Despite all good intentions, I’ve been consumed by blog apathy again, and I’m determined to snap out of it. I have the usual litany of excuses (work, travelling, concerts, country pub, more work) but none of them are really right. I’m torn as to what the tone of this page is – is it meant to be serious, or funny, or just me droning on about chubby men? Should I put effort into how it’s written, or just dash off the odd post as often as possible?
But I’m thinking that at a time when I’m away from home so much this should be a good way for the people I know to keep up with me and get the stuff I’d bore them with if I saw them in person so I will try to keep to a more regular schedule in the coming months.
Pointless worries about the tone of a weblog aside, I did have a really life-changing experience recently. A few weeks ago we started shooting on the TV series I’m currently producing, which is looking at Britain through its mountains. We started in the furthest reaches of Scotland, around the coastal area of Sutherland, in what was the most extreme weather they’d had for about 30 years. Everything was covered in a blanket of blindingly pure white snow, and the landscape was breathtaking at every turn.


On the fourth day of our trip we climbed the highest of the northern Scottish mountains, Ben Hope, which is a bit over 3000 feet to the summit. The weather had been pretty changeable every day, and our first attempt got no further than the breakfast table when our expert mountain guides decided the conditions were too dodgy to go up. The following day we reassembled, but due to a combination of impassable roads, bad cellphone signals and staying in separate hotels we were missing our on-screen presenter. When we finally sorted this out it was midday, three hours behind our allotted start time, and we had a long climb up ahead of us. I think it’s fair to say that we were all getting a bit anxious at this stage.
Turns out the local council had heard we were going up and were appalled, as were the local mountain rescue, because it was still considered to be bad weather warnings. And there were a couple of moments of hail and wind and blizzard, but by and large it was as clear and sunny a day as you could have asked for, and not actually that cold for the first half of the ascent.


And at around half way up, as we stopped to set up cameras for another sequence, where Griff the presenter and Cameron his guide would have a conversation on a promontory of the hill, I turned round and had the most incredible feeling. Here I was, 2000 feet up in the air, knee deep in snow, a bit breathless, and the view out across into this blue sky and vast panorama of white was one of the most stunning things I had ever seen and I really felt quite overcome. I can’t really explain it – I’m afraid it was a real you-had-to-be-there moment. The stillness and the calm air and the sheer hugeness of what I was seeing were beyond equal. (Is that an epiphany I feel coming on? I’d better stop now before I start reading Deepak Chopra). But truly, all cynicism aside, those couple of minutes will never go away for me now and I only hope these pictures give some sense of what it felt like up there, in this otherworldly glow.








We made it to the top just as late as we could probably have safely left it, buried in cloud and with no view to speak of, but it didn’t matter. Then we made our way down as night fell (not something we relative novices should have been doing, even with trained guides) and as it got dark we were just a trail of tiny lights scattered around this vast rock, using our head torches to steer through the path. When you read anything about mountains and the people who go up them I can see how tempting it is to think (as indeed I once did) that it’s part macho mumbo jumbo and part talking to the trees but take it from me, it is indeed another world up there.