tablet form, with 4 pieces in a packet, and store in two tiny Ziplock to avoid it turning to sludge.