Dreams and Nightmares

By Vic Law

Having spent 25 years as climbing bum, paid for by bouts of time spent as a university technician, Vic found himself fighting a different world: his very own pulmonary embolism in both lungs. The doctors are baffled and cant understand why your man is in their intensive care ward. On the long road to recovery, Vic recounts some of the many odd and hilarious climbing stories which marked his way to the doctors and nurses of University College London Hospital. As the silent and unseen internal blood clots dissolve, the realisation of challenges of harsh vertical winter routes in Scotland, the Alps and British Sea cliffs plus Londons transport pollution have to be left behind.

On a chance recommendation: the air in Ireland is clean and it hardly ever rains, well hardly ever. The author exchanges his world for one of science based academic career in Dublin and a new life in Ireland. On a very wet day in Dublin the true love Trish comes passing by and they married on a warm summers day.

They now spend their new lives on the island of Crete, where they explore the eastern Mediterranean and travel through the Euro-zone back to the British Isles and Ireland to visit family and beloved friends: happy ever after. Not so. Todays (2010-2013) austerity: brought about by the European bankers and politicians, desk clerks, managers, security measures and incompetent airport authorities, all have made travel difficult and arduous. Long gone are the days when you could drive across Europe and Asia to the Far East and onto Australia.

This is a book of climbing horror stories and misplaced faith in the travel industries. Friends cannot believe the troubles they have encountered but dreams do some times turn in to nightmares!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477226919

Vic Law

The author was born in the East End of London-England in 1957, from where he escaped to be a climbing bum for 25 years, paid for by bouts of time spent as a university technician. Traveling through Europe in a converted ambulance, and university Mini-bus and private cars, the author is well placed to recount modern climbing stories and the horrors of travel through Europe. Having found his world turned upside down due to suffering a massive pulmonary embolism in both lungs the retelling of personal climbing stores has become a healing cathartic journey. Through this journey, the realisation of challenges of harsh vertical winter routes in Scotland, the Alps and British Sea cliffs plus London’s transport pollution have been put aside. He has exchanged this world for one of science based academic career in Dublin and a new life in Ireland where he married Trish on a warm summer’s day. They now spend their new lives on the island of Crete dealing with the twice daily sheep rush hour in their adopted Cretan village, from where they are exploring the eastern Mediterranean. Their semi-retirement would be ideal if it was not for the dealings with: desk clerks, managers, security measures and incompetent airport authorities who continuously block their journey through the austerity ravaged Euro-zone.

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© 2012 by Vic Law. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/07/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2692-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2693-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2691-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Embolism

The climbs

Cretan odyssey

Epilogue

About the author

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

To friends past and present

Epigraph

‘We love to dip our toes into the cold water of fear ‘

Alfred Hitchcock

List of Illustrations

Front cover: The Frendo Spur

Back cover: Spiders Web

1. Observatory Ridge

2. Isabel climbing Glover’s Chimney

3. The author lost and smelling of brown sauce in Point Five Gully

4. High up on The Frendo Spur

5. Angus returns from the Liskamm:

6. On a summers day, Angus climbing Bow Wall

7. The author climbing the Riders of the Storm

8. Paul after climbing Where Puffins Daren’t’

9. The Italian Houte Route

10. At the Marghertia Refugio

11. Spiders Web

12. Arriving at Abul Simbel

13. Leaving Venice

14. Cruising

15. Delphi

16. Kástelos rush hour

17. The White Mountains—Crete

18. Easter 2012

19. June the 6th Syntagma Square—Athens

Introduction

Born and brought-up on an island of the United kingdom that is located on the western edge of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century easily allows a certain set of cultural ideas and beliefs to be acquired that are far removed from those of the populous of mainland Europe. No need for passport: no need to learn a different language and the cooked full English breakfast is nearly the same in Northern Ireland (Ulster fry) and the Republic of Ireland (full Irish). It’s only when you find out that there is more to the world when you take the ferry, or airplane, and start to travel. When I caught the addictive climbing bug, I had to acquire the necessary French, German and Italian reading skills to translate and decode the local mountaineering guides: sod the culture and politics, just do the peaks and enjoy the climbing way of life. Culture would have to wait, and it waited for a long time.

From my early teenage years I was aware of the historical conflicts between England and the rest of the world: photo journalism and the television informed me of the 1960’s Vietnam War, the 1980’s Falklands war; the 1990’s Balkans war; the mother of all searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and now the defence of Western culture in the blood soaked foot hills of Afghanistan. Indeed I was lucky not to be involved in the last three of these conflicts (not like my brother who was floating around Cape Town on HMS invisible in the Falklands war). Added to this happenstance, I was very ignorant, like most people in England, of the troubles in Northern Ireland. This blissful upbringing meant I could focus my efforts on the pursuit of my childhood dream and become a climbing bum.

From the very early years of my childhood being a climbing bum was most unlikely, and Dreams and Nightmares had no chance of being written for I suffered the most severe travel sickness. All I had to do was sit in Uncle Stan’s black taxi cab and it would fill my stomach with black bile. Even now the smell of the inside of a taxi cab sends me in to a terror and convulsions. Then came the long journeys by motor coach to visit my grandparents in Padstow—Cornwall for the summer. The memories of these visits conjure up glorious long hot summer days on the beach and delish fish dishes served up by granddad Charles who was a superb fish chef: this was well before Rick Stein arrived in Padstow. I still have some of Granddad’s cooking bowls and Alice’s dinner set, the possession of which spurs me on to follow Charles’s passion for food and cooking. Nevertheless all this came at a price; far too many long hours holding a sick bag between my legs as the coach travelled on from London and on to Padstow with Mother seated a few rows away: she desperately tried not to be connected with me as the other travellers looked on with horror at the unfolding drama.

I have my parents to thank for my long held passion for climbing and it stems from their ever increasingly desperate attempts to cure my travel sickness. They sent me to weekend camps, week long dinghy sailing trips on the Humber river estuary, and finally when I was 15, a month’s sailing trip around Scotland’s coast one very cold November. On this last trip I was one of only two volunteers, the rest of the luckless crew were sent from remand centres. This was my parents kill or cure mission. I survived being washed away from the ships bowsprit while sailing around the Inner Hebrides, blown of Goat-fell Mountain that is the highest point on the isle of Arran; near frozen to death on the summit of Ben Nevis; lost and found in the bogs of Cape Roth; and then whilst tied to the lee rail I suffered the most horrendous sea sickness in the North Sea as we sailed to the port of Wick on the East coast of Scotland. At the time all I could do was recite with some degree of commitment ‘this is the worst trip I’ve been on, I want to go home . . . ‘

To my parents great delight I returned, and was changed, but not in the way my parents had hoped. It was when I arrived back at my comprehensive school in the East of London that the girls’ response to having a real-live adventurer in their midst hit home and it was both fantastic and bizarre in many ways. Invitations to parties came flooding in and I become part of the in-crowd which had eluded me up to now. On one occasion a girl who I had wanted to go out with for a long time asked me on a party date, but this ended up being a disaster as another female admirer stole me away and naturally a fight broke out between them: I was the loser.

With erupting teenage hormones I became a would-be mountaineer: sailing was strictly for the birds and girls became a confusing problem. Listening to the evocative sound of Sailing-by on the BBC radio 4 shipping forecast, I read all the great books on the Antarctica and Western European Alps; From Shackleton and Amundsen to Whimper and Shipton; Harrier and Haston to Benatti and Brown. Unwittingly reading these texts inculcated the soul of Achilles in me. I was hooked, no doubt about it; ‘glory and death’ it would be from now on. The problem was how a school leaver with poor grades could maintain this new found status and climb the Worlds Mountains as well.

After two dead-end jobs as a lorry drivers’ mate I found the solution: a University technician post that yielded the money, loads of free time and very little responsibly. Not even a whirlwind marriage and future academic career could stop me.

But alas dreams can sometimes turn into nightmares where only the luck of the devil keeps you alive. In my case the dreams and nightmares did not occur in far flung countries such as Antarctica or the Himalayas whom the great explorers and mountaineers wrote about, but in nearby Scotland and the Western European Alps. Nevertheless in these easily accessible mountains, death is all too present. In fact we all know you only have to walk out of your front door to encounter adventure and death. So why would anyone want to pay good money to read my tales of urban mountaineering? The answer to this question may be found at many different levels.

The uncomplicated answer is that people like to hear about adventures that are far removed from their ordinary daily life, especially when there is an element of danger coupled with a high degree of incompetence: ‘there for the grace of God go I’ I hear you say. Schadenfreude translates well from German to any language and when paired with a good dose of irony I have found the tales transcends class, occupation and culture. This heavy mix, coupled with a good editor’s hand, is my dream retirement fund. However the adventure needs its fair share of misfortune. Paraphrasing Alfred Hitchcock: ‘We love to dip our toes into the cold water of fear without leaving the safety of our living room’. Apart from the humour that is woven in to the story, it would help if the tales have a moral too: for example a journey of self-discovery and the recognition of people around you.

In the autumn of 2011 these tales where first written down, and as the blank paper turned in to lines of written text a deeper answer come in to view in the form of a journey from a simple adventure driven by Achilles soul, to self-discovery in true love, and the part fulfilment of being immerse in landscape of the Greek gods and the taste of Cretan cooking. To crystallise this journey in the readers mind my story is not laid out in a chronological order but rather as I see the story unfold and pivot between key moments. There is a however a time-line gap in the story that revolves around moving to the Republic of Ireland where I fell in love and married Trish. This beautiful episode in our lives is the basis of another book that recounts our sorjon in the Emerald Isle and people who became our great friends.

This book also leaves out climbs in North America and Canada, where an encounter with a barbiturate soaked junky on Cock Sucker Concerto¹ in Yosemite, and being bushwhacked in the Chilliwack Mountains², have become stapled pub stories. These and other North America tales are put aside for another time.

In this book the following tales relate to dear friends and lovers who climbed and ate with me over many years. They have heard the tales told and retold many time in pubs, climbing huts and campsites. I would like to thank them for what they put up with, and that was a lot: Richard for keeping me safe, Stuart