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Blogs not about anything
I like blogs. I don’t think I’ve written that down before — at least not in public. I suppose I have a lot of opinions that I haven’t written down in public.
Anyway, I like blogs that are about something, which is fortunate because most blogs are about something. There are a lot of blogs about “rationalism”, for example. These are pretty good, not least because they give numpties like me a handful of talking points that I can bring up in conversation to demonstrate how Clever I am.
But I’m slowly going off blogs that are about something in favour of blogs that are just journals of regular folks’ idle thoughts. The latest orthodoxy mutates so quickly that I can't keep up, and feels unimportant and consequencelessly culture-war-ey. And I feel increasingly estranged from the only-lightly-filtered daily experience of other people’s lives: maybe this is because writing on the web is micro-optimised to sell me things or make me think a certain way; or maybe this is because I work from home and so opinions aren't buffered by having to face other people's judgment.
So a blog about e.g. a guy who keeps getting his stuff stolen resonates with me, because it’s not about anything: it’s just the way he feels.
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David's Bob Graham
When we get out of the car at Honister the windows of the shop are all boarded up and the gates are closed. It’s a little before 7 am. It’s not raining, per se; but there’s water hanging in the air getting everything sort of damp in a way that really suggests rain.
We head up towards Dubs Quarry and cut around on Moses Trod towards the shoulder of Great Gable. Kirk Fell peeks out from between curtains of mist; the rain waxes and then wanes again. I think about David on the moraines around Bow Fell. He’s half an hour behind his schedule, which isn’t too worrying since he’s aiming for a 23-hour Bob.
We descend from the clouds amid the din of Gable Beck, much fuller now than it was earlier this summer. Wasdale gleams through the mist with reflected sunlight.
At Wasdale Head, we meet a man with a “I drive a Jaguar” accent asking for the route up to Scafell Pike. He balks when he’s told that the best trailhead is the National Trust car park, three-quarters of a mile up the road. I wonder dimly how his blue jeans and fancy boots will fare on the sodden climb. I wonder if he’ll get that far.
We hunker down in the National Trust car park with plenty of time to spare, watching David’s dot move across the crags on the tracking app he’s provided us. He loses a bit more time; it’s enough that we start to get nervous. We take turns in Nina & Adrian’s warm van and chain-drink decaf coffee. We visit the drop toilet with its smooth plastic seat. We try not to look down.
Before long, Nina spots David through her binoculars coming down the screes below Scafell Pike. They round a wall and disappear out of sight. Minutes later they emerge from the woods and into the car park. I notice that all four runners have big brown mud streaks up their backs.
David doesn’t look much worse for wear. He inhales some rice pudding, takes a couple of painkillers, and launches out of the car park and onto the road with Tamsin, Nick, and I in tow. He’s about an hour behind schedule; we’ll need to find some time on the leg 4 tops.
Soon we’re climbing Yewbarrow. The rain forbears; it is a small mercy. Wasdale shrinks below us. It occurs to me that Nina is probably watching our climb through her binoculars. I look back, but I can’t see her.
We crest the shoulder of Yewbarrow and reach the summit. Nick marks down the time and we scurry off towards Red Pike. I try to keep up conversation; David seems in decent spirits. I don’t know how much of our job as supporters is to try and keep up morale. Probably a good deal of the job.
The climb to Red Pike is nowhere steep, but its length makes it a slog. On the Bob Graham timing chart it proves the equal of Yewbarrow for time. We crest the summit, then a brief interlude before the wall at the top of Scoat Fell comes into view.
Steeple comes and goes, then the traverse across the flank of Black Crag and the steep screes up Pillar. From the summit of Pillar we can see the sun shining on the Irish Sea.
Then the long descent towards Kirk Fell, rocky in places but generally joggable. We pass a runner wearing a number coming up the other way, first place (by a long shot) in the Ennerdale Horseshoe fell race. His competitors are so far behind that we think at first that he’d lost the route and was scrambling back into position. It turns out that he’s just famous.
We dodge more runners on the climb up Kirk Fell Crags and then start the descent. Halfway down, David loses his balance on a wet boulder and topples backwards onto an excessively sharp rock. He lies in shock for a minute; we wonder how long before we should call Mountain Rescue. He wiggles his fingers and toes, and then miraculously, gets back up and continues the descent. He’s clearly shaken but is moving well. By the time we get to the pass at the foot of Gable, the only evidence of his fall is a scuffmark on the back of his jacket.
He powers up Gable, then over Green Gable and on to Brandreth and Grey Knotts. There’s a bit of confusion about which summit of Grey Knotts we’re meant to visit, but our proximity to Honister highlights the time crunch: David is now 20 minutes or so behind 24-hour pace. The mood is resigned as we descend to Honister; David says that he’s going to see it through regardless of time.
He spends less than a minute at Honister, swapping out water and handing off poles. Tamsin and I decide to accompany him on leg 5. No one mentions David’s pace or expected finish time until halfway up Dale Head, when Geoff (on nav) announces that from the top onwards we’re going to pick up the pace.
He’s not joking.
Geoff pulling us all on, we fly down Dale Head as if we’re at a fell race and then run full-tilt all the way up to Hindscarth. The wind picks up and the clouds blot out the fading sun. Keswick lurks somewhere in the murk off to the right. David has a fixated look in his eye.
The climb to Robinson is the hardest of the day. Far ahead, there’s a Herdwick sitting in the middle of the path just below the crest of the hill and it somehow never seems to get any closer. My chest heaves and my legs burn. But then I see the characteristic craggy crest at the summit and know we’ve made it.
Over the driving wind at the top of Robinson, Geoff says that we have an hour and a half to get to Keswick. If we can make Newlands Church in half an hour, that gives David an hour to run the 5 miles back to Keswick. It’s on.
We fly down the side of Robinson, Geoff picking out grassy trods around the crags to keep the pace up. Soon we’re on the trail out through the gorse and the gates and the holiday cottage with the funny name and charging down the road. David runs at a 4:30/km pace down to the church. I don’t know how he does this with more than 90 km in his legs already.
I try to keep up, but run out of steam around Swinside. David charges on with his leg 5 supporters and I hobble the remaining 3km back to Keswick. When I arrive at the Moot Hall, I find David in a crowd of friends, a beer in his hand, and a massive smile on his face.
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Swaledale Marathon
4 hours and 15 minutes at the Swaledale Marathon, split into thirds.
The first third was run under threatening clouds. I paced myself and checked my heart rate probably too often. But I felt good over Fremington and up Arkengarthdale.
Ran up into the clouds for the middle third. Stomach started to turn on me up on the moor past Punchard Head. Still running well, keeping up with folks around me.
Bathroom break at Gunnerside before the final third. On the climb up onto the moor the sun came out and my body responded like Superman. Felt great (if thirsty) for the jaunt back to Reeth.
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Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Published 2021 496 pages
Ryland Grace, an American middle school teacher with an annoying name, wakes up from a coma in deep space. His mission, remembered only at intervals due to coma-related amnesia, is to uncover the mystery behind an interstellar bacterium which has infected the sun and is causing it to slowly go out. Shortly he meets an alien from another star system on the same mission. Together they get into a bunch of The Martian-esque science hijinx and sort out the mystery.
That’s the book.
It doesn’t feel like a story so much as a series of problems that Grace and his extraterrestrial buddy, Rocky, have to solve. Which I guess some people quite like; but as for me I never felt like anything was in danger of happening. Most of the book is: something has upset the status quo on the spaceship; Grace & Rocky fix it; the status quo is restored; something else has upset the status quo on the spaceship.
Usually the solution involves gratuitous descriptions of pressing buttons or cycling through screens or attaching things together. This doesn’t feel like narrative to me. It is to narrative as descriptions of what someone is wearing is to character. Yes, Grace is doing things — but nothing is happening. I don’t need three pages of explanation of how some xenonite chain is designed and constructed; just tell me that you did it.
I will say that Rocky is a terrific character. He’s physically expressive, a bit of a himbo, helpless and simultaneously capable. I do wonder how much of Rocky’s lovability is because he’s like a dog that can communicate. Do we like Rocky because he's basically Grace’s daemon?
There are a couple of story beats right at the end of the book that do feel like something is happening — but they come a little bit too late:
The first explains why Grace is on the mission, despite being a middle school teacher and not an astronaut. I wouldn’t call it a twist, but it sort of reorients your perspective of characters in a way that makes zero material difference. I think it was included to give Grace a character arc, but it’s not an effective arc because the shift in character happens off-screen, while he’s out with his coma+amnesia; he goes to sleep at one end of the arc and wakes up at the other.
The second did surprise me, so I’m not going to write about it here — but the book runs out of pages to explore the consequences of what was effectively only the third or fourth actual thing to happen in the whole book.
Still I thought it was fun.
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A Pennine Journey
by A. Wainwright
Published 1986 213 pagesThe Story of a Long Walk in 1938
I’ve walked parts of Wainwright’s Pennine Journey and found it a little rough around the edges — though not necessarily in a bad way. There are sections that follow greenways and high moorland tracks like the most well-trod of the long distance trails here in England; but there are long tracts that meander across fields and over stone walls and through farm courtyards in a way that I think Wainwright might have liked.
Wainwright’s original journey, however, followed very little of the modern signposted route; in 1938 the relatively infrequent motor traffic down what are now designated B-roads meant that he could walk along the roads and lanes and see almost no one. At one point he walks five miles up the road from Alston to Hartside Cross, a voyage no one would dare to undertake by foot these days for danger of being plastered by a BMW X9 operated by a wealthy family from Coventry out on their bank holiday weekend jollies.
A Pennine Journey (the book, not the trail) is a book of two faces.
On the one hand, Wainwright writes loftily of the freedom of the hills, dales, and wideopen lonely places in the north of England; he brings the reader with him into towns that have scarcely changed in hundreds of years, stone walls and flagstone roofs and modest kitchens with a little coal in the grate.
He makes his opinion well-known: Blanchland is out of a fairy-tale; Weardale is industrially depressing; Wharfedale is a secret beauty; the Eden Valley sucks. He writes at length and with unmitigated wonder of Hadrian’s Wall (although inexplicably totally omits any mention of Sycamore Gap (RIP In Peace)).
This tendency of forming a strong opinion of what is basically just grass and stone and tree is what has made him a national treasure (and an MBE). It’s charming and captivating and breeds a sense of romance into the country.
Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walkover country such as this; the scene that delight the eyes, the blessed piece of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously rot within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town or smooth away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe.
On the other hand. He is a little bit too free with that opinion when it comes to women. And his journey brings him into contact with all sorts of women: his MO is basically to rock up as the sun is setting and find someone to take him in for the night. Usually this is a private home (but sometimes an inn) where a woman looks after occasional boarders, and always does A.W. have something to say about these women.
Usually it’s condescending. Usually it reads like something from r/menwritingwomen. Sometimes it’s outright offensive. He flirts with all of the younger ones, despite having a wife of seven years and a son back home; he passes judgment on the elder.
And he holds a pretty high opinion of himself; I quite suspect that he was a miserable person to be around (which is lucky, because he liked to walk on his own). I’m conscious that A.W. wrote this when he was young (but not that young); he may have let judiciousness get the better of his free opinions in his older age. But I’m also conscious that his wife left him after suspecting him of infidelity, and for his lofty pronouncements about “The man has not been born, who does not want a son to follow him”, he left nothing to his son when he died.
So! The scales have fallen from my eyes. Will I still read his Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells in the idle moments between fell runs? Uh yeah I will. Am I going to read another one of his narrative walks? Uh probably not.
Stray observations
- Wainwright stops at the Kirk Inn in Romaldkirk and his description heavily implies that it’s haunted or cursed or something; that despite the solicitousness of the widow who runs the joint there’s a shabby sense of bereft laid over the place like a cloak. He speculates that it will very soon go out of business but: it didn’t! It’s still around. Sam and I visited last weekend and found that the curse still lays upon the place: it is dark and cluttered even on a sunny day, serves only a single beer from a brewery I have never heard of, and remains perennially empty even on a Friday evening, while the (larger, more upscale) pub across the street is fully-booked. The solicitous proprietor remains: the pub does not take cards but does take a promise to return within the hour with a crisp polymer tenner.
- I got the book off World of Books and when it arrived it was battered but whole; by the time I finished it went the way of A.W.’s shoes, by which I mean the adhesive had totally perished and the whole thing came pretty much totally apart.
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