Street food in Kolkata

Here's a mad and beautiful little gem from Mongo Denoon and the ok catering success.

Chilled pet #1

Chilled pet #2

Dry-tooling at the Westway

Last night we participated in a Fig Four dry tooling competition at the Westway. Nick's friend Ramon had signed us up to take part. Somehow we'd got the impression that this was just a bit of fun and that plenty of the participants were, like us, new to dry-tooling. So our hearts sank yesterday when we read on the Westway website that the competition would feature "elite climbers" and take place on the "super-steep" outside wall. Gulp. The less said about my attempt the better, a complete debacle. Nick did much better. Here's a clip of his first go. Ramon and others climbed superbly. As Nick put it, our effort compared with Ramon's was like watching Rotherham play Barcelona.

Roller-skating Santas

Not quite sure what these two were up to, but they made me smile.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I took this photo yesterday after seeing the new le Carré film at the Barbican. The film is excellent. This scene seemed to match the mood.

Proper adventure climbing

Here's a video of Alex Honnold, James Pearson, Renan Ozturk and Mark Synott new routing and adventure climbing in the deserts of Chad.

Flags and fireworks

Southwold being Southwold there are flags and bunting everywhere. It's good that events like the Royal Wedding are helping to rid the union jack of its Nationalist and Hard-Right taints. There’s nothing very threatening or exclusive about a flag that’s got a picture of Wills and Kate grinning in the middle of it.

There were fireworks last night on Gun Hill.

It was a clear night and a strong north-easterly wind made for some interesting effects as it blew the light trails inland.

New camera

I’ve only ever owned Point and Shoot cameras, but last week I had a rush of blood to the head and went out and bought a good digital SLR. Over the last couple of days I’ve been taking my first steps into a whole new world: of shutter speeds, lenses, light sensitivity, metering, apertures, white balance and so on and so on. It’s dizzying, but exciting too.

Yesterday I packed the camera and cycled over to Reydon Wood. The wood is well known for bluebells at this time of year, and there were a couple of serious photographers already wandering its paths, carrying large tripods and enormous zoom lenses, when I arrived. As one of them passed me, he remarked “too little sun, too much wind”. I mumbled something in agreement, feeling a complete charlatan.

Anyway, a couple of the photos came out ok.

I cycled on, further inland to the small old flint church at Blyford. From a previous visit I remembered clear glass windows and a whitewashed interior, which I thought might offer good light for a photo on a cloudy day.

Someone had put flowers in an alcove under a window, for Easter:

On my way back to Southwold I passed a pig farm, and a cock pheasant in a field. The photos I took aren’t very good but I’ve posted them anyway. Some of you may be getting a little bored with all the flower shots.

East Suffolk at Easter

I’m up in Suffolk for a few days. The long weekend has been sunny and warm, without a cloud in the sky.

I got up early on Easter Friday and saw the sun rising over Bramfield church. Double-click the photo to see the rabbits in the field.

The Suffolk landscape is at its best just now, with bright green spring growth and flowers everywhere.





The apple tree in R and C’s garden is in bloom.

Early on Easter Monday, R and I took Poppy for a walk across the heath land and through the woods around Westleton. We heard a nightingale singing in a gorse thicket.



Being with a dog makes walks a lot more fun.

North Norway Ice: a Guideblog

Nick's put together a Guideblog for ice climbing in the Lyngen area. The idea is to put in one place all the information a climber might need for a trip.

There'll be lots of stuff we haven't covered, so we'd be grateful for any further information or comments.

Back to work

I had mixed feelings about returning to the UK. But spring has arrived, the leaves are coming out on the trees and it was a balmy 15 degrees today. I returned to more than 1300 unread emails at work, but am sustained by what was a truly great trip.

My work colleagues enjoyed the dried reindeer meat.

Here are a few more photos from Norway:

Just Another Morning

From yesterday:

Just Another Morning from Jim on Vimeo.

Stuff we haven't had time for

Hattavarri: two climbs at about 90m, plus a shorter one, all believed unclimbed
Kitdalen: a big icefall off the end of the valley, long-looking walk-in
Spansdalen: large number of icefalls (15-20?)
Kvalvik: remainder of the Seven Sisters
Kafjord: we heard about a canyon further southwest from where we climbed, including a 120m M6/WI5+, 80m WI6 X and WI7- X 170m
Nordkjosbotn: good-looking WI4 above the town
Furuflaten: a series of climbs on an escarpment above the village
Tunnel north of Furuflaten: long WI3-4 above the road tunnel
Between Skarvdalen and Birtavalen: another above a road tunnel
Opposite Lyngspollen on the east side of the fjord: a hard looking climb high up towards the top of the escarpment above the road (the main pillar of which collapsed while we were here).

I'm sure there's lots more. Someone with skis and a sense of adventure could probably find lots of virgin ice, too.

Last climb

We chose one of the Seven Sisters of Kvalvik as our last climb. It was, as usual, steeper than it looked. I led the first pitch, Nick the second. Nick had to weave about to find good ice. Even that kept fracturing in great dinner plates, adding interest to the lead.

A good WI4+ 160m, of which 60m was snow-plodding between ice pitches.

After that we drove to he largest town in the area, Nordkjosbotn, 50km south of Skibotn, to get cash to pay Stein-Are's dad for the cabin. We had coffee and cake in the town and picked up a few beers at the big Coop supermarket for our last evening.

It's been a superb trip. For the first couple of days we were a bit concerned that we wouldn't find enough ice at our grade but after some scouting and some advice from Kjetil and Aadne we found a bounty of very good climbing, more than enough in the area around Skibotn for our 3-week stay.

And we saw no other climbers, not one in 3 weeks!