Posted by andy bolger on April 14, 1999 at 00:49:52:
A.R. was not alone in eliminating elimination from his texts. In mountaineering literature all climbers were totally constipated until about the mid 70's, I think, the era of Doug Scott, Dougal Haston etc. Now no epic is complete without a lovingly descibed 'frozen pee bottle' episode.
When we lived on a houseboat at Wroxham, ecology had just been invented and we had to use the dreaded 'port a loo'. This was to preserve the fishes by preventing them feeding on our waste products. I'll spare you the details of emptying it, but they were sufficiently grim as to make it a house(boat) rule that gentlemen were to use the bushes during the hours of darkness.
Other things A.R. seems to have overlooked include:
squabbles,
Dow Crag, which is one of the largest and finest climbing venues in England and clearly visible from Wildcat Island and vise versa, one of the great joys of being a very moderate mountaineer (such as myself) is to look down at the Lake and its islands from a perch on Dow),
The Pudding Stone, which is an enormous boulder at the site of the over night camp in SD,
A very fine secret passage to the High Tops by way of Tilberthwaite Gill, this comes complete with two waterfalls and a cave, ( does this sound familiar?)
and ski-ing in WH. But on this subject I am severley biased and only want to crow that I got out on my skis in the evening sun here in a Derbyshire April.
O.K. you guys, shoot me down. I expect to be put right on all the above points.