It's early morning and I'm in the car nearing the mountain. The road is covered in a couple of inches of snow, but is perfectly navigable: I'm going slowly and being light on the brakes. Out of the side window a deep blue loch is surrounded on all sides by white. Shit, I've never seen a landscape like this before. It's Neal beggs work at the cca which has given me this new perspective.
Neal's there already. Apparently he's been there all night. He slept in his car and is now in the middle of a coffee and porridge breakfast. Will I join him? Of course I will - for coffee.
Neal is brown from a week's climbing in the ben Nevis area. He has strange boots on, with a thick solid sole. However, according to him it is me who is wearing slightly inappropriate footwear. They're simply the black boots I normally walk the streets in. But what Neal doesn't seem to realise is that I sprayed waterproofing on them only yesterday, so they should be up to today's task. Also, last night Mum put patches on the soles of each boot (she didn't trust me to make a decent job of it). All things considered this should be the first walk I've had for some time that won't involve getting my feet wet. my brother was in the house when Mum was glueing the patches. "These boots look like they belong in a Charlie Chaplin film, not on a mountain," said John dryly. Mun looked a little hurt.
Neal reckons that conditions will be tough further up (no problem I have on longjohns, thick jeans, a waxed jacket and thermal gloves). Moreover I am wearing Mum's Russian fur hat which has flaps that come down over the ears. The hat is exactly like the one that - once upon a time - I used to put on Action Man's head. The rest of his WW2 uniform involved jodhpurs and pink epaulettes, which wouldn't have been so appropriate for today's outing. Anyway, I don't have jodhpurs in my wardrobe.
I have no boubt that I'm sensibly dressed for the mountain. Neal does have his doubts though. He reckons there might be ice near the summit and that we'll need crampons to make progress across it. He's brought a spare pair for me to try. They're intended to go on a stiffer-soled boot than my pair, but it's worth a try. Crampons (I discover) are basically a set of blades that you strap onto the bottom of a boot, so as to cut into and grip ice or hard snow. I watch carefully as Neal puts the straps through eyelets, so that if necessary I can repeat the movement on the mountain, where conditions - let's face it - might be less than ideal. When I try to walk with the crampos attached to my boots (just a few steps, as one would on the soft carpet of a shoeshop when trying on a new pair of footwear) they fall off. To be exact, I step out of one metal contraption and then the other, leaving them looking like animal traps on the snowy ground. Neal is unphased. He places his own crampons underneath my boots and again I watch eagle-eyed as he tightens the ties. Then I walk again around the breakfast table while Neal grabs a mouthful of porridge. I step more gingerly this time, and the crampons stay attached. "They're fine, I'll take them." I say decisively as I sit down, as if closing the deal with a helpful shoeshop assistant.
Before we set off, I offer Neal a ski-pole. These were last up the hillsides with Mum in the Fifties. Indeed she carried them on her shoulders, along with her skies, the night she spent lost on the Cairngorms. I did a bit of sandpapering to them yesterday but got distracted after a couple of minutes, and I see now that the poles are still rusty. However, I'm still taking one of them up the mountain as a walking stick. Does Neal want the other? He doesn't, and he offers me an ice-axe. What the hell is that for? Are we expecting polar bears up there? But I don't ask this specialist adventure sports question, I just put the awkward thing in my rucksack alongside the toothy crampons.
The sky is blue when we set off. The route is simple - due west - but the ascending path is difficult to spot because of the snow. Blue sky and white mountains thrusting up into it, basically that's the view as we climb.
I let Neal walk in front, to choose the route. But soon we lose the path and are stepping in deep snow. The deep white areas are the places to skirt round since they involve stepping in teo or even three feet of snow. We try to follow signs of rock and heather. We speak occasionally, but I find it difficult to hear, what with these woolly ear flaps and the howling wind. I ask Neal for an update on his cca project, but don't hear the answer. I ask again, but it's no good, conversation will have to wait until we rest. In areas of deep snow, I step in Neal's footsteps. It would be stupid not to. Sure, it means I am expending less energy, but he's the one that's used to this load of cold bollocks let's face it, so I don't give it a second thought. The ski-pole is great, takeing maybe 10 percent of my weight, more whenever a loss of balance or change of direction comes into play. You can let go of it and the leather wrist strap means that nothing is lost. The spike penetrates the snow and a fancy steel circle stops the pole penetrating the snow too far. To be honest I think the thing ha been designed for just such conditions. Neal is a fool not to have taken advantage of my offer. I just hope he's going to be all right today if conditions turn nasty.
The snow lies like sand in dunes. According to Neal the snow is thick over most of the area covered by our route because it's in the lea of the prevailing wind. But todays's wind is from the north west, so the snow has been shaped an fluted into the desert-like patterns we're walking through. If current conditions kept up for a day or two all this snow would be removed to a different part of the mountain.
It's like walking on the moon, I reckon. Who would have guessed there would be so much moondust? Actually, there was a theory that when Apollo !! landed it would sink into metres of dust, and equipment was on board the lunar module to cope with that possibility... I realised that by walking in Neal's footsteps I could give the misleading impression that only one person walked on the moon, not two. So I step into fresh snow. Plod,plod,plod... But it really is harder work that way, so after a few steps I go back to system A.
Weather conditions change. The wind blows stronger, the sky greys and it snows. Am I all right? Neal asks. I'm warm and dry and fine, as long as we don't go much faster. How about Neal? He thinks we're making satisfactory progress but that it's likely to be as windy as this from now on. He offers me a balaclava, which I take. He offers to hold my hat as I put the balaclava over my head. The wind tries to pull the hat out of my gloved grip: no chance. Neal is experienced in these conditions but strill it's an effort for me not to say"do not under any circumstances let go of my hat". With the balaclava on, and the hat safely and tightly back in place, I feel impregnable. I recall a snippet of dialogue from the transcript of the first lunar landing.
Buz: "beautiful view."
Neil: "Isn't it something! Magnificent view out here!"
We walk on. I keep my right eye shut so that the north west wind doesn't freeze my eyeball. I'm a bit worried about not being able to open the eye again later, so I keep opening it for a second or two from time to time. I'm also turning my head slightly to the left. I keep seeing snowsnakes wriggling away downwind. And since this information is brought to me from my open eye, it must be true. Neal assures me that there is no such thing as snowsnakes. Moonsnakes, then.
The weirdest thig is how conditions change underfoot. You're walking in deep snow one minute, progress slow and tiring. Then the snow firms enough to take your weight ans you're fairly floating up the mountain as if in one-sixth gravity conditions. Then the snow won't take your weight any more and it's plod, plod, plod, albeit in Neal's footsteps. Then you're on a section where the wind has whipped most of the snow from the surface and you're more or less walking on rock, so progress is fast again. Best of all is where the snow will no longer take Neal's weight but will support mine. He plods along like a heavy-shoed Clydesdale while I float along like a pony doing dressage at a home-county meet.
Buzz: "That looks beautiful from here, Neil."
Neil: "It has a stark beauty all of it's own."
We have lunch at some point, sitting with our backs to the still strong wind. Neal's a vegetarian so I left the six mini-pork pies in the car. Stupid of me, because now I've only got one sandwich and a snickers bar. I enjoy the sandwich at first, but soon my hand is cold. I put the glove back on and resume eating, but the hand is still cold. It's the only bit of me that's not comfortable though, despite the snow and wind, and I guess Scott of the Antartic would have swopped how I'm feeling right now with how he was feeling just about any time in his adult life. Neal points to something downwind. The scene is a whiteout as far as I'm concerned. But no, conditions ease, and I see what could indeed be a bird. It's a ptarmigan, apparently. I think about taking the tomohawk from my haversack and throwing it. But that is much easier to think about than to do, so that's that. Anyway, I like the bird; I like the way it changes colour depending on what side of the moon it's on: dark then white, white then whiter than white...
Blue sky as we set off again. Wind but no snow in the air. How much further is it? Neal reckons we've only about 200 metres more to climb; he reckons we can see the summit, but warns of false summits. I don't need to be warned about them. Everything that's happened in life up until today suggests that there'll be false summit after summit. I'm pacing myself accordingly. I've always paced myself accordingly.
Suddenly we're there. That's what Neal reckons anyway. I tell him I'll believe it when we fall off the edge. We are there. I make a point of recalling our first words.
Neal: "That's it."
Me: "Yeah, great. That's it."
Sitting on top of Schiehallion, I call Dad on the mobile phone he's leant me for the occasion. He wanted to know if the phone would work from the top of a mountain to his comfy chair. Well it does, and now he wants to know something else - what is the view like over Loch Tummel and to the north? I explain to Ground Control that the wind is blowing hard and that I've just sat down in the shelter of a rock, for God's sake. I'm reluctant to expose myself to the gale that's been tearing into my face for the last few hours. `so, presuming it's all right with Dad, I just describe the view to the south. "The view to the south id white." I hand the phone to neal and he dials the number of his friend Belinda in Glasgow. I picture her in a tower block flat, though I've no idea if this is the case. While Neal and his friend talk, I picture a work by David Thorpe, one of his delicate layered cut-out landscapes made ot tissue paper, of a tower block-shaped mountain with a caravan on top. Belinda must ask Neal what conditions are like up here. "Magnificent view." Neal tells her. "It has a stark beauty all of it's own." I'm not sure that gives a clear enough picture. "Tell her everything's white," is my advice. That's the sort of specific information Ground Control really appreciates.
We don't stay long. Going downhill, I stop after a minute because I seem to have lost the balaclava. I shout down to Neal, asking if I returned it to him. He pointed toward his throat. Sure enough, the red cloth os loose around my neck. Then I stop again a minute later and check in my rucksack to make sure I've still got the phone. Neal sees me doing this, asks what I'm doing and - when I tell him that I seem to have lost my short-term memory - he tells me I may have picked up space sickness from the summit. This is a JG Ballard reference. And it gives me a chance to mention to Neal that JG Ballard and Jorge Luis Borges are the only two writers that most artists have heard of, and if he wants to make any recommendations along these lines then he might as well do so now (while things are going in one ear and out the other).
Going down is a doddle. The snow takes the strain that is usually put on knees when descending a mountainside. One-sixth gravity rules! It's easier to speak on the way down because we don't need all our concentration to pick out a route and climb it. Neal tells me about the unfortunate climber who was stranded on the top of a Himalayan mountain. The climber used his mobile to phone his wife who told him that the chances of rescue were the same as if he'd been on the moon. What a strange way to die. Sad? Well, it is sad.
Oh, but we're not dying, the sky is blue and we're striding down a mountain. We're following our ascending footsteps. There's only one set - that makes sense. But what only makes sense once we think about it, is that the marks on the soles of our boots are on the top of eighteen-inch high columns of snow. What must have happened in the short time we've been on the upper slopes, is that the wind has blown away the snow. But it hasn't blown away the snow that's been compacted by our footsteps! So maybe three feet of snow has been moved on from hereabouts, leaving our mutual footprints as monuments to our ascent. It's like something from Colorado's Monument Valley.
We stop. Not for a rest so much as a chat. Neal tells me about another piece of work he made. He climbed a wall connected with a motorway flyover. Motorists would toot at the sight of someone mountaineering in such an incongruous setting. The video made of the climb concentrated on the tattoo that Neal has got on his upper arm (I guess the video camera must have been attached to neal as he climbed.) I comment that the work sounded good without the tattoo bit, but add that I liked the tattoo as well, as something separate. Sitting on the side of the mountain, Neal peels back layers to reveal '1959', written in a font typical of digital alarm clocks. My tattoo will read '1957' if I ever have it done. Two men at their absolute prime then; striplings, let's face it. Although some of our conversation about partners and families, as we continue our desent, would give the impression that our biological clocks were about to run down. Digital clocks are different from the old clockwork ones, I remind Neal. They don't need winding up; they never run down. All they need is their batteries replacing once in a blue moon... Step by step, sentence to sentence, we go from feeling like old men to bouncing along in a space-pram.
Neal asks me about Personal Delivery. I tell him about the crap reviews it got in the literay press, the up and down reaction of the art world, and the brilliant Bowie review and surprise phone call. I tell him that I had a dream about the guy and neal tells me that he too has dreamt about David Bowie before. In my dream David wants to talk with me again - a genuine 1-2-1- but crowds of hangers-on get in the way and make it impossible; in Neal's dream he is in a band and gets a kiss from David. Neal (and I) think that a book of artists' dreams about the singer would be an interesting piece of work.
We're back at the car park. After descending mountains in summer, my legs have always been like jelly, my knees aquiver. But not today. However, my boots have fared less well. They look as if they're made of packaging that's been left out in a thunderstorm: mushy cardboard. My feet are soaking wet, but the miracle is that I've got a pair of spare dry socks in the car. As I'm slipping into my driving shoes I tell Neal about the TV moment of 1999. The character Authur, from Mrs Merton and Malcolm, singing Bowie's 'Starman' at the bedside of mrs Merton's paralysed bed-potato of a husband.
Neal must have listened to my description. Because now I see and hear him, learning on his car, singing:
I had to phone someone so I picked on you-u-u
Hey that's far out so you heard him too-o-o
Neal singing 'Starman" to me! Is he implying that I'm some sort of urban potato? I climb mountains, for God's sake. I'm a mountaineer.
He told me:
Let the chilren lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie.
