Part of the world

A few people have asked why I stopped taking money from my paid subscribers, which seems counterproductive to the Kirkpatrick bank balance, especially with another baby on the way. So I thought I should explain myself (it's not you, it's me, by which I mean, it's you).

I once read about some famous Russian author, maybe Dostoevsky, who would take his money and gamble it all away on achieving any degree of wealth and security. One reading of this is that he was just another incorrigible gambler, but being a writer, he masked his addiction with fancy words. A more poetic reading is that the more you have, the less you can be arsed (call that Yorkshire poetry), that no one ever does their best work without the wolves at the door, or if not wolfs, at least an empty fridge. This isn't why I stopped taking money from paid subscribers, although it's something I think about a lot; just a reminder of the Trap.

Gone are my champagne and ashes days, where you burn yourself and write about what you see in the flames. I'm passed that. Now I'm at the phase of life where the biggest threat to creativity and production, that slow decline into gardening, bird watching and finally, painting in watercolours.

The main reason for stopping payments is that it could affect what I choose to write about, as it forces me to write about what I think people will read, to be a dreaded populist, not what I feel like writing about; it makes me stay in my lane. To be bound up in the business of money, to see it appear each month just like that was nice, it was comforting in my advanced age, but as with all things comforting, it was also binding.

A while ago, I published a piece about the wokification of our climbing institutions, not the kind of thing you'd not read anywhere else, especially in mainstream climbing media. It was something I felt compelled to write not out of anger or some low-brow bigotry, but out of love, that identity politics was betraying the principles that make what we do unique, that brings such disparate people together irrespective of age, class, sex, income, ability, race, gender. I'd have loved some climbing journalist to write it, like Ed Douglas, to dig into how our institutions seem to have stopped serving us, but now view us as serving them, that we're at their disposable for the call up for this revolution or that, that it's their job to educate, or re-educate us. I suppose I've been on this road for a while and wondered why the things we love can appear to change overnight, adopt new words and irrational points of view, begin to lecture, harangue and abuse us, and debase the very thing they are meant to represent. I've seen how quickly trust turns to betrayal, and how the thing you love most of all becomes the thing you hate more than anything. If you study the culture you'll see it played out everywhere, in fan culture most of all. Look how Star Wars, Dr Who, and Lord of the Ring fans have become radicalised by things that seem so unimportant to us, and consider how they would view a bolt placed on Stanage. As with the fans, you often get the impression, at least as an old white man (who believes he's been in service to his 'tribe' all his life), that our institutions would like to just dissolve the outdoor communities (climbers, bikers, walkers, paddlers), and replace us with people more aligned with them (shout out to Bertolt Brecht for that idea).

When I wrote this piece, which garnered more attention and comments than anything else I'd written, probably because I was saying the silent part out loud, I lost 50% drop in paid subscribers. I fully understand why, as just as I hate ideology being injected into the things I love, people don't want anti-ideology (which is a kind of ideology) injected into this.

When you see your income from something cut in half the automatic reaction is to never do that again, and hope you can win people back, by being a good boy, by sticking to what you know about (even though I'd say I know a great deal about this, and the underlying drivers, which about conditional funding, both by business and government). But that's not who I am. I'd like to be that person, rather than 'that guy', but when it comes to the crunch, I seem only to be able "to play the man I am", ignorant, backward, stubborn, inflexible, imperfect.

We live in a coercive age, where the few who are beyond the reach of behavioural science or the latest update still find themselves dumb, the things they want to say, that make their heads fit to explode, impossible to get out. And then there are those who are not, who don't even know they're just an instrument, armed to punish anyone who drifts or drops out of line (like everyone, I'm a bit of both).

The reason I stopped taking money is I don't want to just write stuff about ropes and karabiners, even though that pays the bills, I'd rather just feel free to write what I want to write, and not care what people might say or do, that people are free to come or go. Most of all, it's about being able to express what feels true to yourself, not what makes you richer, to not be restricted to, or censored by, the popular, assigned and authorised truths. After all, didn't Merilin tell us that truth - or at least your reading of it - is the greatest virtue, because when a man lies he murders a part of the world, or if not that, then at least part of yourself?