Book review: Pavane

And oldie from Keith Roberts. I liked it enough that I've just ordered The Grain Kings, which I also read oh so many years ago. These are not super high quality stuff, but they have a flavour which modern stuff lacks.

This is an alternate-history "novel" constructed from some loosely-connected short stories: Queen Elizabeth was assasinated, the Armada succeeded, the Catholic Church controls the world; edicts such as Petroleum Veto restrict progress. But in a way it is really about the Isle of Purbeck and Corfe Castle. I think I'd like to visit there in the spring. Let's see if I remember.

Mixed into the stories of traction-engine folk, with their lovingly-described tending, and the signalling, and the lords and ladies, there is the Faery folk as an edge presence, nicely handled, almost as a ghost story when first introduced. Possibly not quite consistently - this is fixup after all - because the Seneschal turns out to be one. Trivia: in the end, the Seneschal turns out to have a primitive radio; but it doesn't do much and it isn't clear how he got it, or who he talks to. This seems to be an oddity. I think this is part of a not-quite-realised plan to have tech start creeping in.

Wiki says "The location and flavour, nostalgic yet tragic in outlook..." which fits fairly well; tragic is too strong though. As everyone say, the coda - "explaining" the Church's cunning plan to restrict science just long enough that humanity has time to mature and not to nuke ourselves to death - jars; I recommend not reading it.

Trivia: given the detail about headers and duplex and routing protocol from the semaphore chains, I'd expected him to have some kind of technical background, but it seems not.

Book review: The Witch Roads

By Kate "Cold Magic" Elliot, though I read that before I started routinely reviewing stuff. Perhaps I'll now read volume three. Aanyway, as to this: I enjoyed it, though it feels somewhat Young Adult-y, although then again perhaps that is why I enjoyed it. And I look forward to volume two.

There are decent characters, decent world-building, and a decet plot. Is that all a bit too decent, perhaps?

The takeover of the Prince by the Haunt - only a minor spoiler - is a good excuse for insinuating <low-status, female, main character> into the plot. And the setup of the Empire is nice, complete with Interlocutor to speak for officials whose status is too high to allow them to speak to peons; shades of White Queen. The shame is that Our Author allows herself to break these rules, so that the <spunky low-status characters> can speak up. It would have been a better, more interesting, book if this wasn't allowed. Or if she would let her characters get cuffed to the ground for their temerity.

Kem being Kema being female is a bit weird. At least in volume one it is apparently pointless, and appears out of character for the society. Although it isn't obvious that the society is quite consistent: females occupy high-status positions, yet the soldiery is rather "rapey", as one Goodreads review put it.

Trivia: the climatic crossing-of-the-gap-by-rope-bridge is a bit strange, as the bunch of wimps that they are require four ropes, two for feet and two handrails, to get across, even in an emergency. This is pretty feeble; one-hand-one-foot would not be out of order; and really, with some kind of support loop just one rope would be enough, so I say they're a bit wet. Trivia two: the theurgist avoids climbing out of the hole-behind-the-waterfall by using up one of her bound air spirits. This is obviously stupid: they are limited and valuable, why waste one merely in order to give the other characters something to talk about?

New heart rate monitor

My Garmin chest-strap heart rate monitor became unreliable, and I realised it was because the casing was falling apart; I "fixed" it but that made it totally dead; so after a few weeks without and realising that the Forerunner 55 light-based HR is unreliable for climbing or erging, I decided to buy a new one. Initially I assumed I needed a Garmin one; but "research" said that any Ant or BT one should do; so I risked a Polar. And lo, it connects and works. Here it is.

And here is the old Garmin one.

They are about the same size and weight; the strap design is similar; they both take coin cell batteries. The Polar one was a "Polar H9 Heart Rate Sensor – ANT Plus/Bluetooth - Waterproof HR Monitor with Soft Chest Strap for Gym, Cycling, Running, Outdoor Sports", £49. A replacement Garmin one would have been £79 I think.

Book review: Maigret a New York

In French, no less. I read it for my mental health. My French comprehension is acceptable, but my vocabulary by no means includes all the words that Simenon uses, so I read this with a combination of blipping, guesswork and Google translate. Wiki isn't interested in it.

This feels to me more like mood-music than kewful: by which I mean it isn't a Poirot, where the Klews are laid out for you if you care to follow them; instead it is more of a novel that happens to be a detective story. Either that or my poor French missed the clues.

Side note: the book is of course in French, as is all the dialogue, except where rarely someone speaks to Maigret in very deliberate English. But it is understood that Maigret is actually speaking English to the New Yorkers. I think this would not in practice have worked: his English, as he notes himself, just isn't good enough.

Laying that aside, what of the story: the famous Commisionaire Maigret, despite being retired,  goes to New York at the behest of a Young Man, concerned that his loving father has had a strange change of tone - letters are shown - and perhaps fears for his life. Arriving by ocean liner, this being 1946, the young man disappears and Maigret meets the Father, and Strangely Undocile Secretary. They are uninterested in Maigret and his mission, and curiously uninterested in the disappearance of the young man.

After anough local colour has been applied to make an interesting book, and enough alcohol drunk to render and entire police department senseless, it turns out that the SUS is actually a lovechild of the F but only Recently Reunited after being given away at birth; that the F had - somewhat improbably, but roll with it, - killed the mother, who he loved, jealous of an affair, thirty years ago; and is being blackmailed by the archetypical and always available New York Gangsters including the notorious Sicilians. Anyway, the RR and the NYG explain the change of tone of the letters, since the YM, the second son of the second wife, was always a bit meh, and only loved when he was the only one available; some flim-flammery excuse is offered for his disappearance-at-disembarcation. Maigret decides not to trouble the NYPD about the stale murder, and sails off home. The End.

Book review: The Shapes of Sleep

By J. B. "An Inspector Calls" Priestley. Not a well-known book; judge that by its Wiki page. Old JB is an intelligent and well-brought up chap, and so has written a corresponding book. Without being too unkind to it I suppose I shall say that it would raise no great enthusiam; it is a workmanlike product to entertain one for a while, and then be put back into an appropriately coloured room¹.

Somewhat surprisingly the cover fits the story: a bygone-looking town - likely Gottingen in Germany - with a shady character in the lamp-dark streets carrying some purloined portfolio to an unknown destination. From the cover this could be between the wars, but it was written in 1962, and includes the dangerous border between East and West Germany, so is set about then.

Priestly was born in 1894 and so is antique by the time of this book, and rather comes across as a grumpy old man: the larded-on social commentary towards the end is of the everything's-going-to-the-dogs kind; in some respects he would be regarded now as unenlightened: he even says "poofter" at one point. He is also under the impression that Hamburg doesn't have much nightlife, which seems odd.

The story is a mystery, or a spy thriller, assuming we can discard the social commentary which I did. Our Hero - as tradition demands, tall, strong of arm and of character, down on his luck and yet living in a nice central flat, disappointed in love, clever - is called in by a chum to try to discover who has stolen a piece of paper from an advertising exec's desk. This elaborates into being hit on the head by a Girl, and chasing off to Germany for colour, in a manner to me curiously familiar from Jack Vance in Ecce and Old Earth. In the end - look away now if you want to read it - it turns out that this is both spy and detective-mystery: because Dr Voss who has invented The Shapes of Sleep and therefore interested the admen who want to use them to lull people into buying products, is also a hardened Communist and has been passing info to the East and therefore interested the Spooks; and this combination neatly explains the rather confused Klews which have been scattered through the book. This is... clever, I think, but somehow not terribly interesting. I spare you the society of Antiants, which although he declines the etymology I feel sure is a play on Antients, aka an obsolete form (see Hobbes) of Ancients.

Notes

1. This is a reference to R, who kindly lent it to me; he had bought it because it fit the colour scheme of his "retro room". This is not a criticism of his reading habits. I should perhaps add that if you were to take the book seriously, and go about remembering all the Klews and stuff, it might be harder work. For example, I still don't know why K wanted to offer the UK exec the piece of paper in the first place, or how the US exec came to know about the Shapes, but I'll just glide over that.

Book review: The Dosadi Experiment

Mumblings from the author of Dune. It lacks the epic sweep of Dune, but alas shares, but displays to a greater extent, Dune's worst flaw: it tells but doesn't show. Time and again we are told how clever the characters are being; we are told there are wheels within wheels and plots within plots; but we are never shown these things; instead we get the fairly routine events that FH's mind can devise.

The second major problem is FH's sociology / politics / Darwinism: the idea is that a massively over-crowded society left to evolve for a twenty generations will develope into something interesting; in particular that the people will become hyper-capable. This deosn't seem particularly likely; more likely is barbarism and oppression. But this again is a "Dune" theme; he has his Arrakis, and his Salusa Secundus. FH is clearly interested in these ideas; but doesn't really have anything to say about them.

Far too much of it is too incoherent to really attempt to analyse properly. By the end, at the "trial", it seems like almost everyone is in someone else's body, for no particularly obvious reason.  By that point I was just reading through hoping to get to the end, which mercifully eventually arrived.

Book review: Broken Angels

SciFi tosh, but better than the usual run, for slightly hard to identify reasons. The summary: <tough battle-hardened man> is recruited in a a warzone on a distant planet and after <recruiting the rest of the team> travels to an archeological dig to explore a <mysterious alien artifact> and <people die> before Our Hero wins the <climatic fight> in <surprising way> is quite generic, but the writing is better and the sense of mystery retained for longer than usual.

In the universe - and I like this bit - it turns out that Mars was inhabited, until about 50 kyr ago, by "Martians", though they came from elsewhere; and humanity is now slowly picking through the remains of their civilisation, including their star maps of where other inhabitable planets are (though if these creatures preferred Mars to Earth, their ideas of inhabitability clearly differ wildly from ours; the book carefully avoids the slightest discussion of whether they ever came to Earth).

It would be nice if the book thought about how this encounter has affected humanity, but apart from a little throwaway stuff - religions adapted - it doesn't. Did science wither, in favour of archeology? Or was it accelerated? I think RM's science is too weak for him to write around it.

Wiki tells me that "Writing for The Guardian, Colin Greenland found that Altered Carbon was about fighting against wealth and power"; when you look at his pic you'll see why; and anyway he wrote Take Back Plenty, on of the few SciFi books crappy enough that I didn't bother to finish. The book might possibly be said to have such themes; but really any philosophy in it is incoherent; it is ranting of the "You shot him! Meh, I'm a mercenary, blame the merchants for my evil!" variety or whatever. I think it is better considered as scene-setting, or simply dialogue. You can just as easily consider it a plea for free-market freedom which actually achieves things against the dead hand of government.

The bits along the lines of "the Martians were winged predadators, therefore their psychology must have been X" were annoyingly stupid. Ditto the Quellist mock-thought, which recalls the worst bits of Dune.

Plot holes are numerous. People's conciousness / memory / personality can be transmitted between the stars, and "resleeved" in new bodies. Mysteriously, no-one at all discusses the sources of the new bodies. Mysteriously, there is no market in fat old rich people dropping into toned young bodies. Mysteriously, no-one plays at swapping to a body of alternate sex; and so on. All of that, which would be social commentary, is just suppressed, because it would be terribly inconvenient. As would the familiar problems of duplication. As would the problems of "wouldn't you rather live in virtuality, it is much nicer in there?" - which would helpfully solve the problem of sourcing bodies. Weirdly, the only backup most people have is in their "cortical stack" whereas it would be natural to have a public repository; then people suffering "real death" - i.e., body and stack - would only lose since-last-backup. Banks, I'm pretty sure, faces up to this.

Oh yes, and despite all this re-animation, with mercenaries guaranteed a new body if killed, the characters still continue to treat death as a terrible thing and talk like grunts out of 'Nam. That brings me to the "torture people to death in public" scene which I thought tasteless and silly: having a policy like that is just dumb, for the reasons that become apparent.

Space travel is only roughly sketched in, and not very realistically: the colony ships can travel at near lightspeed (not very plausible in itself), whereas the military ships are much slower. But I think this is needed for him to get the expansion rate he needs.

The novel provides us with two wonders: a instantaneous-travel-gate, and a giant-alien-spaceship (and never really considers the lack of compatibility between these two items). They display a remarkable lack of interest in these wonders; pressure of situation might possibly justify that, but I still consider the book stunted for its lack of response. The reason being, of course, that Our Author has enough imagination to create / copy these items, but can't really fill them in. On the other hand the atmosphere on board the space ship is nicely done.

The "Our space ship is under attack from another space ship! Never mind, it is just an eternally-recurring 1.2 kyr pattern!" is dumb, because (as Our Author realises a little bit later) it would be too much of a coincidence for them to have turned up just at the right time. He is reduced to ridiculous straits, and decides that there's a whole fleet of suchlike, attacking, what, every day? (Using mega-weaponry, whose bleedin' obvious detonations are mysteriously invisible from not-very-far-away. Also, their deduction that the weapons are FTL isn't believable). That bit needed heavy rewriting to make some kind of sense. Just delete the attacks, I think, and find the sense of menace elsewhere. The book is, obvs, very much wham-bam; but that kind of storyline makes me think it was written that way too, without much prior plot outline or editing.

Trivia: this review points out his use of periods to write speech. The reviewer hated it; I liked it; perhaps because I do it myself.

Book review: Call for the Dead

This is John le Carre's first spy story. Though - while it is indeed a spy story - it is more in the murder mystery detective type¹: Smiley is Poirot, various people are murdered, the mystery is why Fennan wanted a wake-up call at 8:30 the next day. And the answer is that his wife dunnit, not him. This is acceptably satisfying, but I did guess it. A decent book; reasonably written, an interesting story, some characters, and a little history, of the times, of WWII, of before.

The book spans the transition period from when the secret services were run by oxbridge dons on a part time amateur basis, to a somewhat more professional version. Or at least, so it is portrayed: from before WWII, to the 50s. Life here is not so grungy as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: we have the Oxbridge tinges, the suspects are highly placed and go to the theatre, Smiley has a nice house and is married to a Lady, and so on.

Quibbles: Mundt is a ruthless killer who, when he meets Smiley in a quiet car lot after dark late at night merely roughs him up a bit, and Smiley makes a full recovery. This is implausible.

Once it becomes clear that it is Elsa the spy, we now realise that she must have been relying entirely on Fennan bringing work home. Would that really have been common? And she must have been copying it, despite a lack of any obvious facilities for such. This begins to seem odd. Also, Frey is running a single highly-placed domestic agent, so all this effort is on the off-chance that Fennan brings something useful home. Which, for the past six months, he hasn't been doing. Fennan denounces himself in order to get in contact with The Spies. But... wouldn't the F. O. have some more reasonable mechanism for "I think I'm being spied on, please can I talk to someone in confidence"?

Elsa and Mundt exchange music cases every month via cloakroom tickets. But if they have been doing this for years on end, might not the cloakroom attendant notice either that these people have identical luggage, or that they don't pick up the same luggage they put in?

Frey is a cripple. Yet he runs as fast as normal people.

I would quibble people's motivation for doing all this betrayal. And yet we have stuff like the Cambridge Five; and even today people do really stupid things in nominal opposition to fascism.

I'm not fully convinced that Mundt's adventures here are entirely compatible with the account in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Mundt runs away before anyone suspects him; or certainly before Smiley does. You need to posit an entire deeper layer in order to get Mundt being detained and turned.

At one point, Smiley says something like "we can't stop him yet, we've got no evidence, we'll have to wait until he does something". This seems quite unnatural; spy agencies must have extra-judicial powers². Towards the end, Frey flees, yet Smiley only gets the police to watch for him at all ports after Mendel has located him.

Is there another problem? How does Frey know that Fennan has been denounced and investigated? Fennan isn't going to tell Elsa: the entire point of the charade is to get round her. He can't know it just because he has seen F and S together; so by what magic has he deduced the investigation?

Trivia: my parsing of the title, before reading the book, was something like "elegy" or "despairing remembrance"; the actual meaning is disappointingly mundane.

Notes

1. Indeed the front cover that Wiki shows calls it a crime novel.

2. OTOH it would be entirely in place in a detective story.

Book review: Howard's End

Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. Howards End is considered by many to be Forster's masterpiece, or so says Wiki. I woudn't put it quite like that. Grokipedia says Howards End is a novel by English author E. M. Forster, first published in 1910 by Edward Arnold. The narrative intertwines the lives of the cultured, half-German Schlegel sisters—Margaret and Helen—with the pragmatic, affluent Wilcox family and the impoverished clerk Leonard Bast, centering on the titular Hertfordshire country house as a symbol of enduring English heritage and personal continuity; that is rather closer to what I would say. But then again, Gpedia goes on and on about social conditions, overloading a humble article about a book.

I like it. I first read it years ago; it is part of Mother's collection. It is itself cultured, and well written. The aesthete Schlegels are the sort of people that meet other people at Heidelburg; the nouveau wealthy Wilcoxes are not, but they meet there anyway. The Basts are an unpleasant reminder of lower class reality. I should perhaps say a little more about that. Forster, I suspect, is quite sympathetic to the Basts, or perhaps to the poor in general, but he is himself of course not of that class, and he does not hesitate to make them unattractive rather than idealised; they have found no redemption or spirituality in poverty. Leonard, before he is ground down, has some spark of life; but Jacky has gone by the time we meet her and Leonard does not survive the vicissitudes of the plot.

Our chief character, Margaret, despite being cultured has somehow reached thirty unattached, and oddly decides to love and marry Mr Wilcox. Helen is then the rather scatty one to which things happen. Early on there is a discussion group in which nice upper class women discuss how to help the poor; but as the book in the person of Margaret can't help noticing, all the ideas leave the nice upper class wmoen in charge of the money which they think of doling out to the poor as libraries, or trips abroad, or somesuch; Margaret's suggestion that they just give them money is not well received.

Various events occur which cannot but make us think that Mr Wilcox is not worthy of his wife; and eventually she and Helen essentuially retreat into England, personnified byt the house of Howard's End, which has come down through Mr W's ethereal first wife. Forster is clearly not happy with the march of modernity, but has no real answers to a problem he doesn't clearly state. The book's epigram is "Only connect" but while that might have helped some of the individuals, it too would not solve the problem. Indeed the problem cannot be "solved" in those terms, only embraced.

Fun fact: we used to live in Stevenage.

Trivia: Helen's fecklessness reminds me of Daisy.

Book review: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer... or so Wiki would have you believe. Writing quality is good. The book is somewhat depressing, just because it is describing life in the early 1960's England, which sounds rather grim, though he may be laying it on for effect. I don't recall my parents complaining.

Overall: quite good, interestingly complex, but by now not as striking as I presume it was at its debut. Towards the end there is something of a shift in tone and it becomes heavily philosophical about the whole spying business, except that's not quite the right word; introspective might be better. But by then it is too late. It seemed a little jarring and somewhat forced. And the complaint - I think Leamas was the one complaining - seems rather trivial: he is quite happy when he was there to get Mundt killed, but when it becomes clear he is there to save Mundt and get Fiedler killed, he becomes very sad, and says it is all a rotten corrupt business. I can't see why. Liz puts forward the idea that Fiedler is "only doing his job" but since he is doing his level best in service of the Evil Empire, I don't see we need to care much about that. And, as I think someone in a Len Deighton says at one point: it isn't British police putting bullets through anyone's head without real due process: it is the Evil Empire doing it.

At the end, both Liz and Leamas die, Liz by Mundt's treachery I think; and Leamas by his own choice. But this reads more like a carefully contrived dramatic, sad, conclusion to the book than a plausible event: Mundt has every reason to want everything to go quietly; a messy death, with all the press and trouble with West German and UK authorities and the notice that would then bring to the East German authority, is not at all to his advantage.

At the trial, Mundt is saved when it becomes clear that it is all a clever Blitish Plot to implicate him: Liz's lease has been bought, the grocer paid off, and so on. And yet... these moves are terribly clumsy. How could the authorities, when calmly reviewing the record later, not start to wonder about him? Are we really supposed to believe they would leave him in post? His "miraculous" escape from England remains unexplained.

Fairly early on I guessed that Leamas was doing his "death spiral" in order to get picked up by the Evil Empire. Unfortunately, that meant that the exact details of his fall were somewhat "yes yes I see now get on with the actual plot please". Unfortunately part 2, I think that for actual realism, his fall needed to be longer drawn out; had I been an Agent of the Evil Empire, I'd have been fairly suspicious.

Book review: Hammerfall

Yet more SciFi slop, this time from C J Cherryh.

Having asked myself "Should I just put in a bit more effort and read better books?" while reviewing The Devils, I find myself on this. In my defence I was pretty damn sure I was going to find it tosh; but perhaps unusually for such a prolific author I've not read any of hers before, so gave it a go. Also, it was a fairly easy not-brain-taxing read on a weekend.

The plot is reminiscent of The Memory of Earth in some ways, or at least I found it so (distant planet, forgotten beginnings, overseer, voices in the head). We encounter Our Hero in chains; he is freed and tasked by the Immortal Ruler of the planet to Go East and find out what is there, because A Time Of Trouble Is Coming. And so he sets out on a long weary trek across the great desert, and in the Farthest East he finds a mysterious tower and mysterious people. Unfortunately the plot then requires him to wearily trek all the way back again to the Immortal Ruler, gather all the peoples of the world and then, FFS, he treks wearily back across the desert yet again.

Laid on top of this is the actual point, that the Immortal Ruler has fled to the planet after doing naughty things elsewhere; that the nice people in the tower are trying to help, and that there is a Mysterious Alien Race who are a bit pissed off and will fling space rocks at the planet in order to sterilise it. Our Hero and those similarly afflicted receive Mysterious Visions that the space rocks are going to come, but for my part it was Bleedin' Obvious from the title of the book, so there were no surprises. To be fair, the characters don't get to read the title page I suppose.

The said characters, despite being desert folk on a distant planet, remain resolutely suburban USAnians. Token example: when in the depths of storm the captain of the guards' wife is giving birth, it is essential for Our Hero to go off and find the said captain of guards, for how could a women possibly give birth without her husband present? And Our Hero's inability to concentrate on the big picture unfits him for leadership. Related to this, there is the oh-so-common failing of such books: only the main characters are of any interest to the author, so the main character goes off alone, doing <interesting> stuff, even though he would obvs have a retinue.

I finished it, but only by skipping page after page towards the end, where nothing happens except yet more sand.

Oh, and another irritation, also a rather common one: because of the nature of the plot, piles and piles and literal heaps of people at the end of the caravan are going to die in various hideous ways in the desert. Our Hero knows this, but - despite plentiful lardings of "the law of the desert" whenever the plot finds it convenient - he is obliged to be sad about this; not just sad, but demonstratively sad, and do some pointless things to make this clear, as a suburban USAnian politician would have to weep crocodile tears in a similar situation.

Book review: The Devils

By Joe "Heroes" Abercrombie. It is... OK, I guess. But desperately formulaic. Pack of unlikely assorted magical adventurers sets out across the world on <task> and has <fights> along the way. 

In Heroes and BSC, and perhaps also in TBI, there was at least a spark of something more original; I would have hoped he might make some attempt to escape the tropes of his genre; but no, everything falls back into the same old lazy patterns. Am I too old? Have I read too much? Should I just put in a bit more effort and read better books? I fear that is the case.

To give some positives: the <cast of characters> are fun, there are some jokes, and the world might even be interesting. And of course I did actually finish the thing.

And yet... JA surely made lots of money from his previous books. Could he not afford to have spent an extra year and a bit more care producing this one? For myself, I spent about ten minutes writing this review, and don't feel that I owe it any more time.

London: Pictures at an Exhibition

To London, to see Pictures at an Exhibition. But we went up early, and it was a fine cold sunny day when London's monuments show at their best. GPS track, in case you want help identifying things. See here for all pix.

To Bomber Command. This one is new; 2012.

One of the arches.

Albert. The picture doesn't quite capture his gleam. The scene now shifts to the V+A.

I was struck by the outrageous costumes of the soldiers. And the lion "vomiting" his arm is nice. Not shown here, but on the next panel, we see Joseph, the Holy Virgin, and Our Saviour quietly slopeing off in the background leaving the poor infants to their fate.

Next to the Soanearium, a weird and wonderful place, worth a look I think but perhaps not an over-long one.

South, with views back to Nelson's column in the West.

 

And then finally the Queen Elizabeth Hall, to hear Benjamin Grovesnor, who was jolly good. M points out: we also heard him in March, at West Road. I thought his name was familiar.

New trainers

The thrill-a-minute blogging doesn't relent. Here the tedious news of some new shoes.

These are an el-cheapo (£24.99, good grief) Karrimor "Ortholite" from SportsDirect, bought as wear-around-town type things, and probably to erg in too. Here are the old ones:

The wear, apart from general tattiness, isn't too obvious. The final issue was the wearing down of the padding at the heel, which reveals the plastic stiffener inside, which then rubbed my heel; hence the plaster; but that isn't enough. Slightly less obvious is the hole where it flexes towards the front; this is probably caused by erging. I've hardly ever run in these; I bought them about 15 years ago I think, in Buxton, when I did forget my running shoes; but then mostly left them in the cupboard.

Film review: A Real Pain

ARP is a drama¹ of, as wiki puts it, two mismatched cousins who reunite for a Jewish heritage tour through Poland in honor of their late grandmother. One is neurotic and the other is charming and manipulative; the neurotic one is initially annoying but the C+M one rapidly takes over that role. They join a small tour in Poland; they see stuff like an old cemetery, they visit the Majdanek concentration camp, then the two cousins go see their Grandmother's old house, which predictably enough turns out to be uninteresting². The cinematography isn't interesting either; Poland comes out mostly flat fields; I think they deliberately avoid sun or charming vistas to get the we're-serious-about-this-Holocaust-stuff feel. But actually there's little discussion of that (what, after all, could they possibly say?); there is a bizarre segment where the C+M cousin finds it incongruous to be on a first class train in Poland, which makes no sense at all (perhaps they really were struggling to say something, but failed).

How do we interpret the "real pain" of the title? I offered the C+M cousin, who would indeed be a right pain to be anywhere around. This, I see belatedly, might be supported by the poster for the film. M countered with the pain, passed down the generations, from their Grandmother. My suspicion is that is the film's intent, but I dislike that. (I need to interject some film-back-story: it turns out that the C+M cousin is empty; he lives in his mother's basement and plays video games all day, won't bother go and visit his neurotic cousin, and has attempted to kill himself). I'm not interested in the "pain" of pampered USAnians whose only problem is they don't have anything to do to fill their empty lives. There are far too many people in the world - for example, Gazans oppressed by Hamxs, or if you want something less controversial, Iranians oppressed by the Mad Mullahs - who actually deserve sympathy.

Notes

1. The film, and wiki, claim it as a comedy-drama but really it isn't.

2. The trip hazard bit is so importing US mores into other cultures and just isn't plausible. Was it an attempt at humour?

Book review: Man's Search for Meaning

I think I came across this via an ACX book review; although it might have been this one; or even another; I'm not sure. The book is in two parts: the first is the original, about the concentration camps; the second expounds his "logotherapy" theory, as he says at the request of readers. Note that I finished this a couple of months ago, so my recollections are fading and this review may not be entirely reliable; it certainly lacks detail.

The obvious comparison is to If This is a Man by Primo Levi. The two are more similar than different; I think I preferred ITIAM. The subtext on the image "hope from the Holocaust" is sort-of correct: what he thinks, and it seems quite plausible, is that your chances of surviving rather than dying of misery and apathy were greatly increased by having some purpose in life. But this is trite. The reverse, which the slogan implies to me, that one can find hope - people still being good amongst the horror - is only weakly true.

Let me expand a little on the I am just a teensy tiny bit suspicious that there are things we aren't told, that might not be entirely to his credit; but only because that is almost inevitable, if you survived that I wrote in reviewing ITIAM. He says quite early on On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return. But a little later we have for example I spent some time in a hut for typhus patients who ran very high temperatures and were often delirious, many of them moribund. After one of them had just died, I watched without any emotional upset the scene that followed, which was repeated over and over again with each death. One by one the prisoners approached the still warm body. One grabbed the remains of a messy meal of potatoes; another decided that the corpse's wooden shoes were an improvement on his own, and exchanged them. A third man did the same with the dead man's coat, and another was glad to be able to secure some - just imagine - genuine string. All this I watched with unconcern. Notice that the only sin he confesses is to watching with unconcern. There are no instances of him using brutal force, theft or betrayal. Possibly he got really lucky and just didn't need to do any of that.

Part two, his description of his "logotherapy", I found rather less interesting and only skimmed. He has, of course, no actual meaning to offer - this I guess is good; he has not simply invented a spurious one - and falls back to "veryone has to invent their own meaning" or thereabouts. As a retired gentleman of leisure this resonates to a degree; though I'm not sure I would use the word "meaning" myself.

Book review: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Ben-Hur the book is not dissimilar at least in outline plot to BH the movie, assuming the wiki plot is accurate; I don't think I've watched it. This rather surprises me; I'd expected the two to differ strongly. Lew Wallace turns out to have been a union general in the USAnian civil war.

I don't think I recommend reading it, other than for a sort of evocation of the kind of times where the gentleman of the frontispiece sits in his book-nook in front of a fire; notice the carefully drawn screen that shades his face, or rather would, if it were at the right height. The book is rather ponderous, the characters are impossibly noble and self-sacrificing.

BH, when travelling from Italy to Antioch on govt business as the vastly wealthy adopted son and heir of a vastly wealthy and important roman, travels alone: he has not even a single servant, no govt officials flock around him, he disembarks from his ship with no notice taken of him. This is all quite implausible. Later, a messenger turns up inviting him to meet someone at a palace; he goes alone without asking any identification from the messenger; ha ha, it is a trap, as any fule could have guessed; our hero is not a man cut out for any subtle work. Balthazar the Magus has a daughter, beautiful obvs, but as it turns out hard-hearted; her only function is to beguile BH, and then to end up raddled and old before her time as a terrible warning of the evils of dissipation at Rome. But she fits very awkwardly as a daughter of B, who is deeply noble and religious (as well as, as a king, weirdly not needed to govern his kingdom). She attends him, but they don't speak to each other. The disjunction grates more as the book proceeds.

The context is the-time-of-Jesus's-ministry: the Jews groan under the yoke of Rome, and long for a King of the Jews to lead a revolt; but of course Jesus isn't like that. BH though naturally somewhat disappointed realises this is all for the best and lavishes his vast fortune on the church. I rather wonder how much your everyday Jew was groaning under the yoke of aqueducts, sanitation, roads and peace and how much the upper stratum of Jewish society was groaning under the yoke of not getting to be in charge.

New rock shoes

My old shoes¹ were falling apart; most seriously, the rubber was worn through in the toes, but also the sides were starting to tear away a little, and the interiors were going too. They were about 5 years old I think, though they could have been 10; I'm not sure. So I bought some new ones.

These are UP Lace LV; "LV" apparently meaning "low volume" and not the sort of thing I normally exepct to want from a show. But, I tried them on in Outside and they seemed decent; next step will be to try them on a real wall; I'll update this when I do. As to due diligence: I tried on four sorts of Scarpa's at the RR "try a show" event but while they all seemed nicely made, even the best kept biting my ankle; not what I want for the outside world and I am not yet the sort who has multiple pairs, but watch this space. They are, interestingly, size 44.5, which I would hacve guessed too small but it seems not. £138 from Outside.

Notes

1. Which I think were Five Ten Stonelands, size 46.5. See here for a pic.

Another new rope

I am become Immelda like Maz, except for ropes. Anyway, despite having a new rope I still wasn't quite happy in my mind, and decided to cure that with a liberal salve of money. Bought at Outside in Hathersage for £136. 

In essence, I decided I wasn't happy explaining to people that my ropes were old but I was happy to climb on them; especially (as happened on that day) with people who couldn't reasonably be expected to understand.

This, despite being as it says intended for Alpine use, is a bit more craggable than the other, being a whole 7.5 mm thick instead of 7.1; and a touch heavier at 39 g/m instead of 36. Here's a pic of its infosheet and instructions; here's their webpage. Also it turns out to be quite slinky which is nice. Orange is a nice bright colour and a good contrast to the others. It has a dyed-in middle marker that is surprisingly hard to find; I think I'll put some tape on too. Here it is unpacked and awaiting first use.

It is a 60m rope; all my others are 50s. Yesterday I used it at Burbage South and I think the routes were about 10m, so we could trivially use it doubled. There is a trend up from 50 to 60 which I think a little strange but perhaps following it with at least one rope will do no harm.

I did wonder if I should get something thicker and more robust for cragging and wall use. But I don't do roped wall stuff much; and if I do enough cragging to wear this out I shall be deeply grateful and happy to renew it.

Book review: The Fresco

The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper is bad pap on several levels. I'll put in a token piece of niceness - I finished it - and then move on to slagging it off. Grass was good, but this is more Raising the Stones: pantomime villains, fairy godmothers, and the wrong answer to the question "is it worth losing freedom for happiness?"². This one star review says much that I would say, if I could be bothered.

There's a slightly awkward feature of this book, which is that I recognise some of her ideas in my own. Suppose you were given <special powers> - and really, the aliens that turn up are just arbitrary powers - what would you do, if you wanted to make the world a better place? How would you oblige all these unruly humans to behave? All my day dreams of what I might do inevitably fall apart quite quickly, as I realise that instead of doing the sensible thing, people would get their backs up and react against. Well, perhaps fortunately I don't have <special powers>, and definitely fortunately SST doesn't (as well as being dead, obvs).

What, I hear you cry, are the levels on which it is bad? The text is easy-reading pap and the characters all tedious stereotypes, which is why I finished it; you will find no demands on your reading ability. The alien socities are badly crudely sketched; despite being starfaring civilisations their planets appear to be little more than villages. And as in RtS, the philosophy is bad: lying to people is good if done in a noble cause, as judged by those doing the lying; a certain amount of judicious culling of the population is fine, if done in a Darwinian manner¹; an inescapable caste-based system is good³; and more importantly, freedom - judicial, civil, mental - is to be traded for a quiet life.

As a token piece of analysis: SST is very very keen on people getting their comeuppance, to the extent that this occurs even when irrelevant to the plot. The obvious example is the aliens who insert their developing young into humans so that they can grow and feed, eventually clawing their way out (although most of the humans survive this process, the insertion, and clawing-out, are carefully described as very painful, even though the humans had to be sedated for the insertion and so could have been anaethetised, so this is deliberate cruelty, but that does not worry SST who salivates over the pain). But - aha, this is the bit that makes it all right - they only do this to right-to-life right wing males, who have publically stated support for no-abortion-even-for-rape. This doesn't work, of course: even the right-to-life people don't support rape, indeed they oppose it; but SST is so keen to see them suffer she doesn't stop to think.

Notes

1. Actually I have to admit a certain sympathy for that; but I think that's a reflection of why the book is bad, encouraging our worst instincts.

2. Or you may prefer "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

3. Obvs, in her version, those choosing your caste for you are "nice", and only "rarely" make mistakes, and even then they err in favour of what you want. In a cleverer author I would suspect it was all ironic but SST is not such.

A visit to the Imperial War Museum

My chosen picture is by an Ethiopean artist, and shows the Eyties (on the right) invading in the 20s. You could almost, from this, think it was balanced; but of course it wasn't; and I have cropped out the aeroplanes, whose wheels you can just see at the top. It makes me think of The Deep, a little; you can try to work out why if you like. Other pix here. Web: IWM site; Wiki tells me Founded as the Imperial War Museum in 1917, it was intended to record the civil and military war effort and sacrifice of the United Kingdom and its Empire during the First World War. The museum's remit has since expanded to include all conflicts in which British or Commonwealth forces have been involved since 1914.

II have almost no memories of the IWM, though my father took us there as children, though I could not say how often. I do remember the 15" guns at the entrance; though I had not previously noticed that they aren't quite aligned.

Since it starts at WWI, it is naturally divided into the big blocks of WWI, WWII, and other bits. It felt quite small to me; though actually the bits out of the main hall where you wander around WWI or II is probably larger than I thought. And there's a big Holocaust block. Which has a touching display of letters, but also many photos of Jews who were killed; from my perspective the obvious thing about 95% of the pix is not that they are Jewish, because they don't look like that, it's just that they all look like 1930's type people that I couldn't really tell apart from the ethnically-Kraut, if that means anything.

WWI has the obvious horrors of seas of mud and alien-like gas masks. But some other stuff I was less aware of; here is a display of German posters exhorting people to gather nuts and women's hair, and pointing out that approx 500k civilians died of malnutrition; what the UN nowadays would call genocide I suppose.

Trivia: train to KC; Thameslink to Blackfriars, which is in the middle of the river; walk from there; and walked all the way back.

Book review: Five Little Pigs

Another Christie / Poirot; I'd avoided reading this before, under the assumption it was five short stories, but no; the "pigs" are people. The title isn't desperately appropriate but never mind. For spoilers read on.

I managed to guess that Caroline was protecting Angela; indeed, towards the end that is rubbed in perhaps a little too much. And yet it seems rather unfair that it is only made clear at the end; the Governess's last revelation should have come much earlier. But I didn't get beyond that first step. And to be fair, that could have been the answer, though I suppose it would have been a bit flat. To get to the true answer you have to suppose that the conversation, reported 16 years later, is entirely accurate and can have two interpretations; and you have to decide that C and the Painter have made up and Elsa overheard; and all this seems a bit much to me; and there is, as Poirot says at the end, no positive evidence for this at all. The bit about Merry being sure it was a cat meaning the smell of valerian meaning that Angela had pinched that, not the poison, again seems a bit far-fetched sixteen years later. As usual, because the characters are all somewhat generic placeholders, I had a hard time remembering who they were and telling Pippin and Merry apart.

I do owe this book the observation of passion in painting; which I use to devastating effect in my art review. And yet, in the end, the book rather destroys that, in that the Painter's passion is merely for the painting, not the subject. I regret that, which I think is an error on La Christie's part.

GPS concatenation

If you're doing a multi-day walk, it is nice to see the whole thing on one GPS trace. Sadly Strava provides no facilities for doing this. But if you want to, here is one way. There are various online utilities that do similar but I found none of them compelling.

Firstly, it is convenient to export your track as a GPX (XML) file. When you edit that, you'll discover that each file is <header><trkpt>info</trkpt>(repeats)<trailer>. So one way to merge them is by hand: strip off all the headers, concatenate the files, then prepend a header, and postpend a trailer. This gets a bit tedious, especially with Windoze type utilities. So I wrote a Perl script to do it. This, in addition to doing the above, also:

* reduces the trace to one trackpoint per minute. I had my watch set to every-second recording, and the files from that are vast, and at walking pace once a minute is all you need.

* strips out the <extension> tags, because you don't need to see your heartrate or cadence at this scale.

* removes some linefeeds, for convenience.

One thing my Perl doesn't do, because I couldn't be bothered, is the last fiddly bit: Strava's algorithm to detect duplicate traces is very primitive: it flags anything that starts within a minute of any of your existing trace starts (I forget where I learnt this; not by guessing it myself I assure you). So, you need to delete a trackpoint or two from the start of the trace.

Here, for your <cough>edification</cough> is my Perl.

my $header = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <gpx xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1 http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1/gpx.xsd http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/GpxExtensions/v3 http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/GpxExtensionsv3.xsd http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrackPointExtension/v1 http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrackPointExtensionv1.xsd" creator="StravaGPX" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1" xmlns:gpxtpx="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrackPointExtension/v1" xmlns:gpxx="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/GpxExtensions/v3"> <trk> <name>William</name> <type>hiking</type> <trkseg>';

my $trailer = '</trkseg> </trk> </gpx>';

undef $/;                                                    # Ah, don't you just love Perl?
$contents = "";
while (my $file = shift) {

        print "Processing $file\n";
        open(my $fh, "<", "$file") or die "oh dear";
        $content = <$fh>;

        $content =~ s/^.*<trkseg>//ms;                       # Throw away "header"
        $content =~ s/<\/trkseg>.*//ms;                      # And "trailer"
        $content =~ s/<extensions>.*?<\/extensions>\n//msg;  # And extensions
        $content =~ s/\n\s+<ele/<ele/g;                      # And some line feeds
        $content =~ s/\n\s+<time/<time/g;                    # And some more
        $content =~ s/\n\s+<\/trkpt/<\/trkpt/g;              # And a few more

        $old_min = 0;
        for (split "\n", $content) {                         # Reduce to one per minute
                # 2025-08-27T07:03:36Z
                /<time>(.*)<\/time>/;
                my $time = $1;
                $time =~ /(\d{2}):\d{2}Z/;
                my $min = $1;
                if ($min != $old_min) {
                        $contents .= "$_\n";
                        $old_min = $min;
                }
        }
}

open(my $out, ">", "out.gpx") or die "oh dearie me";
print $out "$header $contents $trailer";

Charming I'm sure you agree. Non-native speakers are invited to guess what "undef $/" does.

Book review: the Decipherment of Linear B

By John Chadwick; see Goodreads. At last: a matter of some actual substance. This is a "popular" introduction to the subject, but written by one of those involved, and better still written when "popular" was not debased as it is today¹. I recommend it as a well-written introduction by someone who knows; I shall present it to my daughter for her birthday. Having checked on the Wiki Linear B page, it doesn't seem to be much out of date; perhaps because not much new in the way of tablets have been found since.

I vaguely knew the history of this, but only very vaguely. I learnt that there was a strong academic consensus that Linear B was most definitely not Greek, and in the usual way of things saying - or researching - otherwise was not going to do your academic career any good. Discovering exactly what it was - archaic Greek - depended on starting with a crypto kind of analysis: how many symbols are there, what are their frequencies, and in what positions? This revealed ~90 symbols (excluding the pictograms) which tells you it isn't pictographic (too few, you need thousands) and it isn't alphabetic (too many, you need ~30) and therefore it is syllabic. And the guess, which turns out right, is that there are symbols for vowels, and then symbols for consonant-plus-vowel, and then all the difficulty of how do you deal with successive consonants, and trailing consonants. The initial "key" was thinking that some of the repeatedly seen words were place-names around Knossos. The tablets are initially unfired clay, accidentally preserved by being fired when the palace burnt down. They are a year's administrative records: of chariot wheels, of sheep, of corn, of slaves, and the like. But only one year: the system, as guessed, was that last year's records would be pounded back into clay and re-used: who wants to know how many sheep there were last year? So, no continuous prose, which restricts the kind of guesswork you can do.

I think it is a great thing that our civilisation puts aside resources for activities such as this. It doesn't add anything productive to the world; it doesn't in a way greatly enhance our view of ancient civilisation, because the results are so fragmentary. But in the words of Robert Rathbun Wilson, "It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending".

Notes

1. I recently saw, but to my slight regret did not buy, a hardback of a history of british philosophy from CUP, proudly marked as "Cheap Edition". Who would so label a book nowadays?

Book review: Herr Doktor Thorne

By Anthony "Warden" Trollope. And if you've read that, or another, you'll be thoroughly familiar with his style and mannerisms, and his types of characters. And if you enjoyed that, you'll likely like this too; I did.

In HDT, the central theme is how The Young Master can salvage the fortunes of the family ruined by the improvidence and incompetence of The Squire, by marrying Money. However, TYM is in love with a penniless woman - the ward, and nominally the niece, of the titular HDT - and she with him; their heartwarming constancy despite all obstacles will warm the cockles of your heart, and as the book itself does not hide from you, she is going to become wealthy by judicious slaughtering of a couple of parvenus¹.

Our Author, it barely needs to be said, is very much on the side of the gentlefolk, and on the maintenance of Ye Olde Wayes. The unacknowledged contradiction of the book is that YOW are blatantly unfit for the times³. As noted, OA manages to transfer money from the New to the Old, thereby saving his hero and heroine from the terrible fate of having to actually do something useful to earn a living², but I don't think he or his readers could possibly believe that would work as a general plan. Which means the general plan - apart from just running your estates into the ground and being foreclosed - must have been to marry money; and indeed just this happens to one of the spare genteel females as an aside.

Much of the book - that not taken up by the hero and ine mooning and vacillating - turns over the question of status, looking desperately for some acceptable solution, but without finding one. Status, obvs, comes from being gentlefolk - ideally aristocracy, but just respectable-since-time-out-of-mind squire will do. Those who have merely made money, or who have a large income, carry weight: they are not really respectable, but can become so if not too vulgar, or perhaps in the next generation. And signs of honour such as membership of parliament carry some weight too. Our heroine, by these definitions, is not gentle: her birth is at best obscure and in fact common and illegitimate; but because she has been brought up nicely, all her manners and habits are perfectly acceptable; and she can be brought into a polished drawing room without blush. So she is respectable, or not, according to whether it is convenient for her to be so, or not. At points, the book suggests that perhaps if you have lots of money, and a seat in parliament, that is good enough; but then reluctantly discards the idea.

Is there any virtue in this scheme? As presented by the author, there may be: the nice people are nice, and the sort of people you wouldn't mind dining with, and strolling round their extensive mortgaged grounds, except they are mostly intolerably narrow-minded and boring. Whereas the vulgar people say "d---" (obviously they cannot possibly say anything as offensive as "damn" in print in full) and drink themselves to death while dropping their aitches. But this is a thin basis for arranging the rewards of labour. It is stressed that the nice people, or at least some of them, are really very deeply fond of the countryside they are preserving; but this doesn't extend to giving up signs of honour - seats in parliament, a house in London for the season - that their means no longer stretch to. In the end it is all to obvious that it couldn't last.

Notes

1. Don't worry; she doesn't have to get tooled up; they are conveniently obliged to give themselves up to The Demon Drink.

2. Not that there is any obvious sign of either of them having any useful skills, beyond being able to sit a horse and make polite conversation. Laughably, TYM's main idea is "perhaps papa could lend me a farm"; but if papa has a spare farm, why isn't he making money off it? Why would OH make a better farmer than someone who has been doing it since he was old enough to hold a hoe?

3. Why? While our squire is incompetent, not every squire would have been. At a guess, the answer is inflation of living standards: the country as a whole is becoming richer, through manufacture; but the squire's produce off the land is worth no more now than in the past; thus he could continue with rustic oak furniture but if he wants the mahogany and rosewood products of Paris, more money is required. Seats in parliament, once cheap, are now expensive. And so on. Note that HDT was published in 1858 and may be taken to have been set then; the Corn Laws were repealled in 1849 but nothing of so sordid and commercial a nature is mentioned in the book; and Wiki intimates that the strongest effects may have been later.

Book review: Navola

By Paolo "Windup Girl" Bacigalupi. Sadly, not up to that. It is long and, as I suppose I should have guessed in this debased age, is but the first volume of some trilogy if I suppose it sells well. Despite all my whinges below I enjoyed perhaps the first third, and did after all finish the thing.

The setting is yer familiar Italian city-states era kind of place and time; think Children of Earth and Sky; at least, I think Italian, because there are lots of invented words that end in "i". And the loving depictions of the banking system fit what I picked up from Wolf Hall; and the interspersed "legends" of the gods seem very romanesque. Sufficiently so that perhaps it should have been set in a rather more real Italy; that might have offered enough constraint to provide some backbone to the tale; authors with complete freedom are apt, as here, to find their story flopping around the edges and in need of propping up.

I am also disappointed in the dragon's eye. The dragon could have been the best part of this; in many ways, despite its rather brief appearance, it still is. But that leaves the tale unbalanced: there is precisely one magical artifact in this world, and no hint of magic elsewhere, and yet no-one displays any interest in it as such; and it does so little in the book besides providing a convenient escape route for Our Hero at the end.

This Goodreads review tells me that it is a "masterpiece of storytelling worthy of comparison with many of the finest works of fantasy, stretching as far back as [redacted] finest. It is a historical fantastical epic replete with elegant world-building... that will introduce readers to an intoxicating blend of intrigue and horror". That is all drivel. It is instead rather formulatic; we have the cunning banker who outwits everyone and so on; we have an instantly recognisable cast of characters; the intrigue is kinda Dune-like, and I don't mean that as a compliment. As to the world-building; it is a long book without really anything to say, and so inevitably ends up full of world-building; it isn't as bad as Eye of the World though.

This one says it is "very gory and excessively sexually explicit". I don't think that is right either. There is one sex scene - somewhat jarring, and badly written - because it is necessary that OH gets off with Our Heroine before they are parted, but I think we could have been spared the details; and there is a little gore towards the end; but just like with the dragon, the book is so unbalanced in these respects. The sex scene is also deeply weird, because it occurs on OHi's nominal wedding night, and starts with OHi draped only in the flimsiest of bedwear, through which her alluring body can be glimpsed, and then she gets up, OH shuts his eyes for a moment, and suddenly she is dressed in her wedding outfit. Which he then rips off, obvs. But FFS, a wedding gown of that period is not a thing you get into or out of quickly, or indeed without a maid or seamstress to help you. I'm also doubtful about the absence of serving maids; but this is all of a piece: while nominally set way-back-when, all the attitudes are modern.

OH does seem desperately wet; and his loving father does seem blind to how useless he would be. Towards the end, one of his trusted-retainers-who-yet-betrayed-him patiently explains to him, and to us, that this is why he betrayed him. This explanation is necessary, because it isn't natural. The plot requires the betrayal and downfall of the house of whatever-they-are-called, because Our Author has run out of interesting things to say about banking houses, but the total failure of his father to anticipate any of it is quite inexplicable in view of his previous omniscience; I feel that better "intrigue" was required here.

Tirol 2025

Monday 25th August: we’re back from Sweden, indeed we got back on Saturday, but haven’t done a great deal. I went to the new Rainbow Rocket North yesterday, and can see it becoming the default; Mfd+J came round to dinner; and now I’m packing for tomorrow’s trip to Austria, with the declared aim of attempting the Grossglockner. Now that I’m in the stress of packing, and working out where to go, staying in the comfort of home which is after all quite comfortable seems rather appealing. To save you time, you can just look at all pix from this trip. Here's a composite trace for my route (GPS file). Compare 2023.

Tuesday 26th: sitting on the plane awaiting boarding to finish. Packed last night and as ever it is hard to fit all in so am wearing boots and trusting that axe, carrymat and crampons outside will free up space. Also I forgot my few food items. Last night also tried to work out where I’m going… it turns out that Salzburg to <grossglockner> is harder than you might think and harder than I thought. Expecting 2h bus to Zell then short bus to Fusch and probably hotel there. Wind turbines seen in the Thames estuary. By some miracle we land early, perhaps powered by the screams of infants, and I get my baggage and the 14:47 to Z, €15.30, an hour earlier than I expected. Outside it is 28 oC. Around the plain the hazy mountains, as I remembered. And so through various lovely limestone cliff and tree clad hill valleys to Z. I have a 1:30 wait for the next step so replenish lost food and buy supper: juice, joghurt, melon. And eat it by the See. Oh, and book pension in Fusch. Everything so far is delightfully clean and well presented. Bus to Fusch and to my pension which appears to cater mostly to Polish bikers and is fine. Shower, wub, charge. Note sun had left valley by 6. Pic: Zell looking S; I think we head leftish.

Wednesday 27th: [GPS] alarm 7 snooze:15 then watch Starship #10’s glorious success. With all the stupidity in the world there is hope. B’fast is good and varied, these Poles insist on it. Off 9, sky is cloudy which is good. I think there's a shuttle bus to the pass but I will walk as a good intro. Plus it should pretty. Flowers. Green hillsides. 10: a few km in on a bench overlooking the valley: it is pretty and well cared for. And they are still building. Ooh, and some sun: I’d better be off. A further rest on a providential bench at 2h then at 11:45 to Ferleiten in a little cafe on the far side from the road. 8.5 km in all well so far. My hostess doesn't really recognise “americano” but I have verlangt, schwartz which is just as good. Day now half cloudy, good. Fusch was 800m, now at 1100, lots to go. Actually I may be a little short of Ferleiten, in Judenbichlalm. A lovely waterfall ahead; but I'll be heading left behind the shoulder of trees.

15:00: Trauneralm. Glorious views to Wiesbachhorn on the R and my pass due S; GG is behind stuff. From a lovely valley walk the path has steepened; I have a bit more than 1000m to do; call it 3h; so I can have a nice rest and Radler here. Which turns out to mean, take it from the cooling trough. This may just be me, or meinfrau not wishing to speak to the weird furriner, but this is the first not-gemutlich place I’ve stopped at. Still headingl leftwards.

16:00: off up towards the unter pfandlscharte. 17: 1900. Below, a cowherd shouts at the recalcitrant to come home. Spread below me the green valley. 18: 2200. 400 to go and the rain has started; not too heavy yet but I have my coat on. 19:30: col 2663. A little later than planned but I think I can claim my 300 m per hour. Path exists all the way even if it is crummy in the “throat” (view up towards same). Rain eased off a way back but kept coat it is getting cool. Even thin gloves. 8:30: to bivvy at 2500: down from col, over stream (fill bottle) up to plateau / little lake at 8 then down. Light is fading but hillside is very bivvy friendly. By 9 I have tarp up, am in s’bag and have eaten and now these few words.

Thursday 28th: [GPS] the night went from smatterings of rain to quite windy so lots of waking up. But I survived fairly warm: 2x socks, leggings, black top and down jacket. Hope for sun but morn is grey windy chill.

Up past 7 off 7:30 meet first ascenders soon after. Down to Glocknerhaus Alpeinverein but sadly b’fast is over and they don't reopen till 11. Hmpf. So, off. Paths diverge: I had thought to go up to the Oberwalderhutte 2972 via the tourist tat but the day doesn't suit so settle for the safe and I hope easy Salmhutte. 9: over the dams in cloud - no pix - and stop for some yummy b’fast. 10:40: col at last (I think there was a valley-then-climb alt, but I missed the choice, just after the dam). Cloud persists with rare views across to Franz Josephs Haus etc. 12:20: to Salmhutte in gathering rain, but with views across valley (nb: pic is from tomorrow).

From col it is mostly “traverse” and you know what that means. Salmhutte turns out to be higher than I thought: 26xx not 24xx. Inside is warm so I am sitting with a cafe and recovering. Phone at 44% so charge from battery. What shall I do with the afternoon? Phone to 83%, battery to 71. We’re in the Nationalpark Hohe Tauern. I think M and I did something like Heiligenblut to Kals after Spittal to Lienz, oh so many years ago. Have booked night on halbpension, they didn't want to do no-dinner but that's fine. You can have the soup early, and I did. Wx continues poor and may well for the next few days says meinfrau; that may be a problem, we shall see. But she confirms that there's a route up to the ErzJ hutte (the map makes it look somewhat dodgy), if I have Steigeisen I think she said: ice steps. I have washed armpits, feet and crotch and switched to clean pants and socks and feel much cleaner (€5 for a shower was too much). And have eine glass haus rotwein. Dinner: I was disappointed by my kasespatzle until I realised that was just the salad. 7 pm. Alarm set on watch for 7 am. Bed soon.

Friday 29th: [GPS] up 7 slept well little snoring temp fine. Put phone on to charge when I notice you can. B’fast as usual now 7:30 what to do… sunshine at hutte! But thick grey clouds 300m above. Go up and get stuck in 2 o’clock rain in cloud? Or desc to… via GlorerH to Kals and try again via Studlhutte? Today's forecast comes in: it is better, less rain. I think I am bound to try going up. Somewhat above hut: old Salmhutte: placard; inside view; outside view. 3139 m after 1:30: decent, y’days rest good first day maybe a bit hard. View back down valley; the path is all fine to this point.

A little below a rescue box marked by pole with rope inside; after that path is harder, few cairns not painted, and partly crummy rock over retreating glacier. 2h: at top of rungs section ; that was atmospheric / scary; wet made gloves and hands cold; and it is longer than it looks; glad to get to top. Pic: the path is a bit poor from here; you go up the yukky scree; then there's a wire ladder than cables.

On far side not clear where to go until a clearing; but still I descended too much. And used new crampons for the first time. Ideally I’d have had nice snow instead of ice-hard glacier (really, it was clear glass-like often; probably scoured by the rain). They have a slight tendency to fall off, but I get used to them. After making what turns out to be a small hole in my right calf (detail). Little blood or pain. To top at 3h then just ridge - but airy in places, poles - to hut. Pic: from about my low point, with the cloud briefly clearer, able to see that I need to be higher up. Higher, with a bloke on the final slope coming down. From up there, looking back to the col; you can see a track; it would be much easier with more snow.

Now in Erzherzog-Johann-Hutte, as far as I can tell I’m the only guest; the guardian has kindly started one of those giant Austrian tiled fires.

Aha! Another party has arrived. Started 8:15 here 11:30 3:15 is book time so good; feeling better than yesterday. Outside is 100% cloud and windy but some sunshine; I might try going up around 2. 1:45: 100% cloud, and windy. No, let's wait for tomorrow when the forecast is… actually the guardian said less wind but since they have wifi and charge I can just check... bergfex.at/skiheiligenblut/wetter/prognose/ says kinda that (35 kmh at 2; they call that S5 and colour it red so maybe I should listen); less wind in the morning. Also I would have company which is a safety factor. Also: no free water, but on tap at €2.5 per litre. About 10+ others here now. I’ve paid my halbpension €76. 4: still cloud out. Sitting in the stove corner. Salad. Spinach dumplings. Consider what to do tomorrow pm: Lucknerhaus maybe. And so, reading DLS Clouds of Witness (still enjoyable tosh) to bed. Dortoir:

Saturday 30th: [GPS Glockner and to Kals] didn't sleep too well: left shoulder hurting a bit; some snuffling; and the corridor light. But wake up fine at 5:30, b’fast, various bustling about but I am in no hurry as usual. Under my right eye is puffy: am I getting old? There is an inch or so of snow.

6:40: off. Taking 2x sticks and axe hence big sack. Start off sans crampons. Have realised that they weren't quite tight yesterday, perhaps because of the slanty heel of my boots. So pull them in a notch. Spoiler: they go fine, even on mixed ground, but if strongly torqued will rotate at the toe. Wx is lovely: sun at hut, views down, soft new snow. Head… of course, around hut and up, following tracks, snow is good for that. After 15 mins get to Hofmanskees and put on crampons; could have done it at hut. Up easily to first ropes (but the rope itself is not fun; the alt I used for descent is no easier); leave a ski stick where others have, watch folk on the ropes and follow, with trepidation. It is steep, probably much easier snowless, now snow covers all holds. Pic: snow track up the Kees; rocks looking snowy.

Up, constantly considering how it would be to descend. Pass some ungenerous rungs, then we're on a ridge with spaced poles, for those with ropes to secure. Various parties are not far off. Get to the ridge-to-the-kleinglockner and finally decide to back off. I’ve kinda ground down my reserve of courage and am thinking of how it will all be to descend. Pix; watch folk on summit ridge-wall; don't even do pano as rotating would make me insecure. In arrears, realise that "just" ~5 m or rope and a harness and perhaps a sling or two would be all that I need to use the poles; but that's another day.

Down. This turns out better than feared though the ropes are icky; this is where my crampon turns. Down to snow slopes; easily to hut (wider view).

1:30 to high point; 2:30 overall. Hut: derobe: coffee. Sit for a bit; I’m not too tired but a rest is nice. Pic with hut sign. Sun! 10:50: start down (miss first 5 mins on gps). The Studlhutte route is straight down the ridge, cables; a bit treacherous underfoot as I eschew crampons.

Get onto snow with relief after an hour, and crampon up and toddle down. Now 1:45 in and resting at a fine prominence: I can see Studlhutte to the R on a saddle and straight ahead the valley turning green down to the Lucknerhaus.

1: Studlhutte (sign). We’re back in tourist land though that does mean a real coffee ordered from and brought to my table. Panel re routes. Switch to shoes. 2:30 (3:15 of walking): Lucknerhutte. Now there's a biscuit with my coffee and wifi. Dooown to Lhaus, which I don't actually visit. There's a bus to Kals but it leaves in an hour and walking will take… an hour. And be more interesting, so set off. We're in pine forest land now. Bits of trail but mostly gravel road. About 4:30 I remember this is rural Austria and shops may shut at noon on Saturday, or they did 30 years ago. But, the Kals one is open til 6. So buy my std juice, yog, bread, cheese; and get some salami sticks and apricot herz biccies, and a token banana. Now, where to stay? Saturday night isn't the bestest for a late booking; consider just walking on but have set my heart on a shower and bed. So, splash out €125 on Bergheimat which confuses me by not having its name up but that sorted, I’m in. Shower, wash socks and pants, settle down to eat. And watch IFSC Chamonix lead.

Sunday 31st: [GPS] up 6:50 off 8:20. Clear skies and forecast good for the next few days. B’fast fine if unexciting. Slept v well aah soft beds. Mme keen to impress on me that she is not taking the €2 tourist tax because I paid for a double room. My B+B is typically immaculate; though I am starting to find the massed ranks of flowers a mite oppressive.

Walk out of Kals to Grosdorf then onto track, initially on ski slope now woods. Kals is immaculately clean and tidy and every house has flower boxes and the frequent crucifixes are looked after. That, and the way the mown meadows sweep uninterrupted to the houses feels odd. As I was leaving, Grandma in her apron came in with a bowlful of carrots from the kitchen garden, cut out of the meadow. I'm heading for the Sudentendeutsche hutte. PPic: still climbing out of the valley. Below, the Kals campsite.

11:40: at 22xx with about 200m to the col, and taking a lunch break, having had a tea break a little earlier. The valley stretches below me, the hill shaded beyond, and beyond them the GG just peeks out, snow-dusted. 1:30: col. GG now clearly viz plus icefields W wards plus just barely the hutte.

400 m of up to “traverse” fairly gently I think. Someone has tucked a saint’s card into the signpost! 2:30: Durrenfeld 2691. Wonderful bowl, barren shale very slowly being colonised by pincushions, with an enormous anomalous boulder in the middle.

Climb it via the easy back face. Also, in a dry region where I was cursing self for failing to fill w’bottle, it has a little trickling stream (but actually there are others past the scharte and before the hutte). Would be lovely bivvi spot but I have miles to go before I sleep. 3:15 D’feldscharte 281x, cables on the far side, 4pm hutte, 2656. Lovely views.

In fact the whole day has been lovely, esp the Sudetendeutsche hohenweg section. Radler. Bit of phone charge. Swim! In their lake. In fact more of a plunge, it was chilly. But very refreshing. Pix: hutte reflected. Just before 6 go back a few 100 m around the corner which looks a nice spot. I feel a bit friendless to lose the humanity of the hutte.

Monday 1st September: [GPS] at 6 out for wee then up properly 6:40 and off just before 7. A beautiful clear morning but chill; pockets of frost in hollows and on a bit of my tarp the helmet was under. No point in waiting for sun; it is on the very top of the nearby peak and the far side of the valley but not here. Was cold overnight but slept ok.

Off! Past hutte and its still pond, a dog walker, then off on the Dr Karl Jursch weg. I’d hoped for sun at the Nussingscharte but no, so head on down. Finally 9:25 sun at Kessleralm. Choose this way not S to Steiner Alm because I guess it is pleasanter. But, it has no restaurant as I painfully discover… not on the descent, or in the valley, which seems a most untouristy one. Beehives. lso it has major earthworks going on: they are laying some huge pipes. But there is room for me to squeeze through.

And so to Gruben which is a pleasant 15-house farming hamlet, it even has a house advertising Zimmer but when I look at their terrace a guy in a tractor next door asks me what, and when I say essen? He says no. So, I sit in the shade in a lane and have lunch and watch two cats. And feel slightly betrayed. Well, the sign says 5 ½ hours (why did I pick the hut with the longest walkin in Austria?), its now 1, I can be there for dinner with luck, or a bit later maybe. The road / track up is a grind, and I stupidly reject an offer of a lift, but once I get to the path things are nicer; by the bridge at Steinsteg the valley is opening up, and I only have have 600 m to go, and I cast aside my despair and grind off the meters, arriving just ahead of time at 6:15. Spot the refuge:

There is no problem with dinner or bed; pancake soup (good) followed by beef with rice (meh) and then cake. And I get a coffee. Pay: €60 ish I think. Have a cold shower (ugh but too cheap to pay €3 for hot) and retire to matrazenlager at 8 having charged phone.

Tuesday 2nd: [GPS] overnight wind and rain, so a good night to be in. B’fast is a relaxed 7 so enjoy a lie in in comfort. Wx is mixed: there is sun on the hut; there are extensive views down, but up is distinctly cloudy.

I have a choice of down-n-round to Bonn-Mattreier, or up-n-over to Neue Prager. Or some slightly naughty over-the-glaciers which would have many choices. Badener is a nice old wooden hut (as was the Sudentendeutsche) and the people are friendly. 8:45: hmm wx is not improving now cloud at hut. 9: off to B-M. All very atmospheric.

Some excitingly steep grass to cross; 11:30 now at 24xx heading up to Galtenscharte 28xx. Signs warn of high rockfall danger. Or that's what I assume hohe steinschlaggefahr means. So far cloud is justifying my choice: occasional views down but never up. Nearly 12; 25xx; stop for 15 mins for a few dates and some chocolate etc. 1 pm: scharte 2871. There's a bit less cloud on the far side but not much less. The climb up is fine; cables for the last 200 m which I didn't use; and not obviously prone to stone fall though looseish shale because it slants. Views across, inc the hutte seen dimly over the far ridge.

1:50 Kalberscharte. Quite a nice circuit round a bowl mostly over boulder fields. Oh, the hutte is over yet another ridge… Anyway, to hutte (2750 m) a little after two, so that's about the requisite 5h. Sit, am served coffee with nice biscuit and apfelstudel.

When I look up it is raining. Hut has nice ceramic stove see pix; and is in the nice wood with modern extensions genre. Watch poor snail folk trogging up with poncos over themselves and sacs; snails indeed. French I think. Sit for about an hour then on! To the Eissee hut, about another 3h so I should make it for dinner. Pic: zig-zags up. 4:20: resting pleasantly under a big boulder overhang to shelter from the drippy rain. Got hailed on up the first scharte then break then rain; it is going to be one of those afternoons; hence no pix. And so it proves. Fortunately my raincoat is rainproof and my shorts and leggings are thin so don't care. After a bit my feet are wet but meh, they stay warm. And it turns out to be less than 3h to the Eissee hutte, good. 2521 m. After more ridges than seems plausible (Venediger hohenweg; actually rather pleasant even in the wx) the hut floats foggily out of the mist / rain / cloud; since dinner is at 6 it is just as well I’m early. Put wet kit into drying room; the shoes I was wearing, my boots which were outside on the back (not wet just damp) and gloves and hat. Extract s’bag etc from main sac in case, even though it seems dry in there. Talk (English, guiltily) with nice ~40s couple at my assigned table. Dinner is fried-cheese-dumpling soup, then spinat knodel with salat, then custardy thing. And I have a glass rotwein. Bed 8. Dorm pic taken tomorrow.

Wednesday 3rd: [GPS] b’fast 7, off 8:10. Light not yet at hut but it is a beautiful day. 20 mins later brief sun; 30 full. Up and around; 9:10 2770 looking down on a corner of the Eissee. Peaks have fresh snow down to perhaps 3000. Half hour rest+wub. 10:30: scharte: Wallhorntorl, 3044. I think "torl" is the local for pass. Very distant view of Defregger hut; but it will hide later.

View back up to col. 11:50: 2877: somewhere below the Glexenkopf; I’m pretty sure there's been some ice melt since my map. Descent from scharte was atmospheric - speaking of which noise of stone fall made me jump, but it echoes around the corner - north side, so frozen solid scree, and light snow, and cables. Get down a bit before realising I need crampons so go back a little to safe spot and put them on and descend, cautiously. Down, onto rubbish scree slopes but no markers, so guess. Across first gletscher to first rognon, cross that and desc to second gletscher and rest. Leave a few stones to mark crossing in case I need to return (unlikely) but anyway might go a different way if forced back. But ahead looks friendly (ha). 12:25: it was. Now relaxing on rock and wondering where the hut is; I’m at 2963, so is it. The thing towering above me ia is the Weißspitze 3309. Sample safe crevasse.

Hutte, 2962 m, 1pm. Signs. This was very much one of those routes where in retrospect it was fine, but at the time I was distinctly nervous about whether I should be risking it. Eventually find some cairns on the rocks (Thurs: looking up from below hut: I suspect I should have gone a bit higher and traversed more glacier) (en route: lovely little pools where the stream flows over glacially smoothed rocks; but it will be glacially cold too so skip) and then even later the Defregger hut, discretely tucked around a little shoulder. Register, coffee, cute stove, but will probably head up G Ven soon, being careful about crevasses.

1:39: and so I do. Sign says 3h, and say 2h down, I can just make dinner. Brief thought says take small sack and travel light; I take big gloves gaiters and w’proof trous but don't use them: I’m in shorts over leggings and orange coat, it is such a nice day. Burn up, relishing the light sack I can barely feel, initially up rock spur, at the top a sign and yet another poster warning about not going sans rope (perhaps I should point out that you should definitely take such warnings seriously, and obey them unless you know better), then down left a face with some ropes and rungs, then rubbish, then we're on the glacier put crampons on. There is a small amount of snow left and it holds a faint trace which I follow; as we go along this gets clearer. And so up. Pic taken in descent from quite near the summit, but it is nice so I'll insert it.

Pay close attention to glacier and crevasses; trace wiggles through traversing then up. Snow gets deeper but there are still crevasses; maybe 5 to stride over, and one dodgy enough that I balked and detoured around. Then nice snow slope which the trace takes easily, to a sort of plateau, with a big pole, where paths from other huts meet us. There's a rock peak at 3506 which helps with height: for some reason the gps map height is awol. And so, the top! Hurrah! Also, gorgeous.

Views all round in glorious sunshine and not too cold despite my perhaps underdressing. 2:20 from hut. I can see what I take for GG in the surprisingly distant distance.

And so down: just under 4h total. I didn't take any pix of the "interesting" crevasses, sadly; here's a not-very-interesting one. Now I sit smugly on a deck chair and write up, though it is a bit chill. Oh, and I didn't turn on signal at the summit; I thought it would detract from the moment. Dinner: ok but not up to Eissee or Badener quality. Bed: 2nd floor is “divided” up by rafters into various “rooms”; I have one in #4, and the luxury of the other vacant. This calls back memories of… where?

Thursday 4th: [GPS] sleep well up 6 slowish b’fast others on their way out. It is a fine morning for it; I am tempted to do again, or use as traverse, but that would be pushing my luck (later: I do slightly regret this choice; but maybe another time...). So it is time to go down. Sun to hut around 7:30 (it is well positioned for morning and evening; indeed good hut overall, lovely broad irregular floor boards and all that goes with that); sit outside in deck chair soaking it up. 8: off, reluctantly. Looking up to hut (distant; very distant). Views of y’day’s crossing, and - just- parties near the GV summit.

Gently greenly down, looking down on people plodding up.

10: Johannishutte 2122 m (wider). Coffee. Pleasant enough catering to day visitors and those on their way up to Defregger I guess. No signal. Trout.

I had planned to slog up and round to Essen-u-Rostocker but I now think I won't; instead an easy day down to the flesh pots of the valley. 12:30: Hinterbichl. A good walk down, managing to avoid the road mostly, partly by taking the track left across fields in the pic not the gravel road on the right with people on it. The upper quarry is just visible tucked into the valley.

Go over huge wash-out around upper quarry which is marked as path in map but at the lower quarry end is signed Stop - Falsch - Steinschlag, if you're heading up. Just as well I was going down… Pic: lower quarry.

In what I think is only cafe in HB, will go on to Pragraten in a bit. Mostly it is a working type agricultural village. I have just had a conversation in German! First I ordered a coffee+sachertorte, then when it turned out that had run out, I swapped to apfelstrudel nature. Remove tick from belly-button. There's a campsite (wider). And then down, via old but still working sawmill, by river, to P. It looks like there is some controversial re-introduce wolves scheme. Booking has found me Enzian for the night (room): €88+12. Run by Dutch I think. Shower. To MPreis for stuff and get carried away with melon and wine. Quiet a’noon reading+wub.

Friday 5th: [GPS] heading up to Bergerseehutte. Left about 8:30 after a crisis of where am I going? And how long am I staying out? No answers yet. 18xx still in forest overlooking Pragraten and can just about make out the Enzian (left, mid height, one back and left of the round roof; more distantly).

12: Bergerseehutte. Light rain for last 20 mins my own fault for stopping to play with streams; hut in cloud. Coffee <long pause; various people come in, usually wet, rain off and on> Heise Citron <long pause, less wet> well I suppose I must be going.

M. warns me of wx, though I don't understand the details and I presume I am seeing the same forecast as him, which is that the worst is over. Off 3:40, “contouring up”. After 10 mins it starts to look like wx and just for once I am sensible enough to put on w’proof trous before it gets bad. And so it does: hail. Pass one goat shed because I don't have the heart to displace the goats (those black n white ones) but 4:15 stop at a second, clean goatshit off bench and rest. Hail (now light snow) is ok but thunder, some close, is unnerving. Will give it 10 mins. And eat some bloody melon. This is my view for about half an hour or more.

Path is good and in better wx the panoramaweg would be splendid. Some view, towards the end. 5:50: to hut. Small, and at only 1900 m. Their Eng is as bad as my Deu but I communicate my desire for a bed and get one. Mme has a baby on her back. Quite quiet; 5 others in gaststube now. Free power in lager but no signal which is not surprising; I am looking across to the Johannis hutte valley. Plan was to sleep out tonight but it is cloud grey miserable and the valley is not naturally bivvish (one generally has a choice of deep dark moist valley bottoms, low down, with a side order of cows; or more appealling nice sunny shoulders high up, and therefore cold). Free hot shower! Wx continues poor: more rain. 7:30: at last the sky is clearing; there was sun on - it may have been - the GV; but cloud has filled the upper valley again. It comes clear just as the sun is only on the summit ridge; lovely. I get the luxury of a dorm to myself, with power socket, and choice of how far to open the window.

Saturday 6th: [GPS] b’fast 7 off 8:30. No sun at hut but it is going to be a glorious sunny day with all the peaks dusted with y’days snow. Here we're looking N to the Johannis hutte valley.

Sun 9; Michelstalscharte 2652 m 10:30. 3:20: Rote Lenke 2794. Pic: view up to RL (left hand, higher, side of the shark's fin).

Completely still; ahead, 200 m below, a lake and the Reichenberger hutte (closer). 12:30: hut. Big lake, nice snowy refl, interestingly the Gosleswand, which is uninteresting from the scharte, is an enormous tower from the hut. There are many places to go.

No wifi :-(. Order a hot lemon, which I have come to like, and a piece of carrot-nut cake. After, sit out, with trous on since a little wind has sprung up. As I sit the snow diminishes; I can compare to the pic I took 2h earlier. Off 2:30. Later: well, this is more pleasant than huddling in a goatshed against a snowstorm: lying back against a warm rock in the sun whiling away the afternoon. Having set off from the hut for Clarahutte I suddenly thought… well this doesn't seem quite right… things don't really fit together. So I reconfigured for St Jakob, 3h away. But overlooking that valley I can get signal and book my flight back (Thursday 11th) and so… well I can just sleep here I hope. Nice S facing spot with both E and W viz for the sun. I deserve a quiet afternoon.

Note that I'm using the new "rear stick" theory, which worked. Though that does make me think wouldn't it be nice to have a little flap to close the front and rear if it is windy?

Sunday 7th: [GPS] up 7 sun 7:30. Slept better thanks to “foot gloves”: I put my down inner gloves onto feet which helped keep my toes warm despite cold night: there was frost out. 10:20 / 2:30: down in St Jakob. Two excitements: I followed an “obvious” gravel road, increasingly overgrown, down the last bit, which seemed clear enough from the map, and passed a sport climbing crag, but I grew increasingly worried about its outlet… which turned out to be one of those giant concrete flood defense barriers (later: plaque about it). Fortunately I was able to wade the river and continue to town. Item two was earlier and may not have fully played out: an unlucky slip scratched my L shin badly and there is a mild swelling and a little pain. I plan to sit in this nice cafe (Knappenstube, in a big old bldg) for an hour or so and see how it develops. Wx: haze / thin cloud. Forecast: looking good today, Mon and Tues till eve; Weds rainy. 12:50: off, having visited church see pix. Also it has a free power outlet.

L shin fading I think. This valley doesn't terminate: there's a pass: hence bikers etc; more life. My chosen path to the Bruggeralm is shut by Works; I could just ignore that - it is Sunday - but realise I can be good and go up next valley… and then it turns out to have a ski lift… toy with myself at what price I’ll take it; €16 turns out to pass. And it would have been a long hot ascent; the sun has come out. 1:40: at top, Brunnalm. But their cafe ist geschlossen, boo. Heading up the Bruggeralm Bach, rest 2:25 for choc.

4pm: rest at 23xx. Out of the trees and shrubs and cowland and another 400 m to the pass Ochsenlenke. More rests; pass little lake; scharte 5:55; tired. But it has been a way. Sun just leaving the Falkommsee, 2632 (nice refl in Degenhornsee 2700 eralier).

But the col is now moved a few hundred m W. Descend, for quite a bit, then come into wider shallower valley with… three horses in it. Nice glossy ?roan? that come and say hello, then let me walk on. Come to head (Schrentebachboden) overlooking lower valley which looks a good place to stop; should get early sun. Check scrape on L shin: looks ok. Pic, looking back towards col, taken in tomorrow's morning sunshine.

Monday 8th: [GPS] sleep ok, up just after 7 with the sunlight of a clear day (bivvi), now sitting at the head of the valley having b’fast and looking down towards the Volkzeiner hutte somewhere in the shadow. Enjoy resting in morning sun.

8:30: off: goodbye horses. 9:30 down to Volkzeiner. All v quiet. Coffee+Kuche - raspberry - for an hour inc sneak charge. M. is alone, initially cleaning his pots, then setting out the tables.

10:30 off. View further down valley; and back where I've come from. Path uphill which I had slightly dreaded is surprisingly fine; faint clouds drift o’er the sun. Pause at little refurbed shed which has a nice veranda and bench, and nice weathered wood. 12: Leisacheralm 2330; closed chalet over cowshed with a cargo tele. Rest 1h. 1:50: Hoferalm 2392 now to head up to Joch. Weak signal, finally. Vilgrater Joch 2583 2:20. Views S to distant Dolomites. Up ridge of the Kugelspitze with some trepidation. But it turns out that we avoid the peak. So when across I go up the far ridge unladen. Nice views of both GG and GV. Then down (wrong but easy way) to Pumpersee 4pm. Refl.

Don't quite have the strength of mind to swim - the light is getting milky - but do have a wash. 4:40: down then up to Glaurihutte on the Geigensee; probably best seen in context in this pic.

Which turns out to be a charming 4-bunk (and more upstairs) bivvi hut with a woman called Annikki present. The terrain here - little lakes, humpy scraped rock - is good. Make myself some tomato soup. Nice now for some sphag au naturel and - gasp - a glass (or two) of white. There is a double gas stove, lighter, spare sugar salt etc; coffee filters but alas no coffee. Shall make some hot water. Talk with A; she quit her docu-film making job and is hiking to Venice.

Tuesday 9th: [GPS] up 7 and reaslise there is a tiny composting loo. A is up already and heads out soon after. Peace. It would be tempting to stay here but wx f’cast for pm is poor and tomorrow all rain so will go down. Tiny pattering noises in roof. Sweep floor, shut shutters and windows, turn off gas. Pack. Two day bods turn up - enterprisingly early of them - but aren't going in so lock door and hang up key. Farewell magical hut!

8:20: turn nose upwards towards Regenstein… oh hold on that's not where I meant to go. I meant Bockstein. Ho hum, correct, losing 50 m. To Hochegg scharte, 10. Broad views of lakes and cliffs and sun. 21: to Ochsensee, having taken a slight short cut. Col 11:30 signal f’cast looks ok today. 11:45: down far side a bit to see Arnsteiger Biwakschachel hut 2600. Tiny; one bed place, no amenities; partly under rock.

Back to col, along ridge, and start up B’stein. Boulders, crap, as usual. The last bit is a sort of split ridge or ravine; view up to summit cross from where that starts. 12:30: summit! (Proof: summit book, and following). Then I need to desc a bit (view back to ravine and ridge beyond),

pick up sack, “traverse” the S side, which is a right pain with no markings I can see but finally 1:15 to the far-side col (having, I am fairly sure, gone too low) and start of walking desc. Chased off by white sheep suckling two black lambs. 2: head of Zagoritzsee. Behind, B’stein is now wreathed in cloud. Have last of the cheese. This is kinda goodbye mountains; just a loong walkout to go.

2:40 road head. 3:15 Huberalm and light rain. The road (gravel/grass) feels eternal and I start to wonder why I chose this way (but at least it isn't sunny). No restos anywhere on the way. At 5, in Goriach (coming down into G I took a short cut on a lovely little path and got stuck behind a little herd of cows that had been called down), I look for supermarkets and find one in Ainet but its 45 mins away and shuts at 6. March on! And, arrive: juice jog cheese bread biscuits will make a fine supper. There's also a hotel so get a room; it all seems v quiet but it's a dull damp Tues eve in late summer so no surprise. Quiet eve catching up.

Wednesday 10th: unexciting b’fast in bedroom, but blaukase is nice. Walk in rain (hills wreathed in cloud, everything dripping) to stop (dry inside), catch 9:10 into Lienz €3. Now I'm back in interchangeable not individual land, but it cheerfully serves me coffee and a bun; awaiting 11:00 to Innsbruck. 10:15: finish refill coffee and may as well look around. The station is immaculate. Eisenbahn museum? It has steam trains! Ah, eisen = iron, its the iron road. Could have spent longer. There's a giant steam snow plough, a big steam loco, more engines, and lots of bits.

My cunning timing to catch bus is slightly upset by nice lady making me fill in guest book but I have spare anyway. The old engines make me think of time, of a slower and more lovely era. Musing: trains, buses, cars, walking. Bus is good. Route via Italy no border checks. 3:11: after heavy traffic we're more than an hour late and appear to be in some carpark on the Austrian side of the Brenner and possibly about to swap buses. The driver said <something> but the passenger response was mild so it can't be too bad I hope. The rain pours down. 3:30: another bus arrives. The poor driver has to swap baggage for a couple of fuckwits who didn't do it themselves. 3:40: off. This was all so dumb: 20 mins would have got us to Innsbruck (errm actually I am wrong about that…). 4: Oh, and we’re just passing the loop that would lead up to Stubaital, invisible in cloud.

4:50: hauptbahnhof. And it has stopped raining! 5:20: hotel via MPreis. Huge checkin queue so seat in cafe bar area and guzzle Austrian camembert. Room: fine.

My roommate has hung up his wet clothes and left, so we should get on well. Walk round evening Innsbruck inc Goldener Adler inc post-rain damp quiet bot garden. Back for coffee.

Thursday 11th: the man above me with the socks turns out to be a champion snorer. Up 7 buy b’fast, decent. Sit over coffee, up for a shower - our snorer is a decent guy and allows me first go - then to Spar for Lebkuchen for us, Mfd+J, and Ma; bus to airport; I’m about 2:30 early but there's little I could have done with that :30. Buses are every 15 mins €3 and the stop is near hotel. Usual dull security; the mad 50 m bus xfer to aircraft. Sun shines, hills have cloud on top.

And so on, via landing at Gatwick not Stansted, to home and M.