author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
I can confidently say that Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris is my favourite of all the Boardman Tasker Prize winners that I’ve read. It reminded me of Dervla Murphy, but how similar is it? I read Dervla Murphy’s book Full Tilt to find out.
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It’s not clear why Kangchenjunga should be considered the last great mountain, but whatever: this book is a comprehensive history of all expeditions up to its first ascent in 1955. I learned a lot from it, and I can thoroughly recommend it, however well acquainted you are with Kangchenjunga’s history.
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Now that the pubs are all closed, I’ve been spending Saturday nights searching for mountain gems on YouTube. Here’s one. In the Shadow of Annapurna offers a glimpse into an earlier age in Nepal, when things were rapidly changing but many of the old ways remained.
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So far I’ve not been finding lockdown too bad. I don’t know whether this makes me unusual. I know I’m lucky in many respects. We have a nice garden beside the river here in the Cotswolds and we’re able to
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As coronavirus lockdown takes hold, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane has started running a reading group on Twitter about Nan Shepherd’s classic nature book The Living Mountain. It was a no-brainer for me to join, and it’s helping me to see the world differently.
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Edita was in Africa last week, so last weekend I had a day to myself. What better way to spend it than pulling up YouTube on the TV and spending the evening watching porn… Mountain porn, that is – and I found an absolute gem.
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There aren’t many characters in Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void, and the main one spends most of the story entirely alone, contemplating existence as he crawls for three days along a glacier. How on earth were they going to make a stage version of this?
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The shortlist for this year’s Boardman Tasker Prize was announced this month, and once again five out of six books on the shortlist are about climbing. You can be certain that the winner will be one of the five. [*]
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I would like to pay tribute a mountaineering friend of mine who passed away last month. He is not someone you will have heard of, but I believe that it’s important to remember such people, for they are the ones most like ourselves.
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Nepal has brought many wonderful memories, but it is also a place that reminds me of the fragile nature of life. This was brought home last month when I was saddened to learn of the early death of Michelle Pradhan of the Courtyard Hotel, Kathmandu.
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