Hot and Cold

I lit the fire and the lamps and turned the sitting room into a warm and desirable nest yesterday evening, then settled down to watch Strictly. But I got sidetracked by a film called Valley Uprising, about rock climbing in Yosemite National Park. I had been looking for Into The Void, a movie about a man stranded high up in a mountain and dangling from a rope after a fall, when his partner decides to cut it to save his own life. What happens next is so beyond extraordinary that I've never forgotten it, and thought it was high time to watch again. But Netflix didn't have it, and instead I was directed to this film which begins in the 1960s when the first ascents were made of the massive, sheer rockfaces there. Later a group of hippies converged on the park with their psychedelic drugs and booze and marijuana, making ever more daring climbs until the present day when the latest dare devils arrived. One particular forbidding climb took two years on and off to achieve, then another group took a week to do the same ascent, which was later reduced to a day, and finally just a few hours. The new men use no aids at all, no ropes or crampons or safety measures of any kind. They dance up sheer rock with just tiny fissures to fit their fingers into, then do the same up and over vast overhanging crags, always in peril of falling. They are like mountain goats. Watching the progression from the early, more timid methods to nowadays was awe-inspiring, and given my terror of heights, both gut-wrenching and thrilling. By comparison Strictly was a walk in the park.

Afterwards I thought I'd marzipan the Christmas cake, and searched in the larder for the packet. Instead I managed to knock over and smash an unopened bottle of rape oil, and spent the next half hour and whole roll of kitchen paper cleaning it up. That's an awful lot of oil. When I finally made it to bed there was a wasp in my room which I wasted more time hunting down. The two of us were never going to share that space overnight.

Eat your heart out, Canada

Hugo was reluctant to go walkies this morning, given the driving ran and bitter cold, but he had no choice. Soaked, we returned to the house to watch the rain become snow and the garden quickly disappear under a thick cover. I was ushering at Snape at lunchtime, and both the road out of the village and the main Fram to Sax one were treacherous. Heart in my mouth, I crawled onwards, dreading the return journey. Half the audience never made it, and I was sent home at the interval. But suddenly it was a different world, wet again and a few degrees warmer. It's still white out there and we have another walk to do. But there's no wind now, and we won't go far. Hugo does dislike getting his feet wet.