What I've Learnt

Old words from a dead magazine

Around ten years ago, someone from Rock & Ice, a now-dead magazine, asked me to submit some answers to their regular ‘What I’ve Learnt’ series, which, although based on a tired theme, seemed to elicit some great and insightful writing, probably as they seemed to pick over the hill climbers, who just said it how it was. I was searching for this series online, as I wanted to get the author of The Beyond’s foreword to write something in the same vein, but found they’d all been scrubbed. It seemed that Outside, who bought R&I, appeared to have just tossed it away (like Mega Corp’s often seem to do). The only one I could find was my own, which I thought I’d share here, as I think there is some good stuff in here that I really don’t think I thought that much about at that time.

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Not Your Man

If you want a filtered, branded climber, I’m not your man. I can’t supply the Instagram snapshot that rules these days — all pressed and clean, sending cool projects, yoga in the meadow, mock-Buddhist karmic bullshit, and snappy quotes laid over pictures of waterfalls or puppies. If that’s what you want, I’m not your man.

Wanking

Climbing is like masturbation. It’s fun to do, but no one wants to hear about it. That’s how I approach it. It’s personal, and I find little of interest in writing or talking about it. So if you read on, don’t expect much of the C-word. For me, climbing is richer than crimps and pull-ups.

Sex

Everything in life is about sex except sex. The same applies to climbing. For me, it’s complicated, and long gone are the halcyon days of first love.

In the Clouds

I was high for much of my childhood — ‘my head in the clouds,’ as my mum said — living in a block of flats in a run-down northern city after my parents divorced. Hull had made its fortune from cod and from killing whales, both in decline in 70s Britain. My mountains and wilderness were bombed-out buildings, rusty cranes and bridges, the docks we swam in. There I learned the art of the daredevil, skills I later carried to Antarctica, Alaska, Patagonia, and Greenland. Poverty and necessity gave me an edge others lacked.

Suicide

They say darkness separates the super-elite from the elite, that you need something bad in the mix to push further. I don’t think much of anything was ever achieved by a happy, balanced person — why bother when you have bliss, apart from yoga on Malibu beach? The previous tenant of our flat had hanged himself on the stairs. That death haunted my childhood, too much for a sensitive kid. Rope, gravity, death, and suicide were part of my foundation.

Beholding

‘You’re too poor to have principles,’ someone once told my mum. She said, ‘No one’s that poor.’ That stuck, and maybe held me back. I never wanted to sell out, happy not to be Bear Grylls. For most of my life I’ve avoided sponsorship or shabby money-making, preferring to work for my supper, not beholden to many. Besides, the more you earn, the less you climb.

Hard

Climbing harder is easy. There’s an industry built around telling you it’s not. All you need is to climb three times a week, stretch, stop fearing falls, eat and sleep well, keep a healthy weight, and find a partner who’s got your back. If YouTube or Rock & Ice don’t cut it, buy a ‘how to climb dead hard’ book, or a yoga mat.

Wild Animal

Climbing is a wild animal. Fun and playful, until you turn your back. Then it chews your head off.

Back

Never turn your back on yourself. Be honest. Be who you are, not who you think people want you to be.

Expectations

People usually have low expectations of speakers. Don’t disappoint.

Burnt

Love is a fire. It can start with a spark, rage, warm, or burn so hot you think you’ll never be cold again. But never forget it can turn into a bonfire of teeth, limbs, laughter, a forest of hope feeding the flames, until there’s nothing left but ash. Love can burn your world to the ground.

Love

Never assume those you love know it. Tell them. Because one day they may be gone. We’re brave people — hang off cliffs, crap into paper bags without a blush — yet sometimes we can’t even text: If I had to choose between breathing and you, I could hold my breath forever.

Leaving

Never mistake anger for fear. When someone lashes out as you leave, it isn’t anger at your going — it’s fear you won’t come back.

Reality

A doesn’t always follow B. There’s a gap, a space in between. In that space you can weigh past, present, future. Why start at A, not X or G? Why does B follow? I was never good at the alphabet, maybe that’s why I don’t follow the usual paths of thought laid out by school, parents, the media. My politics and ideas are ambiguous — to me and to others. That’s how we should be as writers, because nothing is static.

Lead

When instinct gives you an answer, ask why. Instinct is just the sum of what you’ve been bred to believe. Follow it and you take shortcuts, often to false truths. We surround ourselves with like-minded people, never challenging what we believe, demonising those who don’t. Reality is too complex for simple answers. If you call yourself liberal, you’re half wrong. Right-wing? Half wrong too. Our brains, swamped with noise, likes, comments, opinions, are just shortcuts reinforcing unreality. Breaking out means seeing through the eyes of those you hate — the scared cop with a gun, the addict breaking into your house, the racist torching a church, the pirate, your mum, your dad. Do this long enough and you’re a nomad in your own head, with no safe harbour, no fixed belief, hearing the world all at once. That place is as scary as any Patagonian spire, but necessary if you want to know what you are — even if the answer is nothing at all. We are irrelevant. Hard to accept, which is why we cling to God, phone-ins, likes, comments.

Dying

You never hear the one that gets you. But when you think you’re about to die, do you know what it feels like? Not anger, not despair. Just deep disappointment — like waking from the greatest dream you ever had, only in reverse.

Life

Live life on your own terms. Be selfish enough to find what makes you happy, because if you’re selfless and miserable you’re no good to anyone — just another martyr. The only rule is that your selfishness mustn’t rob happiness from anyone else. That’s the balance of life.

Fucking Up

You’re shaped more by your fuck-ups than your triumphs. Triumphs gather dust. Mistakes lead somewhere. Yes, sometimes you’ll feel crushed in the cogs of life, but at least the cogs are turning.

Madness

I found myself out of rope, thinking I’d reached the end, talking once again about climbing, life in ashes — because of love and climbing, I told myself, but really because of me. Later, in a pub after some climbing talk, a young woman sat beside me, small talk about crimps and jams and routes I didn’t know, but her words felt honest, light, full of hope. As she spoke, the vice on my chest eased a little. I found myself listening, not thinking. Do you have a broken heart? I asked. She said, yes.

V

And so it goes. I sit at a picnic table in Camp 4 with her, who — like climbing — has shown me another way to live, a life not so dark and twisted. Together, maybe, we could have that unfiltered Instagram reality — without the yoga. I know I’m not easy to love. High risk, drawn to the darkest drums, self-regarding, always wanting more. But I’m an artist, dude. And brave enough to tell her there, chalk still on our hands: for all the good and bad that climbing has brought me, all the pain and sacrifice and joy, if there was some greater purpose to it all, it was to lead me here, to you.