I’ve been to a number of unconference events now, and was at UKGovCamp last year too. This was, however, the first one I’ve been to since choosing to step off the local government (not so)merry-go-round last August. That meant I saw things through slightly different eyes to previously.

1. Has anyone done the sums yet? I got the impression that overall, people actually working in government (central and local) only amounted for about 50% of the attendees, and that local government was really quite a minor presence. I make this point because it’s an ongoing sadness with me that much of local government is so far behind the beat on this sort of stuff and these sorts of events.

2. Memo to self for next time: don’t expect to find much time for sitting chatting with people. I had a small list of people and issues we had said we’d discuss. We never did. Too many competing demands, lots of new friends to make, plus the inevitable temptation to simply crash from time to time.

3. Putting names and faces to Twitter identities is great. I used to think it a good week if I met one person I followed, and had not actually met them in person before. I reckon I met more than 50 over the two days of UKGovCamp.

4. Take care when you pitch for a session. I slapped my Post-It on the board early on, and thought I’d selected Friday’s slot 4, giving me plenty of time to prepare and talk the session up. With two minutes to go, I discovered I’d actually put it in Room 4 for the first session of the day. Sorry to those who came, if it looked like I was winging it. I was.

5. Don’t ever take for granted who might come to your session. I’d anticipated a certain range of participants, but 50% of those who came were actually opponents of the theme, in one way or another. They were, of course, polite and sustained a good case, but it still threw me, and might have frustrated a few participants.

6. Individually and collaboratively, Catherine Howe and Anthony Zacharzewski are a formidable pair. They also have that huge skill of being able to get the best out of everyone when facilitating a session, couples with the ability to make one forget coffee breaks and (nearly) lunch too. They’re that good.

7. Networks are seldom, if ever, two dimensional, no matter how well you draw them.

8. By a similar token “government” and “governance” is seldom single stratum. What seems right in a London Borough or a Unitary authority is just going to have to be done a different way where there are parishes, districts and counties all contributing to the process. That is a Universal Law.

9. I don’t mind if people like Mike Bracken come to speak at UKGovCamp. I have no real idea what connection they have to what I am doing day to day. They seldom leave me any wiser. That’s as much my fault as anything, but I don’t do squee.

10. I have never seen two conference promoters looking as relaxed during the event as Dave Briggs and Steph Gray. That can only be down to hard work at the times it really mattered, in preparation etc. I am envious of their skills in that respect, because you can never just hope “it’ll be all right on the night”.

11. Talking to Shirley Ayres made me realise how much our networks intersect and overlap. I suspect that is true for anyone who lives in more than one world. This makes for some delightful serendipity and coincidence. The world can be a small place at times, but I’d still not want to have to dust it.

12. I covet one single photo taken at UKGovCamp this year. It is this, by @ashroplad   Am I jealous? The sin of covetousness will suffice!

13. What I am jealous of is the ability of London based people to sustain something like #teacamp and do the necessary face to face stuff regularly and often. So, YES, to those who say local government needs a regular unconference of its own. Count me in as a participant, and  as a willing pair of hands in the preparation.

14. The jury must be out on the two day experiment for UKGovCamp. Steph has posted here about it, and I have added my two penn’orth to the debate. But even if it turns out to be a one off, we’d not have known without trying.

15. I see more and more geeks getting excited about QR codes, and Terence Eden ran a brilliant session about them, stripping bare many of the myths. However, I still don’t see their use catching on in some simple, basic local government uses.

16. It is far too long since I commuted to and from London. Travelling home on Friday evening was an unfortunate necessity made awful by a broken down train and a one hour trip taking two and a half. To the fellow travellers who said it was the third time that week, I can only say, “Surely to God, your physical presence in London is not THAT vital every day, is it?”

17. Steph’s blog points up the need to spend more time on setting each day’s agenda. I’m also wondering whether the introductions stuff can’t learn something from the world of speed dating?

18. A lot of “open data” sessions just seemed to me to be variations on a theme, and didn’t sell themselves to me at all. I am therefore worried that some of those discussions are either very esoteric, or insufficiently informed by people who understand the issues rather than the tech.

19. Can someone please point me at stuff about Reflective Practice that I can read up on, please? Missing the sessions on this is a great regret, which Carl Haggerty’s blog has impressed on me very much.

Like the lovely, relaxed Sarah Lay, with whom I did manage a few moments to chat, I’m leaving it at 19. In my case it’s because, as in real life in relation to keys, wallet, coat, etc, there will usually be something I’ve forgotten and need to go back for. It’s my age, you know.

(Oh, and if you’ve still not seen them, my photos from the event are here.

It should go without saying that depression is a difficult issue wherever it arises, but the premise of the documentary was that in sport, and particularly at the high level, megabucks, celebrity end of sport, depression gets neither recognition nor sympathy. Best summed up by the media pundit interviewed, whose view was basically “What have you got to be depressed about? Half the country would give an arm and a leg to be standing where you stand”.

I found the programme both challenging and heartening at the same time. It’s almost exactly two years now since I realised that the combination of physical and emotional symptoms I was getting from sport were not just “ a bad patch”, the result of over-training, or something like that. I was still three months away from my GP diagnosing severe depression as the cause. To hear the likes of England cricketer Steve Harmison, or snooker star Graeme Dott describing exactly what I was going through myself at that time brought on some dreadful flashbacks. After all, sport is macho, full of tough, resilient superheroes, isn’t it? And besides, if it all gets too bad, you can just walk away, can’t you? Not as if it’s real life or anything. As if, eh?

My sport isn’t at the stratospheric levels of the likes of Freddie Flintoff, Vinnie Jones, or Barry McGuigan, who all took part in the TV programme. Or maybe to me, at my own scale, actually, it is – just without the money, the media and the public recognition! I know what it’s like to line up in a World Championship final, and what it took me to get there. I also know what it’s like to stand on the podium and receive a medal, and also what it’s like to find that not all fairytales have happy endings.

I’d not before heard the statistics on depression in sport (one person in ten at any one time) expressed as “one depressed person in every cricket or soccer team”. That hit home. Or put another way, for every three sprint relay squads, one depressed athlete. Ouch.

I don’t want this to be a morose blog, though. I can now describe myself as an athlete coping with depression and getting better one day at a time. That’s down to being around friends and competitors who understand, and whose support, good humour and advice are things I treasure.

On that very note, I’ve been waiting many months for a new book. “The Chimp Paradox”, by my Great Britain Masters sprint team-mate Dr Steve Peters has now come out (ISBN 978-0-09193-558-0). I’ve attended several of the “mind management” courses Steve has laid on for athletes and others in recent years, and I’m itching to get to grips with the book. I’m only about six pages in at the moment, so perhaps a future blog will carry more of a review. This is a book about life, relationships and being human, by the way, not about depression. Don’t let the context of me mentioning it put you off getting a copy. One hopes the royalties will keep Steve in running spikes for the rest of his illustrious track career.

More next time!

No surprise then, that when my wife and I had the chance regularly to have Christmas together more often, we saw nothing unusual in simply leaving the country and spending it somewhere else. This was actually good economics, and pretty good for the digestion. It also gave us near-deserted skiing, and the delights of a simple, non-Disney Christmas with our sort-of adopted family in Italy’s Sud Tirol region. Several snow-free, globally warmed Christmases took the gloss off that, and it’s been our habit for a good few years since, to find a bolt-hole somewhere in Tuscany. This isn’t glamorous or extravagant, just a simple opportunity to be wowed by landscape, local food, and culture. Where else would you be able to sit on Christmas morning in a 12th Century church, listening to two monks singing plainsong, while two beams of the most radiant sunlight pour in to light the interior?

San Miniato al Monte 25/12/11

It’s a definite break from training for me. I had a decent session the day before we left this year, and I was in the gym within 8 hours of getting home the other day. Really. If you don’t have an excess to work off, and you’re training when many others aren’t, doesn’t that make it twice as beneficial?

It’s good to be able to say that last Christmas was my last one on antidepressants, and that this year was my first one for a while completely off them. Someone told me once that their worst side effect is to rob you of your vitality. Looking back, I think that was spot on. While under the regime of pills, training was always a struggle, and results almost non-existent. Particularly for someone who had come oh-o close to a World Championship medal, and for whom personal expectations had become high. If they did nothing else for me, antidepressants balanced the equation, because it was the pressure of those self-imposed expectations that I believe started my slide. I’m now putting in three quality training sessions a week, enjoying doing so, and enjoying simply musing on what their effect is going to be.

One thing that won’t come from this winter’s work is any appearance at the World Masters Indoor Championships in Jyvaskyla, Finland, just before Easter. “Where?” you ask? It’s another in the line of near-inaccessible one-horse towns that no one would really ever want to go to, that World Masters Athletics, the bundle of fat cats and free-lunchers who make up our “governing body”, has chosen for a major championship. Try the names Lahti, Kamloops, or Porto Allegre on your friends if you want to see more blank looks. More than that, the hotel and flight cartels involved make getting there far more expensive than should ever be the case. And all to race on a four-lane indoor track. This represents pathetic facilities by any athlete’s domestic standards, let alone those of a World Championship. Sorry WMA, MTH. Must try harder.

So, there’s me, mellowed by sojourns with Giotto, Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Rai 2 Sport and such, home just in time for the winter “sales” in the shops. Being an assiduous shopper during the year, I seldom want anything in the sales. This year, sales time clashed with me needing to find a support brace for my left wrist, which I’ve managed to injure while weight training. May yet be carpal tunnel syndrome; we wait to see. My local sports shop had more bargain training shoes and t-shirts than you could wave the proverbial stick at. And lo, they had a whole display of wrist supports…..all of them for the right wrist. What do they teach shop assistants these days? When I asked, quick as a flash, he told me “It’s far more common for people to injure their right wrist, you know.” Disbelieving, I said I thought that left wrist injuries could never be ruled out, and so where were the left wrist supports. “Oh, we’ve sold them all,” he said. Go figure.

More at another time. I need a lie down in a dark room after that.

To the song-watchers, the title of this blog is, of course, from a song of that name by Melanie. The title seemed to convey the right idea.

And Season's Greetings from him, too.

My regular reader will remember that I went off-grid for almost all of September and October. My 2011 racing season actually came good while I was away, but the European Masters Games track in Lignano really did for my achilles tendons. Several other athletes report the same thing. It was like concrete, and no was suitable for a major event like that. I learned a lot about collagen. Specifically, how slowly it repairs. And I guess that the month I spent after the EMG, riding my motorbike and lugging cameras around the mountains didn’t really serve as recovery time.

Not sure this did my sprinting any good! September 2011

Consequently, by the time I’d returned home, settled back into my new routine enough to start training again, and begun working hard enough to make a difference but not hurt my heels any further, I’m imagining that most of those I will race against next season were much further into their stride, as it were.

New routine? Yeah, now that I’m not working, except in a voluntary capacity, I have time on my hands, in theory. I wish it felt like it at the moment, though. What I am managing to do is to keep to my training routine pretty well. Gone are the days when the demands of a full time job meant skipped or skimped sessions, days lost from being just too damned worn out, physically or mentally, to be able to bother, and so on.

I never did kid myself, however, that, having left work (I can’t bring myself to use the word “retired”) I’d be able to train every day, crank out great big long sessions, and all that stuff. Currently, I’m content with being able to relax a bit before taking on a session, being able to do the session at a decent pace and quality, and in full, and then to be able to rest up properly afterwards. As I reminded someone recently, It isn’t actually the training that gets you fit, it’s the process of adaptation that takes place after each training session.

As a runner, I need to confess something unusual. I actually hate running. Let me qualify that. I actually hate running any great distance, and I loathe cross-country running with a deep and lifelong hatred! I’ve done my share of both. I had a spell in my 30s when a long-term injury prevented any sort of sprinting and sprint training. I regularly ran 10ks and half marathons. And hated it. I’d hoped to add a photo of me suffering in a half marathon in 1986. I’ve mislaid it for now. It’ll turn up.

Without divulging secrets, most of my training currently revolves around a core of strength, agility, and leg-speed training. I do the boring stuff, like stamina and cardio work, of course. I wish I could bring myself to enjoy it, though. I’m happy enough to enjoy my own company while training, and not to be bothered by how good (or bad) a session companions might be having. I’m also imaginative enough to devise sufficient variety in my routines to stop me getting stale, and I’m good at stealing great ideas from other people. Perversely, living more than 20 miles away from the nearest decent track, and within walking distance of my gym, means that I never have the excuse of bad weather to avoid doing some sort of decent session, too.

I’m feeling a bit like a kid in the back of the car, asking “Are we nearly there yet?” The answer seems at present to be “Nowhere near”. The more difficult question is “Are we having fun yet?”

Two “By the way” bits to close: in keeping with tradition, the title of this blog is a song title. By the wonderful Martin Carthy.) And the first draft of the web site covering the big Dolomites project mentioned back before my Big Adventure is now on line. You can find it here.

Suddenly the sheer scale of the First World War hit me hard. Mine wasn’t a name like Smith, Jones, or Brown. Mine’s a common enough surname, particularly in parts of Northern Ireland, where my late father’s family are from, but by coupling it with my first names, I expected to find maybe two or three entries. Not 54.

I have three first names (a family tradition) and there were even CWGC entries for soldiers with the same initials. I was also pretty sure that none of the entries related to direct relatives. My admittedly pretty thin understanding of my family history is that they were involved in what came to be known as “reserved employment”.

I’d travelled around France and Belgium a lot. I’d admired how beautifully situated and perfectly tended the CWGC cemeteries were, and read lots about the War, including the excellent Lyn MacDonald books. I’d never made a connection with it all at a personal level, though. Reader, that may be your position too. Try the search engine thing. You never know where it might take you.

Now, of course, I couldn’t just let it go at that. It was midwinter, but I began plotting a series of visits in the spring and summer to visit, photograph and pay my respects to each of my namesakes’ graves or memorials. It’s something I’ve completed now, and I’ve visited several more than once. This little project probably reached it’s emotional climax at the little Asservilliers cemetery on the Somme. Nowadays this small graveyard sits right next to the A26 motorway and the TGV line, but it is home in perpetuity for two dead soldiers named T.Phillips. Astonishingly, it is the last repose of an uncle of someone I know, too.

I can never forget the emotion of seeing my own name on a gravestone. My first was at Busigny, deep in rural Picardy. I’d expected it would feel a bit like the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come showing Scrooge his own headstone, but it was far more visceral than that. This was later compounded when I realised that I was visiting the graves only of the namesakes who had died. There would have been others who survived, intact or wounded, physically or mentally scarred, and all forever changed by their experiences. And suddenly I understood how huge this thing called mechanised war really is, how it destroys families, villages, regiments and so on.

Maybe we’re not learning the lessons, but thank you, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, for helping remind us.

At Varennes Cemetery

All boxes ticked, all goals achieved. 3,500 miles travelled, 3,500 photos taken. That’s a satisfying figure, but don’t get the impression I was stopping every mile! I’m blogging this a few days after getting back, in fact. I thought this might be long enough to have given me some idea of the effect the trip has had on me. Sadly, it’s too soon to say. What I can admit to is that I am very relaxed, and very contented about the whole thing.

I had several specific aims – the European Masters Games, some time in the Dolomites, a photographic project, and the like, but these were couched in a pretty loose framework of travel and accommodation. I wanted to keep it loose and follow my nose for a bit, having become too accustomed to needing to be at a specify place at a specific time. Only two pieces of accommodation were pre-booked more than a couple of days in advance. The rest was done using the very able Booking.com iPad app, backed up by reviews I’d read on TripAdvisor. Those really are good tools, by the way. I am glad about this looseness, because it allowed me to re-plan around the only piece of bad weather I encountered. Actually, I ended up with only one wet day in six weeks, plus a couple of close encounters with early winter snow in the Alps. Not bad going, eh?

I thought I’d find turning for home hard, but I managed to make the return legs of the journey a necessary part of the trip, without being so interesting I was tempted to linger further. If I hadn’t been ready to go home (though I was), my wife was keen for me to get back. It was, of course, by her generous agreement that the whole thing happened at all. We did the Venice bit together, of course, and that helped make the thing perhaps seem like two three-week trips. Perhaps.

Coming home was like a time warp. So little had changed. It was just like time travel, really. While I was away, there were moments when time seemed to stand still, and days passed deliciously slowly. I’ve taught enough time management in my time to know that’s nonsense, of course, but I can’t help feeling that was what happened. I’ve also been augmenting my enjoyment and my increasingly poor memory by pretty much constantly playing each day of the trip in succession as a “video in my head”. This is being helped hugely by having shot something like 8 hours of video, mostly while riding the more scenic parts of my route, like the Galibier Pass and the Stelvio Pass. These clips are going to have a wonderfully therapeutic power on bad days to come.

One thing I am very glad of is that in six weeks, I didn’t suffer any spell of significant depression. I feared this quite a lot to begin with. Too bad and it might have caused me to turn for home prematurely. I had several very lonely days, of course. Even now, I choke at how it felt to wander the alleyways of Venice on the day that I’d seen my wife off at the airport. However, in the main, every day had an aim and a purpose, and ended with an outcome.

I am enormously glad I decided to take on the photographic project I’ve mentioned before in this blog. There were times when my shoulders and back were not so glad of my having chosen to lug around a big Bronica GS medium format camera and all the bits that go with it. But working with film, and a great big camera (believe me!) was a very refreshing change from digital snappery, and I’m looking forward to the 14 rolls of film coming back from processing (remember that feeling?). I’m then going to have great fun editing the shots and beginning to assemble them for a future web site. Stay tuned.

Oh, by the way, my travelling companion had a good time, too.

Content with his lot

So, the big adventure my little furry friend and I have been on for nearly six weeks is reaching its end. As I write, two more nights and I expect to be home. Basically just a load of miles to do now, one of which will see me top 3,000 miles since I left home. I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time wondering why I really did it, what it’s achieved, whether it will “change” me, and so on. Just wondering, mind you. No conclusions. I’m not home yet.

This blog is principally about running and racing. Forgive me if it might not have seemed like that for the past few episodes. A nagging thought in the back of my mind since early on has also been that this trip has some similarities with my running. I’ll not stretch the analogy too far, but you’ll get the drift.

Basically, I run because I can. I am very mindful of, and at times driven by, memories of the years when significant back injury meant I couldn’t. I’m in no way trying to make up for lost time, though. My attitude on that point is aptly summed up by the lyrics of a song recorded by the great Nic Jones (words here). Who is to say that, without that injury, which put paid to many years of quite high level performance, I’d still be running?

Not only because I can, but because I choose to. I know many fit people who could, but don’t, by choice. Some have stopped, others never started. Others are just put off by the whole “older athlete” thing. I tackled this head on in a rather well received essay I wrote a couple of years back, called “Heroes of Freaks”, which you can read here .

I could also have gone with the flow of the “running boom” and decided that, although I was a sprinter once, I’ll be a casual marathon runner now. I chose to remain a sprinter, knowing it would never be easy. It never was.

The similarities with my recent travels relate to things like: a) a middle-aged man doing something most would have thought he’d have got out of his system years ago; b) me chosing to do this as a means to at least mark, if not celebrate, my retirement from work, as opposed simply to putting my feet up and lounging back; c) me chosing to make this thing pretty difficult – a photographic assignment, high standard international races, and time in several different mountain areas all thrown into the mix.

As an analogy or parallel with sport, the trip has ticked some boxes, therefore. basically, I chose to do something out of the mainstream, and did it the difficult way.

That’s pretty satisfying, when I put it like that.

I’m in Chamonix. It’s been both an exciting and a restful few days since the last blog, but now my big trip begins to have a sense of going home. Its own “autumn”, if you like. My weather has turned. I’ve had a bit of re-planning of my itinerary, which was only ever vague to begin with, and a couple of lucky escapes from early snow. Snow might be ok in a car with snow tyres or chains, but on a large and heavy loaded motorbike, it is no go.

I was sorry to leave the Dolomites, especally as it was on a very murky morning, which robbed me of the final photo I needed for my big project. However, I’d been in a rather indifferent hotel for a couple of nights, one in which non-smokers were a beleagured minority, and so the fresh air was welcome. My route to Andermatt, in Switzerland, involved some back-tracking, but also took me through places I had travelled a few years ago, and wanted to see again.There was also a race on. Against the weather, this time.

For several days, the forecasts had been certain – the Central Alps was in for some snow and a real freeze. I’d abandoned a few days’ plans in faour of a couple of nights luxury near the Italian Lakes, but I had to get there first. Dropping into Andermatt, in central Switzerland, gave all the signals that big weather changes were imminent, with black skies on the horizon. I had an anxious night as it rained with snow forecast, and I rode out of the town after breakfast as heavy snow began to fall. Fortunately, my route was pretty much straight into the 17km long Gotthard Tunnel, heading south, under the mountains. At the other end, it was dry and sunny. Such is Alpine weather.

There was a similar fortunate escape crossing the Simplon Pass, on my way over towards France two days later. Major snow had clipped the area about two hours before I passed through. There was masses of the stuff on the mountains and on the roadsides, but the black stuff was clear.

Chamonix was freezing when I got here. Almost literally. Two degrees. Remember, I’ve been used to 29 degrees recently. Overnight, it rained. I could hear it all night. I expected to wake to oodles of the white stuff. Not a problem this time – I have three nights here. However, it also warmed up a lot, and the rain actually stripped off a lot of snow laying below 1,500 metres.

So, I’m writing this at breakfast before a morning spent wandering around the outdoor equipment shops etc of Chamonix. Plenty of them to keep me occupied. Having no room for any more luggage is a good antidote to retail therapy, too. Wish me luck!

Next blog is likely to be about going home.

Heaven, in that sense, would be unremittingly rocky, drawn like a child would draw mountains, and with a sky of the deepest blue imaginable. Such clouds as there would be would only be there for dramatic effect. There would be next to nobody else about, and I’d have endless power in my camera batteries, and loads of space on the cards in the cameras. Yup, by that token, the day was indeed one in Heaven. But then, so was the next, and the next, and….

However, all good things must come to an end, and today is effectively the day I start to point this trip of mine in a vaguely homeward direction. By a rough calculation, I’ll be back in ten days from now. In part, I’m taking the philosophical view that all good things must come to an end. On a more practical note, places I have been going to are now very much gearing down for the break between summer and skiing. It’s actually getting difficult to guarantee somewhere for a meal of an evening. This weather, perfect though it may have been for weeks, is not going to hold, and a mountain area in the first storms of autumn is somewhere I want to avoid, being as I am travelling on two wheels.

I have had amazing success with the photographic project that was to form a backbone of this trip. As a reminder, I’ve been aiming to take a 2011 equivalent of each of 36 photos I have in a hand-made book, taken in the Dolomites in about 1911. I’d estimated possibly several years to complete the groundwork for this. At time of posting this, I have 33 of the 36 in the can, all shot on large format film, and backed up with digital versions from the same spot. I’ve got there by good weather, principally, coupled with (in order of importance) good luck, hard graft and good local knowledge of some areas. An early job upon return will be to track down somewhere that can develop the negatives really well. I also need to be turning my thoughts to the sort of web site the stuff will be going on to. I’ve been working on notes for the accompanying words on several evenings while dining.

Before I finish here, I have a day to capture two of the final photos. The third one is just going to have to wait. It was taken from a very inaccessible place high in the mountains, which I have visited once before. Whatever else I have with me on this trip, I am not equipped to get back up there solo or safely. Impressed that the original photographer managed with, I think, a 5×4 plate camera. I quite like the idea of having one piece of the jigsaw still needing to be fitted. An excuse to return, were one really to be needed.

My choice of hotel for the next couple of nights has not been a good one. This one flouts EC law on smoking in indoors, and will be the subject of a flaming review from me on the bookings web site I used, which is normally so reliable.

I’m hoping I’ll be in Switzerland for the next blog.

Spending time here has always been an integral part of the journey I’ve been on for nearly a month now. Those of you who know me will know something of my attachment to this area, and the work I later came to do here. This all came about in the late 1980′s through a mixture of good fortune, a good friend and some sheer hard graft. Those of you who knew me well in the 1990′s will fully understand why I am here on this journey, and what it means to me.

The good friend I mentioned went by the name of Butch. His real name was Frederick, but I never heard him called anything other than Butch. Even by his wife. An extraordinary guy, and given the connotations latterly attaching to a nickname like that, a man of real, unflinching character not to ditch it for something else.

Butch joined the climbing club I’d helped start in the late 1970′s. He was already a full member of the Alpine Club, had travelled and worked in many parts of the world, and was, it must be said, old enough to be the father of any of the rest of us in the club at that time. Butch also had a thing about the Dolomites. He’d spent time there regularly in the latter part of the 1950′s and was on the lookout for a climbing partner to return there with. It took until 1986, but he persuaded me in the end.

The place had changed beyond all recognition in the time since Butch had been there, except up in the mountains, and in the mountain huts. Unbelievably (to me) we even met the wife of an old hut guardian who remembered him! Not that it was hard, really. Think slightly slimmed down version of Ronnie Drew, from The Dubliners, similar Dublin-by-way-of-other-places Irish brogue, and humour and annecdotes well beyond the gifts any one man ought to have posessed.

We found ourselves in the Sexten Dolomites early in our jaunt. I’d never been anywhere like it before. Huge pillars of rock, Mountains like a young child would draw them. All either up or down. Very little sideways. Our mixture of good weather, good choice of routes to climb, including the first British ascent of one, and Butch’s natural garrulous nature in the mountain huts of an evening, made the trip for me. Frankly, it changed the course of my life for the ensuing twenty or more years. Tales for another time, perhaps.

I spent today in the Sexten Dolomites too, visiting a couple of readily accessible places Butch and I knew from those days. He was like a ghost behind me on the paths. I half expected to look back and see him sitting on a rock enjoying one of his “funf Minuten Zigaretten Pause”. But that wasn’t to be.

Because Butch died last Christmas. His descent into the hell of prostate cancer was at the time of my own battles with severe depression, and we didn’t even speak on the telephone. One of his daughters rang me in January. I’d been away, and missed his funeral too. I could have used today to scatter his ashes or something. I’ve actually no idea what he would have wanted. We were living life to the full on our original visit, and on several follow-up trips to the Dolomites, such that death was never a topic.

I mourn his passing and think of him often, but I owe to him the joy I get from places like the Sexten Dolomites. And today, that was some joy.