High Infatuation

I've just finished reading Steph Davis' autobiography (High Infatuation: A Climber's Guide to Love and Gravity). Two months from my final PhD deadline, it's not as if I don't have enough reading to do at the moment. But last Friday I pulled this off the mini-mountain of non-work books that are stacked by my bed. There's something reassuring about autobiographies. Maybe, as I stare into the abyss of freedom where for the first time in my life I don't have the next stage neatly lined up, I'm subconsciously searching for inspiration from those who have had the courage to find and follow their passion.


Steph is cool. Not only is she an amazing climber but she's also a sugar-free vegan yogi. This is more than enough to make me turn my head in her direction. She came from an academic, suburban background, trained in classical music and English literature. She didn't discover climbing until she went to university, where she completed a master's degree but rejected a PhD scholarship in favour of living out of the back of her car for years to follow her climbing dream...

...which she succeeded at remarkably. (I recommend the book if you're at all interested. It's short, easy to get through, well-written and thought-provoking).

Something that Steph discusses is the various ways in which individual or teams of climbers orchestrate their big wall free climbs. Stashing gear, finding belayers willing to follow them thirty pitches or more, leading one pitch then coming back to the ground before going up a fixed line to continue, leading each pitch but not in order... Something about it seems incredibly contrived. I suppose all climbing is contrived to an extent, but the meticulous planning and breaking down of a whole concept into individual, sometimes even independent, parts seems to lose some of the simple beauty of just climbing for the sake of climbing.

I'm not for an instant criticising those who do make these ascents. They have more skill and strength than I could ever hope for. However, what climbing means to me is a way to explore my freedom in the amazing natural beauty of the world. Deconstructing it into a to-do list removes the pure joy from it.

A blog!

A blog! A blog. I've never seriously thought about blogging before. To some degree it goes against my natural instincts which are much more notebook-based rather than computer and internet-based. However, I read a lot of things and I do a lot of thinking and I scribble things down in a book (or not, as the case may be), and I've recently started to think that it's a shame that I never do anything with those musings. I suspect that publishing them in a public place will help me to put my thoughts together in a more critical and reasoned way. It might seem counterintuitive to start writing a blog during the final three months of my PhD, but I spend a lot of time on my own in front of a computer at the moment and with that comes an inevitable amount of thinking. There's also a lot that I've learnt at work that would have made my life considerably easier if I'd not had to figure it out myself, and I would like to make those things publicly accessible.

In a sense I suppose I am trying to make my learning experience public - in an academic sense and in the sense of learning about myself and about life. And to not allow my ego to get in the way, by making my thoughts, feelings and even mistakes public!

I was woken up by the dawn chorus this morning. It was just about light but other than that I have no idea what time it was. I can only have had a few hours of sleep (I got home from the office at 10pm last night, sat down to do some more work at 11, then the next thing I knew it was 3am). The birds were so... loud! Unexpectedly so. From my attic bedroom with the windows shut it was loud enough to wake me. I lay there for a while trying to get back to sleep but it didn't happen. It felt like being woken by the dawn chorus when you're in a tent, except I was in my bedroom in central Leeds. Apart from the lack of sleep, I'm amazed that I can be in the centre of a huge city and still the birds can wake me up. Living opposite an allotment instead of yet more rows of red brick terraces is great. With my bed in the window, I can pull my curtains back while I'm still in bed in the morning and see the clouds, or the sun, or the field if I lean up. Once I was lucky enough to be greeted by a red kite soaring overhead. All within 3 miles of the city centre. It makes my wild heart happy.