I’ve seconded (more) and lead (less) a few climbs during these three days – and it worked well, at first: No trace of anxieties that hindered me on previous outings and generally just having a good time. I know the basics well enough, by now, can place (protective) gear, construct anchors/belays … even if it’s a little slow and clumsy at times. I still feel that I want to do more of this, that being out there, having those experiences is … well what I search for in life. That by and large Outdoor activities are my thing. I was having fun. But then.

Third day was a visit to Holyhead mountain. This is a sea-cliff like mountain close to the ocean, that requires one to walk up a steep scree slope to the base of the rock face where the climbing routes begin. It looks a little like a minutre version of Ayer’s Rock in as much as it rises out of flat ground surrounding it, quite suddenly. And then … hello darkness my old friend²: Anxiety. Started up on the scree slope where my imagination ran away with me. It wasn’t any more dangerous or difficult or complicated than ground I’ve covered in the past. Even the routes ahead weren’t more difficult than what I’d done the days before, just more exposed. Being afraid of the scree under my feet suddenly slipping away, or me slipping not finding the ground. Possible, yes, probable not very. And even if: Heather with it’s strong roots covering the ground, loads of bolders, things to grab in case. Anxiety persisted. I didn’t climb that day. Needed to tie myself in just to belay at the ground of the climb. And (remember this is part of the assessment days) the suggestion by Duncan (the lecturer with the small group of four that day) that I descend back to a ledge and call it a day.

And – as so often that coldness that comes with that, a chill down to the bones, where no amount of sunlight is warm enough. But then. It was a glorious day and it is an amazing place. I rested on that ledge, high enough to see the ocean curve on the horizon, no cloud, blue sky (a first hint of tanned skin, now days later). I built a minature stone circle on that ledge that was eventually crushed by a rope from the sky. I’d wished I’d packed my camera, which I had considered while packing, but didn’t in the end.

It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and the canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself – struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” [...] “It suddenly get’s cold. The sun seems to give less heat,” she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft dreep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue.”

-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Foghorns in the distance, as mist was over the ocean and this is a shipping lane, including those high-speed ferries crossing from Ireland to Wales and England. There were dolphins playing out in the ocean. And later in the day six sea-kayaks, quite likely other OEE students as they were supposed to be out there that day. There are sea cliffs in that area, which rank among the most scenic but also most difficult climbs in the UK – as the tide comes in you can’t escape other than climbing all the way. These cliffs are closed for climbers during the summer as they are the nesting place of some 10.000 birds or so. And then, there’s what I imagine Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse to look like. I doesn’t require a boat – there’s a bridge, but still:

If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask [...]

-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Mind you – it is a beautiful place, but that’s the first description of the lighthouse I came across browsing the pages. I will have to use other’s photos instead of mine for illustration, below³. I’ve scrapped just below the passing mark for the assessment (35%) based on my climbing the first two days. It’s only part of the module mark and I can compensate that. But the point is … as I said in the review discussion later, what I need is people to go climbing with, but it’s so hard to find people that I don’t hold back, on those days I can’t, but that choose to climb to a level that’s challenging as well. I hope it’ll fix itself some day.

South Stack Lighthouse

South Stack Lighthouse & Sea Cliffs

Holyhead Mountain

And that was the last big field trip with the course I’ll be part of. No-one, unlike those other days, felt like returning home. We usually just focused on going back quickly, everyone yearning for their home after a week or so out. No … it was a holiday like feeling these days, for everyone, I think. I’ll miss them days.

1. in translation – Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
2. I was nicknamed “the sound of silence” back in high school.
3. Click on them to go to the source pages

I don’t know. I am not motivated – the topic feels superflous. I know the general answers, but will have to fill it out with details and find actual examples & references. The usual scientific drag. And I am still listening to the eels. But I also want to finally work through my backlog of photos. I haven’t really shared any I took in Liverpool these last two and a half years with anyone. I want to pick up my writing again. It’s just … not quite there yet, and I need my blanket more often.

Thursday: A fieldtrip to a waste water plant close-by. As ever so often I am surprised by the contrast between studying Outdoor Education and the leather-seated way too posh coaches we are put in at times. We were booked in for an hour long tour, but ended up spending two hours there.

Saturday: A visit to the tate. This was with Headspace but only K. turned up. Some of William Blake’s paintings and drawings on display. As with anything about him these are focused on christian motives, exploring spirituality and – no matter what you think about these topics – very well crafted. Particularly the way background and foreground work together, his obvious keen sense of human faces and expressions. My favourites, however, are an incredible goofy Cerberus and that fascinating creature in The Six-Footed Serpent Attacking Agnolo Brunelleschi².

Illustrations by William Blake

Walking back home on my own I passed The Olive Tree, one of those general esoteric and spirituality shops that smell of holyness and that everyone (including employees) whispers in. I walked in because they had Moroccan cooking books on sale (and picked one up eventually). A good ethnic cooking book is more than just recipies but also an exploration of a different country – and this one is a particularly nice example. I’d walked in wearing my headphones, smiled briefly at the person on duty, and turned them off just in the (unlikely) case they might leak sound and upset. Not eels. Artery³ Now … if I’d only lose my anxieties about cooking in shared housing. I dislike having people watch, especially when trying new things. Which means I stick to simple, quick and what I know.

1. That is – I’ve looked for some articles yesterday night. Past midnight.
2. Image slightly enlarged. And blurry, thus
3. Bulgarian-Dutch Balkan Underground Folk Metal. Try Rubber Moon, Take it from me, Control and Electricity for the whole width of their sound and please (mostly) ignore the lyrics.

Also – up & down mountains loads, micro & night navigation, river crossings, emergency procedures, steep ground², rope work, an overnight camping trip to Sprinkling Tarn (frozen at the time), pointless evening lectures, and many, many stories about Landrovers from my room mate³. Apart from that – my evenings filled with working on my dissertation. I ended up bringing three backpacks to carry all books.

Back home and off to Ambleside with the three that participate in my Adventure Therapy research/dissertation the day after. It was a good day, I think, and I felt – at the time – that it was quite successful. I’d left late though, we missed the first train, but had wonderful weather once there.

I spent a day at home, last Sunday. Then off to Wales for “Mountain Experience Days and Assessment” through uni. The last time to stay at Charmoix Mountain Centre with the course. None of the University Lectures actually could be present, leaving those students that already have gained Mountain Leader Assessed (or more) status to run these days (as members of staff).

Two of the LJMU students were going for their Walking Group Leader assessment, however, and I joined that group (of five total) under Phil George‘s supervision. Marshlands. Welsh wild horses (one dead). More micro navigation. The remnants of local shooting practice (wooden planks, aluminium cans and assorted other material partially pullverized by bullet holes) … and more Landrover stories⁴. I am glad to have had the chance to meet Phil again before the end of the course – he remembered me from back in year one. Phil – and his identical twin Al [suffering from cancer] – is one of the legends of English Mountaineering. Now in their fifties the two left the UK for Italy aged 16, became Alpine Mountain Guides by 21 and completed many first ascends of routes in the UK.

Mostly though – he is one of these awesome personalities that are rare to come by. Highly intelligent, yet humble, full of stories, little facts and knowledge – but always keen to get to know more about the world and the people around him.

1. Unless you paid a fee.
2. Still my main problem – I am less anxious than I used to be though
3. One of the few topics that really excite him
4. He didn’t like the pink one we ran into.

Things like toilets that provide facilities to only half-flush, recycling systems, composting, reducing carbon footprint by bicycling/using train, etc.. I won’t say these are givens in Germany or Sweden but it is more of a normality to simply do them, without having to think about it, then it is the case here. Particularly the notion that “cars are still the best way to get around” and that the suggested alternatives are “ridiculous” coming from some of the other course members annoy me. I’d really hoped that a course on “Outdoor and Environmental Education” would draw a more environmentally aware crowd.

They also have a bookshop and given their orientation I just couldn’t walk past it. I picked up David Edwards’ Free to be Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions, E.F. Schumacher’s small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered and James Lovelock’s Gaia: The practical science of planetary medicine (which was on sale). That means I am dipping into my savings this month, again … or rather I exchanged some of the Euros I still have for pounds to allow me to go through the rest of the month.

On the way back I started reading some in Free to be Human and sadly one of the criticisms offered in one of the reviews on amazon seems to be quite descriptive:

“Too often the book proceeds by personal declaration rather than from the basis of concrete examples, facts or research. This is compounded by a rather polarised viewpoint in which the affairs of the world are seen as either good or evil, black or white.”

The introduction of the third edition I have starts out with comparing our societies and political realities with The Truman Show: A make-believe world and construct that is artificially created, where the only real person is the one born into the movie set, not knowing any other reality. From there on the first Chapter begins by summing up Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media – which I read years ago while living in Sweden.

Chomsky and Herman’s book uses a relatively neutral language and highlights what, why and how this unbalanced picture of news comes into existence without commenting much outside their factual observations. In contrast Edwards employs a moralising and aggressive manner of speech that weakens his argument and doesn’t do a lot of justice to the careful language of the original argument.

What got me though are his attacks against Psychotherapy:

“Most psychotherapists (apart from isolated radicals like Erich Fromm, R.D. Laing and James Hillman) have approached this modern problem by attempting to alleviate symptoms of dis-ease on the basis of the Freudian hypothesis, suggesting that neurosis is primarily (if not always) a result of sexual repression. More recently, therapists have emphasised the need to re-live repressed childhood trauma, so relieving the symptoms of the repression that is their cause. Rarely have psychotherapists sought the cause of neurosis in the economic and political system within which we live.” (page 45)

“[C]learly any system concerned with alteration of the personality that assumes as its premise that the requirements of society define the norm of sanity into which the personality should be fitted, is little more than a system of brainwashing.” (pages 45-46)

“The irrationality of trying to make a human being sane by emphasising his or her childhood and sexual experiences while largely excluding the impact of the requirements of the economic and political system has, apparently, only recently begun to strike a minority of psychotherapists.” (page 46)

What irks me is that he criticises something without really seeming to have an experience or knowledge about current practise. That is – I feel he’s attacking some form of urban myth about what happens in psychotherapy. Freud stopped being a model quite a while ago from all I know. But also – the way he puts things to me feels like downplaying how crippling mental health distress is. If I am not able to function in a way that makes me able to engage with society – critically or not – at all, then yes, the only positive consequence is to assist in helping to move toward less anxious and more “normal” behaviour. That is not saying that the current promoted lifestyle has problems and that yes, there might be a link to mental health – but counselling/therapy can not change the political landscape to accommodate people with a mental health problem. It can work with people and assist them to be more able to have a functioning life though.

I guess the point is – I am disappointed because the aim of the book “Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusion” suggests to me an attempt to move toward something positive – how his aggressive and attacking tone will help is beyond me. The sad part is – a good number of the topics he raises are important and important to discuss, look and point at. Only that he’s standing in his own way. On the other hand, I haven’t even finished the first chapter and will at least try to give him a chance.

In one of those funny coincidences I also happened to read an article by Paul Stolz (The Power to Change Through the Change to Power: Narrative Therapy, Power and the Wilderness enhanced Model, published in the Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, Volume Four, 2000) on the way to the centre. Stolz uses The Truman Show (!) as an example for “power and knowledge that serves to construct the reality in which one lives”. That is, he is pointing to exactly the problem that Edwards attacks (see above). However, Stolz, as a therapist, approaches a constructive not destructive perspective as a base of Narrative Therapy:

“As a therapist my discourses will be often completely different to those of the adolescent. My values and beliefs about family, gender, race, education, drug use etc. are coloured by the discourses that I have engaged in and have acted on me over a long period of time. [...] In understanding this within myself it opens up the possibility of acknowledging multiple realities, multiple perceptions and multiple constructions which opens the space for new and different possibilities.”

I’ve had my last counselling session this Friday. As said earlier and elsewhere things are good. My “CORE” score dropped massively since last October and while I am not at the level of what is considered “normal” I am not far off, either. Met next year’s house-mate B. whom I’ll be hunting for houses with as soon as possible (Ehlo!). We’d still need a third one to catch somewhat cheaper house prices (and have more choice as to where to live) but let’s see. Also taken some pictures at CAT … some behind the cutoff below. Finished the registration forms for Headspace. Next thing to manage: 5 exams and a seminar in a row (and then another exam a bit further down the road). Oh and … if “Cellar Door” is the most beautiful word in English then “Mushroom” must be in the top ten.

-C.

I just love the Welsh word for Microwave! I still hope to pick up another language sometime … Esperanto, at least on the basic level, still seems a fair bet.

My attempt at doing a Kinga Freespirit (one of my idols) like self-portrait from memory. It’s nowhere close, but hey, features the green water bottle I always carry (it’s the third one, actually, the rest having been lost somewhere)!

A public phone booth at CAT.

One of the exhibitions at the centre. This one explaining issues around public transport (on signs along the path).

Random motive saying winter is over (#234123450123).

I can’t really say what makes caving enjoyable for me. Part of it is probably discovering a part of the world and the environment that isn’t easily visible. Part of it are those fascinating views one only gets in an underground environment. Walking through a cave and suddenly coming to a spot that has an opening, the walls covered with moss and grasses – life claiming it’s space, a waterfall feeding the channels that cut the caves, and then re-entering darkness. Part of it is the whole sense of awe of the time spans, the geological history of the places one touches. Caves are ancient spaces. Spaces that are beyond human history, that have a sense of eternity in them. It is an environment that changes only very slowly. On the last day caving we spent time in a quite muddy environment – dry mud that partially started to turn into rock – and likely has been deposited in that cave during the last ice age (there are no signs of flooding, whatsoever) 10.000 years ago. And maybe that aspect of having to bend, flex and use all of one’s body makes part of it – wriggling through a tight space for a couple meters, squeezing around corners, using counter-pressure to stay on that rim, with a large drop below – to traverse from one part of the cave to another … I really can’t say. Other then that I enjoyed my time.

I’ve also learnt an interesting tidbit about the way assignments are constructed here at the uni. There are, apparently, regulations that govern how much words an assignment has to have. That is, for example, an assignment carrying 33% equals a maximum of 1000 words. Knowing that helps appreciate the difficulties in constructing tasks for the courses – and, at the same time, makes it easier to accept what sometimes seems like “impossibly” few words for complex topics. I think I always need to understand the reasoning behind things, understand why something is asked of me the way it is. I like transparency.

I also have to state at this point that the lecturers on this course are accepting and understanding of my needs to a point that is exemplary. I will – very likely – need – in one form or another – some extensions on my work. The general consent among the staff is one of – we’ll help you, think you are intelligent enough to do this, and want to provide support. I am more scared and feeling guilty for asking for help than I should be.

Coming home … I stopped counting after the 50th discarded beer can in the living room. The house was clean and tidy when I left (and after Ed had returned) – with all the others around the same problems as usual return. We’d run out of toilet paper. Instead of buying new ones (buying more alcohol always works) they started using newspaper. Will, as ever so often, passed out sometime Saturday afternoon and didn’t return to the living world until midnight (I was watching Oh Brother where art thou on Film4 in an – for once – otherwise empty living room) when I went to bed. I am worried some about him – drinking and diabetes don’t go well together. That he’s being “abandoned” pretty much by his drinking buddies in that state – doesn’t really point toward healthy friendships, I think.

I am looking forward to moving out, hope to find more mature people and – finally – a room with a window that I can actually look out of. (There are some photos after the “more” tag. Warning! Big!)

-C.

This is the lower of the two Limestone Beds we examined. What happened here is that glacial movement removed the cover of the bedrock and then water cut grykes in it (and leaving clints behind).

A view from inside a gryke.

A top down view.

One of those photos that are so cliche Outdoor Ed

River Twiss valley – before the waterfalls section and an obviously artificially straightened river bed. Shows the typical glacial valley form (with subsequent “softening” through weathering/erosion).

Same waterfall as above (there are several) – the lower part of the rocks are Ordovician slates (which have been uplifted and are at a 76 to 78 degree angle now), with Carboniferous limestones (in there original vertical sedimentary position). The Devonian rocks must have been eroded away before the deposition of the limestone – leaving a “gap” in the geolocial timescale (i.e. an Unconformity).

A close up of a third layer of rock between the two, this time a conglomerate, likely remains of glacial deposits. There’ll be some cave photos later – once the files from the waterproof “indestructible” university cameras have been uploaded.