Extract from 'The local climbing club is ten years old'

If, along with my eight gramophone records, I could take one memory, it would be of the couple of hours around the fall of night in mid-summer.

Arms and legs would feel stretched and loose. The last figures, still in T-shirts and shorts, would be leaving the crag. The track would be unclear and the pace intense. Gear would clink like reindeer bells in the night. Sitting on the wall outside the chip shop in the warm air, the quiet of the village would make the skin tingle. Stepping through the pub door a wave of human warmth would break. There would be all the old stories again, all the anticipation and interjection, the shared bedtime tales that never grow stale, the laughter that bursts without ever a moment of calculation, the eyes alive, the bodies close together and all that blood and adrenalin coursing to a common pulse.

Ten years old?


May you stay forever young!   


(nb. 'While Giants Sleep' does not contain photographs. These have been included only for the purposes of this blog. Photographs are taken from Google Images )