Tuesday 3 August
One of my reasons for taking early retirement was that it would give me an opportunity to go walking in the Lake District. To get there at the weekend, from where I live, is a nightmare journey of narrow winding roads clogged with day trippers. Then when you get there the car parks are overflowing and the hills are full of noisy ramblers. But on a weekday, things are different. The roads are empty and so are the carparks and the hills, and the journey takes only a couple of hours each way. All I have been waiting for is a dry sunny day when I didn't have any other commitments.
This year, contrary to all previous experience, the dry sunny weather has all been at the weekends, and the weekdays have been dull and wet. There hasn't been a single day when it seemed worth risking a trip to the Lakes. This past weekend was warm and sunny, and finally, at long last, the forecast for the next day was also good. I decided to grab the opportunity for a day's climbing in the Lakes.
I set the alarm for 6.30 yesterday, and woke to find a dull grey day with thick mist. But the forecast was still promising, so I made a sandwich lunch and set off at 8.00. The mist, drizzle and low cloud persisted all the way across Yorkshire, but by the time I reached Windermere it was looking much brighter and warmer, though still very hazy. I parked the car at the little village of Hartsop and headed for the 2,000 foot hill of Hartsop Dodd.
View from the shoulder of Hartsop Dodd. The village of Hartsop is at bottom right. In the hazy distance, the southern end of Ullswater.
From Hartsop Dodd there is an easy ridge walk to the next summit, Caudale Moor, and then a steep 600 drop down to a col, and an equally steep 600 foot ascent to Thornthwaite Crag. On the descent I passed a party of people who were making heavy weather of the climb. Their leader stayed back to help them negotiate some of the rocky crags. But when they reached the col he took off at great speed up the path to Thornthwaite Crag, and soon passed me. I found this climb a real killer, and was feeling shattered when I got to the top and found him waiting for the rest of his group. I said to him "It must be nice to be fit," and he modestly disclaimed being fit. It turned out that he was a local, from Windermere, and knew the hills well. The others in his group were friends who were visiting him from London. He said that they were dismayed at the sight of the steep 600 foot climb, and that he had told them "It's nothing really. Just think of it as climbing 60 flights of stairs." I don't know whether they had appreciated this advice. I told him that they were probably eagerly looking forward to returning to London.
I didn't wait for the rest of his party to reach Thornthwaite Crag, but set off along the summit ridge of High Street. This is a historic path that has been used as a thoroughfare for at least 2,000 years, when it was a Roman road.
The ancient roadway of High Street.
High Street led me to the final peak of the day, The Knott, and down into the Hayeswater valley which leads back to Hartsop, a village so small that it doesn't even have a pub. You notice these things after a hot thirsty day in the hills. I had to drive over the Kirkstone Pass to The Queen's Head at Troutbeck for a refreshing pint of shandy. (I don't usually drink and drive, but this was an emergency.)
Hayeswater reservoir. Beyond it, the valley leading back to Hartsop in the distant haze.
Saturday 7 August
Nearly a year after I took the University's early retirement package and signed up for part time re-engagement, I still have the use of my old office. Part of the deal was that I should move to a smaller office, and in fact there is another professor who is very keen to move into my office. But I stalled for a few months, claiming quite reasonably that it would be hard for me to move office before Christmas because of all the Math Soc filing cabinets that I was still responsible for.
Christmas came and went. I took all the Math Soc files to the colleague in Edinburgh who inherited the job from me. I told the Departmental administrator that I was ready to move office, but that if the move was not completed by the end of January it would have to wait until Easter (because we were away on our round the world trip for the whole of February and March). January came and went. So did Easter. Still no movement on the office front, because there was no empty office available for me to move into. Then in June a couple of postdocs, who had been sharing a small office, both left, and I agreed to move to their office. It's much smaller than my current office, but in a convenient location and with a nice view across the campus. It was in a filthy condition, and the administrator agreed that it must be cleaned and redecorated before I move into it. But the departmental budget was overspent for the academic year, so the redecoration would have to wait until August.
Two months later, the painters are finally ready to move in. The new office will be decorated next week, and the University's "heavy squad" will be coming in on Monday week to move my remaining filing cabinets, computer, bookcases and other furniture into it.
That gives me just a week to sort out everything in my old office, ruthlessly throwing out all the papers, journals and old correspondence that I no longer need and that there won't be room for in the new office. It's an interesting process, quite nostalgic in a way, as I come across old research notes, or references written for long-forgotten students. I tend to file away just about everything I can, and in a career of nearly 40 years that adds up to a real mountain of paperwork.
One thing that I came across was a selection of student feedback questionnaires on courses that I have taught. Of course, I only keep the most flattering responses, like this one (from a sabbatical year at the University of Pennsylvania, where I taught Math 150, a calculus course for social science majors):
"He has made me love calculus." Isn't that cute? That's one piece of paper I don't intend to throw away, not just yet at any rate.
Thursday 12 August
Today is the calm before the storm. Tomorrow, Steve and family are arriving, to stay with us for three weeks. Since Liz is already living at home, we're going to be short of a bedroom. Baby David can sleep in a cot in Steve and Jo's room, but Tom will need a room of his own.
The only possibility was to use Mary's study. This room was at one time the fourth bedroom. It's very small, and in the 24 years that Mary has used it as a study it has become congested (to put it mildly). Mary, like me, never throws anything away, so the room gradually filled up from floor to ceiling with old bills, receipts, letters, books and heaven knows what else.
For the past few weeks, while I have been ruthlessly clearing things from my office at work, she has been doing the same in her office at home. Between us, we must have generated enough waste paper to keep the local recycling depot busy for the rest of the year. But now it's all done. The rubbish has all been disposed of, and the stuff that Mary needs to keep has been stashed away in the loft.
Ah yes, the loft. While I was up there last Saturday putting Mary's things into storage I noticed a drip coming from one of the water tanks, and a damp patch on the floor below it. (There are two 40-gallon header tanks on a wooden platform in the loft, one for the cold water and the other for the hot water system.) I was worried that the tank might be about to rupture, so I called an emergency plumber, who arrived within a couple of hours. He said there was no cause for concern, just a faulty ballcock that was allowing the tank to overflow. He replaced the faulty part, but when I went to check, the next day, there was still a slow drip coming from the tank. I called another plumber for a second opinion. He agreed that the tank had indeed been overflowing, but he gave it a more careful inspection and noticed that there was a hairline crack on the base, where the tank overlapped the edge of its platform and the weight of water over the years has caused it to sag. He is coming back on Monday to replace the fibreglass tank with a stronger new one. We're keeping our fingers crossed that the tank doesn't fracture during the weekend.
Meanwhile, Mary's study has been emptied of most of her paperwork and converted back into a bedroom, with a camp bed for young Tom, and we look forward to the family's arrival tomorrow.
Actually, I won't be there when they arrive. I'm off to Scotland for three days for a special event that I'll report on in the next diary entry.
Friday 20 August
Phew! Over a week has passed since the last update, and I haven't been able to get near the computer. The house is bulging with family. It's great to have them all here, but it's also quite tiring. I'm not going to have time for a proper update, so here are a few disconnected jottings.
The plumber came on Monday, and spent all day replacing the two water tanks and renewing some of the pipework. I have been up into the loft several times since then, and there is no sign of leaking or dampness anywhere. The total cost, for labour and parts, was nearly £500, more than double what I was expecting. But that's a better outcome than if the old tank had burst and brought the landing ceiling down.
At work, I have completed the move to the new office, and I'm very pleased with it. The only hitch is that to connect my computer to the laser printer in the departmental office, I had to switch from an ethernet line to a TCP/IP connection. I had a lot of trouble installing this, and it was only today that I got the computer to recognise the office printer. I sent it a test message to print, and went to the office to collect it. When I got there I found that instead of a single page, the printer was spewing out dozens of copies of my message. Feeling like the sorcerer's apprentice, I hurried off to find the IT technician. He tried to stop the print job, but the departmental server gave him an "permission denied" message. Strange, since he has root access to the server. He's a smart lad, and he found some other way to turn off the flood of paper, but he still hasn't been able to discover the source of the problem.
At home, Jo has been using our laptop for her work, for which she needs some PC software and broadband internet access. So I have had to disconnect the Macintosh from the internet for most of the day. It's going to be that way for the next couple of weeks, which is why I won't be able to update the journal much.
Finally, I ought to say a bit about the trip to Scotland last weekend. Regular readers will know that there are 284 mountains over 3000 feet in Scotland (known as Munros after the man who first listed them). A friend of mine has been climbing all of them, over a period of 30 years or so, and last weekend he reached his final Munro. There's a tradition that someone completing all the Munro climbs should invite his friends to join him for the final climb, and celebrate with a drink of champagne at the summit and a dinner afterwards. So, three of us drove up from Leeds to Glencoe last Friday and stayed overnight, for the ascent of Buachaille Etive Mor on Saturday.
Right up to the last minute, it seemed quite likely that the climb might have to be cancelled. The weather for the previous week had been foul, as the remnants of hurricane Alex crossed the Atlantic and dumped several inches of rain on Britain. Now Glencoe is almost permanently wet in any case – I have been there many times and I don't remember a dry day there. As for the sun, it just don't shine there. So it seemed that we were fated to have a very wet climb, if the weather was good enough for us to go out on the hills at all.
But by some miracle Saturday dawned bright and sunny, with no clouds even on the highest peaks. I was very glad that I had optimistically packed a pair of shorts. We had a wonderful day's climbing, completing the traverse of the undulating 7km ridge of Buachaille Etive Mor, with spectacular views over Rannoch Moor and Loch Etive, before descending into Glen Etive where we had a car waiting. There were fourteen of us in the party, including a 12 year old girl climbing her first Munro as her grandfather climbed his last one. In the evening, we assembled in the Kingshouse Hotel for a nice meal.
Five days later, the road we had taken on the drive to Glencoe was washed away by two huge mudslides, caused by the tail end of tropical storm Beth which had followed hurricane Alex across the Atlantic. Nobody was injured, but several dozen cars were stranded between the two slides and the occupants had to be helicoptered out. Next week, the remains of hurricane Charlie are expected to arrive here.
For the record, I have now climbed 82 Munros. I have no realistic hope of ever completing all of them, but I hope to do many more of them before I am too old and frail to continue.
