When I was a young undergraduate, way back in the mists of time, my cohort included one friend whom we all admired. His name was Mudd. He was witty and idiosyncratic, and he thought deeply about both literature and the wider universe, while the rest of us were still pondering how to boil an egg.
He was different, too, in his choice of pictures to hang on his wall. Most us tacked up typically immature stuff – it was the era of that infamous poster of the lithe tennis player’s rear – but his rear-view image was rather different. It depicted a frock-coated figure standing atop a mountain outcrop, gazing out over a fantastical carpet of mist pierced by rocky pinnacles, trees and distant mountains. It looked like an album cover, and for us it came to symbolise the point we were at in our lives: looking forward into an uncertain future, still mostly obscured, having climbed one big peak – egg-boiling notwithstanding – but with many more ahead.
Fast-forward some 45 years to this past winter, when I found myself standing statuesque on a rocky outcrop in those self-same mountains, looking out over that self-same mist pierced by pinnacles, trees and distant mountains. It seemed that little had changed since Mudd’s favourite supposedly stood there, contemplating… we know
