Historic moments ...

The weather reverted to grey today - grey and wet, with moments of quite unreasonable windiness. It was the kind of day when indoor pursuits actually seem preferable, so I succumbed ... 

It all began purposefully enough. I made two sourdough loaves to a new recipe - not machine jobs, but one that involved all the kneading and waiting around for things to happen. I cleaned up the resulting mess (I can't do tidy flour.) I did a hefty lot of Italian to kick the new week off. 

And then I looked at my friend Sarah's photos ...

She and her man are on holiday. They spent yesterday on the Arran hills. The hills where I learned to climb when I was a small child, and where Himself and I probably did our last climb, a couple of years ago. And it made me start thinking of all these climbs, all these years, all these photos - and not one of them digital. And I wanted to to find some. Fatal.

Several hours and half a drawer later I'd only found a few. There are many more of these wee packets of prints left to look at, but today's collage reminds me, not of Arran, but of the very first rock climb I was taken on, the Curved Ridge on Buchaille Etive Mhor. I don't even think I had a camera with me on that occasion, and I certainly didn't take the photo of my backside clambering up a steep bit, but I've put it here just because it was one of these stand-out days I'll never forget. 

It was nearly 30 years ago when a colleague in the English department asked me if I'd like to join him and another fellow-climber on the staff on a day in Glencoe. I was wildly excited - we'd not been back to Arran at that point, and I had only yomped over the muddy hills of Cowal in the intervening years. You can see I'm not really terribly well equipped - these are leggings I'm wearing, an enormous and rather bulky fleece, and an inadequate rucksack - but I've got decent boots and I suddenly felt I'd been waiting all my life to find all the nice wee foot and hand holds in this particular crag. 

The other photo is a rather shaky one of Crowberry Gully, with my hand clearly obscuring the bottom of the lens. (I must have borrowed the camera) By then the hard climbing on the ridge was done, but we did a wee extra up Crowberry Tower before heading for the summit and the easy route back down to the glen. And on the top of the Tower, there were two other climbers, slightly older than us, and a man said to me, while my companions made vomiting gestures behind his back: "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

I should have told him this was just the start ...