brothers go camping and climb Ben Alder

Spending the last few years on Tenerife has made me lose my real lived sensory awareness of the enormity of the seasonal pendulum in Northern Europe.

Where would one be here without the summer months? ...struck with some sort of seasonal affective disorder, I'd say.

O how we need these wafts of warm air to chase away the weary dreary winter chill;

we really need to fill our eyes with lush leaves and lingering light all night.

Summer, when sleeping out on a mountain top seems feasible and really appealing,

thanks to the tilt of the planet as she orbits around the sun.

Aye, we can all do with a decent dose of summer therapy.

Thanks, tilt.

Regarding evening meals, we had arranged that we would take turns to cook over the three nights.  The first night camping at Linn of Tummel I arrived first and had baked tatties with cheese and lentils waiting warm on the embers when Kevin and Finlay arrived.  The next two nights, however, without really planning it, unable to really prevent it, we all just found ourselves mucking in - chopping onions, boiling pasta, chucking in chickpeas, creating sauces with great glugs of hoppy tasty homemade beer, thickening them with great dollops of peanut butter and great slabs of solid coconut cream.  We were all reading from the same page in our intuitive cookery book, as it were - all having worked up a similar great appetite after a great day's hiking in the hills.

One the second evening we came to a beautiful bit of sand sticking out into Loch Ericht, strewn with great bits of pine roots which were beautiful and old and gnarly and it seemed somehow profligate for us just to burn them like that on a common camp fire but it also felt special and privileged.

A man and a teenager - probably father and son - walked past with relatively small rucksacks.  We told them that we reckoned we would camp right here; they said that they would camp a bit further on.

"How do they manage to go camping, like us, but carrying so much less?"

"They are obviously not doing the same camping-cooking trip that we are"

"They are probably carrying lightweight ready meals"

 

What was the last night like for you?

I don't know . . . I was tired from the walking but I didn't want to go to sleep.  There was a hushed stillness in the air.  It felt like we didn't need to say anything at all.  There was nothing to say.  I kept eating things.  Our eyes would meet occasionally across the fire and we would just smile with some knowing appreciation, looking around at the stillness and slowness of the coming dawn.  

Kevin and Finlay took a dip in the loch, and came back shivering with vitality.  How was it, Kevin?  "It was cold," he emphasised, with an irrepressible grin.  "Just imagine being cold - that is what it is."  

At that point I was particularly enjoying the warmth of the fire and the thought of plunging into cold water was somewhat off-putting, but after some time I could not resist the appeal either.  However beautifully flickering and warm the flames may seem, these qualities are only enhanced when one has just come from a shocking cold loch.

Almost all these photos come from Kevin's camera.  Thanks, Kevin