Today is the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest (in case you didn’t know). You don’t have to be a mountaineer to gaze in wonder at photos of the highest mountain on earth, picturing what it would be like if you could drag yourself up it’s treacherous slopes. I used to think I’d like to have a go at it one day but for several reasons that I’ll get into, I doubt I will. However, for a mere $65,000 you can get yourself on an expedition and be in with a real chance of making it to the summit. I have a great deal of respect for anybody who manages to push themselves to get to the top, or even has a crack at it and fails (as most people do). But it’s nothing compared to the respect I have for the team who managed to put Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay onto the roof of the world.

With modern equipment, a competent guide, fixed ropes for most of the route to the summit, good weather and a body that can handle being at high altitude (doesn’t matter how fit and strong you are, some people’s bodies just can’t adapt to the altitude), then you’re in with a good chance of climbing Everest. I’ve seen professional climbers say that “with the right weather you can get almost anybody to the top of Everest” and they’re right, technically it’s nowhere near as hard as, say K2 or Gasherbrum 4. It’s an amazing achievement to succeed if all the above factors are in your favour, but it’s not what I’d call mountaineering.

Wind back to 1953. The equipment was extremely primitive by today’s standards: the oxygen equipment was bulky, heavy and not a patch on modern kit, Gore-Tex was decades away, camping equipment hadn’t benefited from light-weight advanced materials, the crampons weren’t secured to their flimsy boots very well and didn’t even have front pointing spikes on them. In fact, whereas you can front-point your way up ice today with crampons and ice tools, in those days they had to cut steps the whole way up with their ice axes – sheer hell. Understanding of the physiological effects of altitude was in its infancy and – most important of all – it had never been done before. This last point matters on many levels.

In 1953 nobody had been to 29,000 feet on a mountain and many believed that you would die trying. While a Swiss team the year before had made it to the south summit, no human had gone along the knife-edge ridge to the summit proper. They were stepping into the unknown, not really knowing
what to expect, the barrier to success being as much psychological as physical. They had everything to lose and everything to gain. That’s why I get shivers down my spine just thinking about it. I try to imagine what it must have felt like with all the doubts and dangers, both known and suspected. Doing something for the first time – forging into the unknown – seems like the ultimate adventure if you ask me. Knowing what to expect at every turn just seems to take the edge off.

Nope, being guided all the way to the top wouldn’t do it for me. It just wouldn’t be right. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t give it a go if the opportunity fell into my lap. But whenever I start thinking that way I just think back to seeing Chris Bonington give a presentation a few years ago on an expedition he’d just done. There was one slide he showed where he was leading along a knife-edge
ice-covered ridge with a sheer 3000m drop below “just to see if there was a way through”. There was just him and his climbing partner belaying, and that was it. That was all the support he had. He couldn’t call search and rescue and expect them to come and save him if it all went pear shaped, he had to rely purely on his and his partner’s skills and experience gained over years of climbing at the top level.

Call me old fashioned if you like, but I think you  should earn the right to climb mountains like the Himalayas with winters in the Alps or similar locations. Being a rich, successful trader with $65,000 to spare doesn’t qualify in my mind. And neither do I. So on this 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, I’ll not be thinking about the mountain, I’ll be thinking about the men who beat all the odds and achieved the impossible. And lived to tell the tale.

One of the facets of my character that drives my girlfriend mad is how I deal with something normal people (like her) would get excited about. Let’s take an example. A couple of years ago my brother, my good lady and I decided to go on holiday to Las Vegas. My girlfriend works for a travel company and so managed to get us a deal so cheap that it felt as though they were paying us to go. Anyway, rather than talk to me about the holiday in the weeks prior to our flights, she rang my brother and enthused with him. No, it’s not because she was having an affair with him behind my back, it’s because he gets excited about things and so does she. But I don’t.

I didn’t really notice this habit until it was pointed out to me but it seems perfectly rational to me (as most character flaws are to the people who harbour them). Put simply, I never try to tempt fate. To avoid feeling let down when plans fall apart, I work on the assumption that something won’t happen, until it actually does. So if I’ve got a kick-ass holiday coming up I work on the assumption that it’ll happen, but prepare myself for the eventuality that it won’t. I feel that if I start to look forward to it then the evil fate monster will decide to snatch it away from me just to piss me off. I guess you could call me a pessimist – but I’m not. I just don’t like surprises.

When I was preparing to buy my fancy BMW (which I’ve already managed to put a dent in by opening another car door onto my own – there’s karma for you) I would run through in my mind everything that could go wrong so it wouldn’t take me by surprise when anything went wrong. The finance deal could fall through, I could crash my previous car therefore losing it’s trade-in value, I could be made redundant and not be able to afford it any more, and so on. I like to call it “scenario visualisation” and I’m told it’s a predominantly male characteristic.

I suppose I must have learned this defence mechanism at some point in my past and it’s no doubt as a result of some bitter experience I’ve had and felt let down by. Perhaps I was so gutted that I’ve blocked it out of my memory (which is why I can’t pinpoint it just now). Or perhaps it’s the result of many incidents that have snowballed over the years. Whatever the cause, I’m making a concerted effort to stop thinking in this negative, defensive way, because it sucks all the fun out of everything, and it drives the people around me crazy.

But it does explain one other part of my personality. My impulsiveness. I can walk into a bike shop with the intention of buying a pair of gloves and come out with a new bike. One of my tenets is that if I have a “do I or don’t I?” question in my mind, I always do it (in the long term it always works out to be the right choice). I like to live in the moment rather than waiting for things to happen. I’m a control freak. Simple as that. Anyway, you must excuse me, I’m off to think up the worst-case scenario for my drive home from work.

There’s not a day that goes by when the state of the British health service isn’t panned on the news. There are tales of long waiting lists, inconsistencies on standards of service across the country, under-staffing, low morale, botched operations and mis-diagnoses to name but a few. But until you actually have to use the NHS (National Health Service) you don’t really believe how bad it is. For various reasons that I’ll get into, I’ve had close encounters with the NHS a few times recently – and so have some friends – and I can report that the situation is worse than you could believe.

Let’s start with my mother. She was diagnosed with cancer around October 2001 and it was the beginning of a nightmare. Between that point and the day she died nine months later she never once had an MRI scan and we never once knew the extent of the spread of her cancer. She saw several different doctors and it always felt like a roller coaster ride of good and bad news reflecting the differing opinions of the doctors. At the time I felt my mother wasn’t getting particularly good treatment as I knew that if you want to track the progress of cancer treatments you need to have checkpoints of the tumours to compare and contrast. They never had that information and it seemed they were using guesswork and some endoscope explorations to surmise the state of her cancer. I can understand why people decide to sue hospitals or doctors for messing things up but it wouldn’t bring my mother back. As it happens, there probably wouldn’t have been anything they could have done, except give us a realistic timeframe as to how long she would have lived.

Next is my next door neighbour. He came back from a holiday in Australia a few weeks ago and he then went to watch a game of rugby. At this point he had a very sharp pain in one of his calf muscles and went to casualty in Cardiff. He was diagnosed with a possible DVT (deep vein thrombosis) and would need to undergo some test to make sure and they gave him a shot of warfarin. On returning home he went to the local hospital and they told him to take some pain killers and come back in two weeks if it persisted. He wasn’t taking that for an answer knowing that if he had a DVT he could drop dead the next day. So they told him to come back the next day for a scan. Come next morning he returned and was told that he should have made an appointment for the scan and besides, he’d need another test first to see if the scan was required! They performed the primary test which came back positive and then made an appointment for the scan. So he came back again the next day for the scan which showed a 10cm long blood clot in his calf muscle (good job he didn’t go home and see how he got on for 2 weeks).

So he was given daily injections of warfarin to thin his blood and would need to keep having them until his blood thinned to a certain amount for a certain amount of time (he even got conflicting information about taking alcohol – one doctor said he should take small amounts whereas another was adamant that he shouldn’t touch a drop). But after a while he started getting numbness in one of his arms and sharp shooting pains in his chest. At the same time he started having panic attacks (heart racing, adrenaline pumping, shaking, light-headed, that sort of thing). So he went back to hospital when the pain in his chest got too much. They strapped him to some monitors but discharged him shortly afterwards telling him there was nothing they could do. The pains continued and he decided to visit his local GP. This was where it got a bit bizarre. The GP looked up the side-effects for the medication he was on and they didn’t match up to what he was experiencing. So she just told him to take some pain killers and suck on a boiled sweet if he had another panic attack. He also mentioned that he had a sore throat so she recommended he suck on some ice! World class advice that ain’t.

Next on my list is my brother. And that’s what’s prompted this article. When he was younger he had a ganglion cyst in his hand (and had it removed). They’re basically swellings that appear under the skin and can restrict movement and cause some pain. The modern practice is no longer to hit them with a bible (absolutely true), but instead drain the fluid or in some cases perform minor surgery. Anyway, for the past couple of weeks a ganglion has been forming on his hand and it had started to cause him quite a bit of pain. So he decided to take a trip to casualty to see what they could do. After waiting for around an hour and a half a nurse came over to him to tell him that a doctor was going to come and see to him. When the doctor turned up he didn’t even look at the ganglion but instead told my brother that as he’d had the symptoms for more than three days that he’d have to go and visit his GP instead! Of course, he’ll have to wait until Monday to book an appointment and they’ll most likely refer him to a consultant which will most likely take three months before he gets to see him. Marvellous.

There’s talk just now of foundation hospitals and a two-tiered system and how that will destroy the principles of the same standard of service for all. But what use is the “same standard of service for all” if that standard of service is abysmal. I get private health care from work and I’m bloody glad that I do, you can waltz into your GP and arrange to see a consultant any time you want – no waiting around. I pay taxes to fund the NHS and I’d happily pay more if it would improve the standard of health care, but I very much doubt it would. I mean, it’s in such a state that it would take a miracle to turn it around. Maybe it’s time to reach for that bible and hit some politicians upside the head with it.

When you want to buy a house in Scotland it’s easy. You have a look around the place and if you like the price, you make an offer through the estate agent. If the seller is happy with the offer and agrees to sell you it then that’s it. It’s legally binding. You have to buy the house and the seller has to sell it to you. You then go and get a mortgage, then agree on a move-in date, wait until then and move in. Simple, quick and effective. And that’s how house buying should be.

But I live in England. Things are different down here. It starts out the same way as in Scotland. You have a look around the house, make an offer and the seller accepts (assuming they’re happy with your offer). Now, that agreement is not legally binding so you can back out at any time and they can decide at a later point to do any of the following:

• Decide to not sell the house any more.
• Decide to add 10,000 on to the price.
• Decide to sell to somebody else instead, who may or may not have offered more money.
• Paint the house pink.

Okay, that last point is fairly unlikely. But the main point is that nothing is certain at this point in the process. So you go and get yourself a mortgage offer and get the deposit together. All set? Well, not quite. The seller may be in a chain. This means that they’re buying a house from someone else who may need to sell their house before moving out and so on. At any point, anybody in the chain can drop out and the whole thing breaks down. Contrast this with Scotland where you’ve already agreed the sale and there’s no backing out.

So, before you can actually buy the house, the seller has to have sold their house, and the person they’re buying from has to have already sold theirs, and so on. And all this can take quite some time. And, I stress, can break down at any time.

Luckily for me there is no chain involved and I should (fingers crossed) get into my new house in the next 3 weeks or so. But seeing how this system works compared to my native country’s makes me wonder why the hell it has to be this way. There’s uncertainty all the way and nobody trusts anybody else. It’s just plain stupid, and it’s not as if there’s no alternative. It’s also fantastically slow. Even though I’m not in a chain, it takes a damned long time to get anywhere in the process. You can nag everybody involved as much as you like but it seems to have little or no effect. Why aren’t they using modern technology to manage the whole process? I mean, come on, we live in the 21^st century!

Okay, I feel a bit better now having got that off my chest. But I’ll say this much. Should it fall through at this stage for any reason, then I’ll be getting decidedly Braveheart on their asses…

A couple of friends and I decided to go mountain biking yesterday. There’s nothing unusual in that. But the day didn’t turn out quite like we planned. We should have paid attention to the warning signs.

The first was that the guide book for the route we were doing described the route as “very hard”, 5 hours in duration and 3000ft of altitude gain. In past experience, routes that supposedly take that long normally take about 3 hours for fit young bikers like ourselves and 3000ft of gain didn’t seem too bad over a 20 mile route (which didn’t seem very far anyway). So we ignored those warning and carried on.

The weather wasn’t exactly perfect. It was quite windy and it looked as though it might rain a bit. However, we’d not been biking for a while and weren’t going to let a bit of traditional Yorkshire weather put us off. We drove to our starting point (at a place called Starbotton) and set off. We took a few snacks for the trip and were glad to be out on the trail again. Basically, it all went down hill from there on (not literally, sadly).

We started with a rocky climb that we had to get off and push a good portion of (it was completely unrideable). The terrain changed to boggy moor and continued to climb for another few miles and it just kept on going up and up and up. A good portion of it was rideable but a fair portion of it was not, especially the extremely steep, boggy climb on to the top of the moor. After an hour or so of hard slog (did I mention that it had started raining heavily here?) we got onto the main moor only to find a very hard wind blowing into our faces. And that was it. We spent the rest of the day pedalling into a seriously strong head wind over some terrible, boggy terrain with little or no downhills to cheer us up.

I’ll cut to about 4 and a half hours into the supposedly 3 hour ride. Myself and one of the other guys were utterly wasted. We had no energy and could barely keep going. I was pushing my bike up the steepest road in Yorkshire (note: if there is a steeper one I’d like to see it) and I was fit to drop. When I eventually managed to drag myself to the top of the hill I was able to ride the next couple of miles to where our route left the road. It was murder. As soon as I met up with the other two (both of whom were clearly just as knackered as me) I collapsed on to the ground and lay there in a heap, exhausted. I had nothing left to give. I had hit the wall.

We had no more food (remember, this was supposed to be a 3 hour ride) and couldn’t just stay put as we had to get back to the car. We decided to carry on and that’s when it happened. A switch just flicked in my head and I could carry on, I was blocking out the pain and the urge to lie down and burst into tears (it had been there, believe me). My emotions were gone and all that was left was the will to carry on. I was lucky. I’ve been there before. Back when I used to run marathons I’d hit the wall and I’d forgotten just how bloody hard it was. It doesn’t matter if you can run a marathon in 2 hours 5 minutes or 5 hours 2 minutes, everybody hits it. The only way you can go on is with sheer will power.

One guy had also hit the wall (for the first time) and he wasn’t enjoying it, but the other one is from New Zealand and is therefore as hard as nails and seems impervious to pretty much everything that life can throw at him! So he shot off ahead and we pushed on as best we could. It was comforting to realise that he had the same symptoms as me: pins and needles in the fingers, unable to focus, coordination not as good as before and the overwhelming desire to lie down and go to sleep. Not terribly helpful when you’re on the back of a mountain bike. However, the rocky descent at the end was quite an experience. I didn’t have the energy to hit the brakes hard and I could only see a blur ahead. I probably went faster than I normally would (being a bit of a wuss).

One thing is that my sense of humour remained intact, although I’m not sure whether that made my companions want to kill me more or less than usual. So after nearly six hours of hard slog we finally managed to make it back to the car. And then the pub.

I certainly learned a few lessons from the whole experience, most of which I should have learned before but I guess I got complacent. Firstly, always assume the route is going to be much harder than you think it is and take twice as long. So bring loads of food along. Secondly, watch the weather a bit more closely. Thirdly, special forces soldiers (and infantry soldiers in general for that matter) have to operate in that state of total exhaustion all the time, that’s why being a software engineer is such a great job. Fourthly (and I knew this already, it probably helped to flick that switch in my head), the human body can take a hell of a lot more punishment than you would ever believe possible. When you think you can’t give any more you can, it just takes pure will power to keep it going. And finally, I’m not that little blonde haired boy who used to cry when the wind blew in his hair anymore. I haven’t been for a long time!

It’s not often I can pinpoint the precise moment that my immune system issues the orders to attack a foreign virus that has invaded my body. I was brought up to think of my immune system as an army with the white blood cells acting as soldiers, battling to destroy an enemy force. I guess the reality isn’t much different from that analogy and I still think of things that way.

So I’ve just come home from a hard day in the office staring at my dual 21 inch monitors at lines of code and I sit down on my sofa. I look over to my kitchen and spy a box of Kellogs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and I simply can’t resist.

I’m on my feet in seconds. I’m pacing purposefully over to the counter. In the blink of an eye I’ve got a bowl out from the cupboard and in a move perfected by hours on the training ground I’ve started to pour the cereal into the bowl. I breathe lightly and turn to my right. Another quick hand movement and a spoon is in my hand. Squatting low I open the fridge, reach in and snatch the milk out in a blur. I slowly open the milk and begin to pour, savouring the moment and the sound of cold milk on dry corn flakes. I return the milk to the fridge and move back over to my sofa and sit down.

So as I’m about half way through the cereal I get this nasty taste and sensation in the back of my throat. It’s a feeling I’ve known so well over the years and I recognise it in an instant. It’s the signal that I’m about to get a cold. There’s nothing I can do, in a few hours the glands in my neck will be swollen and sore and I’ll have a thumping headache.

Cut to an hour or so later and this is exactly the case. By the morning (after a rough night) my eyes feel like they literally want to explode out of my head. Despite the fact that this might make an entertaining picture, I take asprin to calm it all down. And call work for a sick day. I can’t remember the last time I’ve taken one (no, my memory is not affected, I just never take sick days).

Still, that was Wednesday and I’m feeling almost back to my normal self today. Getting a cold isn’t very interesting but it was strange to feel a switch flick in my body from being fine to knowing I was fighting an infection of some sort. Weird…