Scotland, 2026

The 4C's - well, AH - have organised a trip to Scotland again this winter, and it almost feels like a tradition now, harkening back to the days of yore. Following last year's Cairngorms, we're going to Fort William this year. Here, as an aide memoire, is a pic of most of the stuff I'm taking. I'm driving alone in the car so can afford to take whatever I feel like.

So we have:

* (green bag on left): Miranda's boots and raincoat

* (grey bag on top with stripey stuff): misc winter clothes likely not to be used

* (black bag rightwards): Daniel's yellow sleeping bag, a bivvi sac, and inners for me and E; I expect to use none of that

* (white bag above that): rock shoes, chalk: since E has invited me bouldering on Thursday night

* (small black bag rightwards): my usual "little black bag" of compass, spare batteries, spare glasses, lip salve, headtorch

* (purple bag): my walking boots, and my old plastic boots, to go with the skis

* (black and white holdall): two new tech axes, two old tech axes, two lightweight axes, two aluminium crampons and one steel, and the new Leopards, E's helmet, two Z-fold poles and two telescopic poles

* (blue bag): std gear bag, which I guess I'll sort on Friday night, or maybe Thursday

* (rope bag): old slinky blue; new slinky orange 60m, new non-slinky blue, my helmet, E's harness (my two are in the gear bag)

* (in front): my old skis with Silvretta 404 bindings (and, not shown: poles). I might get a chance to try them, who knows. And hope to hire some modern bindings for a day, too.

In my big blue rucksac: old green warm waterproof trousers; new black waterproof trousers; raincoat; thin yellow spare raincoat; walky-talkies; yellow bag with chargers and cables.

Also to take: car food, and enough pasta to get us through Friday night if we need it; and 4 x fruit+nut bars.

Book review: The Inferno

The Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle is very much in the style and tone of his other books, but my first impression is that despite the non-stellar¹ prose, it is just more intelligently written than the other stuff I've been surfing through recently.

The plot, in brief: a Scientist, Our Hero, Cameron who is in fact The Cameron, in Australia to arbitrate rival designs for a new radiotelescope, notices a reddish patch in the sky that isn't Mars, and which turns out to be not a supernova but even more excitingly the first signs of the galactic core turning into a quasar. Returning to his home in northern Scotland, conveniently shielded by the season from the core, he and a few others survive and begin to rebuild, encountering and overcoming vicissitudes along the way. At the end, he discovers that a providential darkness that had shielded the Earth from overheating had some unexplained extraterrrestrial origin.

All of this is quite nicely handled. There's a bit of religion thrown in - Cameron's wife gets religion and leaves him for the madness down south, there's a nice singing-in-ruined-cathedral scene at the end, and Cameron ponders the observations made by the Mad Astronomer which reveal that the darkness-that-saved wasn't natural. Cameron speaks gaelic to ghillies and ponders Culloden. I could find out if the Hoyles had roots up there, but perhaps it is just the climbing: there's a lot of names of mountains and the A9 out of Pitlochry stuff. The initial build up is nice: our man is from CERN, but knows enough to arbitrate UK vs Oz radiotelescope designs, flys around the world a bit, and sees kangaroos or are they wallabies in Oz. It all seems a bit like the rather more gentle pace of scientific life in the 60s. The scene when "Mars" is seen is almost comic, undoubtedly by design: Hoyle is either making fun at, or just replaying in-jokes, about astronomers only looking through computer-pointed telescopes and not actually knowing where any of the planets are.

In a way the ending, by which I mean all the stuff after the inferno, is - apart from the cathedral - a bit mechanical, working through "the obvious" sort of problems, but not in a heavy-handed maner.

Notes

1. Arf arf.

Book review: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Ralf Dahrendorf is a book; Goodreads starts off The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 effectively ended the division of Europe into East and West, and the features of our world that have resulted bear little resemblance to those of the forty years that preceded the Wall's fall. The rise of a new Europe prompts many questions, most of which remain to be answered. What does it all mean? Where is it going to lead? Are we witnessing the conclusion of an era without seeing anything to replace an old and admittedly dismal way of life? What will a market economy do to the social texture of various countries of Central Europe? Will it not make some rich while many will become poorer than ever? That last question at least turns out to be answerable No: most have become better off, some greatly so; few have become worse off.

However, I read this thing more than a year ago and, as Spike Milligan memorably said, it left an indellible blank on my mind. The title aims far too high; not only does it - as I recall - fail from this distance in time to manage much in the way of foresight, but philosophically it falls far short of Burke.

Books read, 2026

I have a (crudely ranked) sci-fi books list; and an "other" list. This I one find myself in need of: simply a list of books read, in order. See-also the 2025 version.

* As On a Darkling Plain, Ben Bova

* The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner

* Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Ralf Dahrendorf 

* The Inferno, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle

Book review: As On a Darkling Plain

Scifi tosh of my least favourite genre, a self-conscious² attempt to be a proper book. By Ben Bova; see-also The Exiles Trilogy which I also didn't like. So why did I buy it? Mostly for the title, and the hope that it would be an interesting Icehenge knock-off. But it isn't.

Indeed to my surprise it predates Icehenge. This post tells me also that it is a fix-up, which neatly explains the pointless "Jupiter" part which takes up 2/5 of the book, and in which our author runs through yet more cod psychology, and fails to think of an alien animal more interesting than a whale or a shark, but like really really big.

Unlike Icehenge, which manages to imbue the monoliths with a sense of mystery, here the buildings on Titan are just big buildings that throb like a post office motorbike¹.

Going for two out of two on annoyingness³, the book also displays the irritating trope where the character sees something - in this case the buildings - and instantly and unshakeably adopts some prejudice - in this case that the aliens are hostile. And then even more irritatingly the characters have a stupid discussion in which the hero blatantly fails to advance any plausible arguments in favour of his prejudice, and no-one calls him a dimwitted tosser. Sorry, am I ranting?

Lastly, at the end of the book, it turns out that the mysterious throbbing motorbike - sorry, I mean buildings - are emitting gravity waves aimed at causing sunspots and solar flares, in a pathetically inefficient attempt to erase life on Earth. Why the aliens would choose such a hopelessly wigmawolishly woundabout way of killing us all instead of just tossing a couple of asteroids or even a few big nukes at us is never made clear.

Trivia: Sirius B went white dwarf 120 million years ago, so his timeline doesn't fit; but that may not have been known then, for all I know.

Notes

1. What's big and red and throbs between your legs?

2. If, per Lewis, the chief virtue of medaeival literature is its lack of strain, this type of book is the opposite.

3. I shall discretely ignore the dull love triangle stuff, but make it 3/3 if you like.

New gear: wires, crabs

I was in Wales last weekend with the 4C's in the Rucksack Club hut in the Llanberis pass - more on that anon - and passing by Joe Brown's in Capel Curig stopped to poke around. They have an excellent selection of gear, I've not seen better elsewhere, probably better than Outside in Hathersage. Anyway I've begun my project to renew my gear, some of which dates back to the early 90's so is up to 35 years old. Although I do have a lot of newer stuff. First up is a set of wires, technically Wallnuts, from DMM.

And some crabs aka carabiners.

Note what isn't desperately obvious from the picture: they are smaller than standard, by a little, thus lighter, hence "Wisp". Looking at the online prices, Joe Brown's was actually slightly cheaper, something to remember.

New running shoes

Happy New Year. Having lost my beloved Boston Adizero 9's to old age, mountain walking and erging, themselves replacements for the 8's,

I had bought some Altra's in July 2024:

These are nice, without too much absurdly overbuilt heel as almost everything has these days, though a little bitey on the ankles; I've had to cut them back a little. But I still hankered after the Boston's, though you can no longer buy the 9's. Or so I thought! But recently I found some online (Joom) and bought them:

They are nice, although when wearing them I do find them a touch flat :-). I may now be eligible for Imelda status: