Back onto the radar screen briefly ...

[fivemack]

Had a nice few days; up to Nottingham Saturday to see Chris, Dan, Chiara, and over the course of two vast evening meals most of my Nottingham friends turning up to visit. We didn't get to the Peaks, but I got to fly a remote-controlled plane belonging to Chris's friend Leonardo; and whilst it did drop out of sight behind the trees and take half an hour to be rediscovered, total damage was the displacement of one small wooden shim.

Then to Cardiff to see papersky and zorinth at Papersky's aunt's house; good food and fine conversation, and on Tuesday a lovely trip up to Castell Carreg Cennen and then across the Brecon Beacons, the kinds of gently-undulating mountains that make you want to get out and run up to the ridge, were my body not so eloquent in arguing against. We got out, but I have not the mountain-goat balance of zorinth so we didn't get up to the ridge.

This morning we went to the bizarre Castell Coch near Cardiff before I got on the train home. It's an amazing piece of work, with the most superb proto-Art Nouveau wall-paintings; stencilling on all the unpainted walls of a sort I'd only seen in major Eastern European cathedrals before.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Your discussion of not-ridge-climbing reminds me of when a friend took me hiking outside of Los Angeles. What one needs for such climbs is three legs, i.e. a walking stick. Bizarrely enough, when I found myself wishing for a walking stick, that was the first time it over occurred to me that people carried them for practical reasons, or why they're called walking sticks!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Going over the same ground as fivemack yesterday, I found mine a great help. But what you really need for ridges like that is balance. zorinth can run along the paths, and I could when I had two good legs, I have a kinetic memory of doing it -- and I still know where all the paths are. Sheeptracks do not move much in a mere twenty-five years. But now I walk slowly and am glad of a third leg as support, and sit on a rock while more energetic people run on.

When they get nanotech working properly, I'll get a tent about the size of a credit card and a computer that folds up like a rain-hat and put them into denim bag and I'll go up there in in my newly adjusted fit body with good legs and eat wimberries and look up at the stars and email my friends who live up among them.