Jim Perrin - Travels with the Flea

The mystery does not get any clearer by repeating the question.
Nor is it bought with going to amazing places.

Rumi

Praise for Travels with The Flea:

The pre-eminent writer on the British landscape. Peter Beaumont, the Observer

Jim Perrin is an alchemist. He takes the base metal of his own experience and, in retorts fuelled by the power of his observation and skill with language, transmutes it into prose that coruscates with spirit and meaning. Jamie Jauncey, the Scotsman

Perrin writes the kind of evocative, elegant prose, lyrical but not fussy, clear but not simple, that anyone who has ever aspired to write ... will look at in despair, knowing they will never be half as good ... A refreshing spring from which to drink. Robert Dawson Scott, the Herald

The spirit of [William Hazlitt], along with a measure of his writing skills is alive and well in Jim Perrin. Gavin Bell, the Daily Telgraph

Praise for Jim Perrins writing:

In the last hundred and twenty years, from the age of Whymper, mountaineering has attracted a unique array of writing talent. Of all those writers, famous, infamous and unknown, Jim Perrin is by far the best. Climber

A remarkable writer ... a sort of rucksack Thoreau ... some of the finest travel writing ever. Jan Morris, the Guardian

He gets his joy, and expresses it like a poet, from solitude and nature. the Observer

River Map

Wholly original ... deeply moving ... passionate and urgent TGO

On and Off the Rocks

These essays are as fine as anything that has been written about climbing. Geographical Magazine

A beautiful and important book ... powerfully convincing ... a triumph ... brilliant ... gives the extra dimension of a language richer, more generous and prolific than any other climber can produce. Mountain

A collection of moral essays in the tradition of Johnson and Hazlitt. This highly articulate and lyrical writer combines great powers of description and a deep, perceptive vision with a strong, quirky sense of humour. Western Mail

The range, quality and humane breadth of the book, with its beautifully integrated photographs, amount to a literary achievement ... as strong in its impassioned polemic ... and its pleas for conservation as in its memoirs of climbing rock. the Guardian

Spirits of Place and Visions of Snowdonia

No-one else in contemporary Wales is capable of writing prose of this exceptional quality ... he deserves to be recognised as the most singular, and the most outstanding prose-writer of present-day Wales. Professor M Wynn Thomas in New Welsh Review

Yes, To Dance

Delight in the range of his prose and ideas if they suit you. Struggle with them if they infuriate you. Dont ignore them. They come from the best mountain writer we have left. Climbers Club Journal

Menlove

The star of English climbing writing today ... writing as powerful as any I have ever read, light years ahead of the bulk of climbing literature. Rock & Ice

An exceptionally wise biography. London Review of Books

Perrin has greatly raised the status of mountain literature. Climbing

C ONTENTS

Riding in America before the fall

Through Wales on six legs

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many of these articles first appeared in the Daily Telegraph Travel section, and are reprinted here with its editor Graham Boyntons permission. They were commissioned for the most part by Michael Kerr, to whom Im indebted not only for his own fine example as a travel writer, but also for the opportunities hes put my way, his encouragement, and the meticulous care and skill that he brings to the handling of other writers copy. His suggested changes have always been improvements and his queries never less than constructive. No writer could hope for a better editor. Im also grateful and appreciative of the support offered at the Telegraph by Nigel Richardson, Richard Madden, Christopher Gilbert, Graham Boynton and, especially, Lisa Donald.

Other pieces in this collection appear courtesy of John Cleare and Duncan Baird Publishing, Roland Smith and Michael Joseph Ltd, Victor Golightly and the New Welsh Review, Roger Alton and the Guardian, Mairwen Prys Jones and Gwasg Gomer, and Gwenda Williams.

Many people have helped facilitate these travels. Id like to single out for special thanks Phil Bloomfield, Glyn Lovell, Jane Harris of the Wales Tourist Board, Hamish McCall of Trips Worldwide in Bristol, Maggi Smit of Windows on the Wild and Mary and Joe King-Nemeth of Freewheel Tours (both in London), guidebook publishers Lonely Planet, trekking specialists Himalayan Kingdoms, John Atkinson of equipment manufacturers Sprayway Ltd, and Nim Singh of the Canadian High Commission in London. The friendship and support of Cameron McNeish over more than 15 years has been one of the pleasures of my life, and to him and his deputy at TGO, John Manning, I am particularly grateful. They will recognise the provenance of much of this material.

Without the helpful criticism and comment of many friends, all this writers confidence would have ebbed away. Id like therefore to record here my thanks to Roger Alton, Sally Baker, John Beatty, Polly Biven, Dr Ian Gregson, Roger Hubank, Clare Hudson, Nigel Jenkins, Aled Jones, Colin and Annette Mortlock, Bernard Newman, Mary OMalley, the late Robin Reeves, Tony Shaw, Dermot Somers, Professor M Wynn Thomas, Robert Wilkinson, Gwenda Williams and Ray Wood.

To my publisher, Neil Wilson, thanks for his guidance and energy and the opportunity to gather these pieces together, and to my editor, Morven Dooner, gratitude for her wonderfully sound ear, sharp eye, and acute sense of humour.

To anyone whom I may inadvertently have omitted to mention, I apologise, and assure them that appreciation, if not exposure, is theirs.

Lastly, if through fear of being thought gushing or sentimental I did not mention the bright tints of joy with which a friendship begun in that wonderful decade of the 1960s with the artist Jacquetta Balla has infused my perception of the world, then I would have missed my chance with one of the lords/ Of life/ And ... have something to expiate;/ A pettiness. That my oldest and dearest woman friend should now be my wife leaves me marvelling at undeserved providence and pondering, in the words of the Grateful Dead remembered from acid-illuminated nights we shared 30 years ago, on what a long, strange trip it's been.

So to her, as well as the little dog who enhanced my life in her own ways for 17 years (and has come back, obviously, as a cat), this book, with love, is dedicated.

F OREWORD

BY R OGER H UBANK

A cultured man, wrote W J Gruffydd, is one who touches life in the greatest number of places. Touching life is precisely what is on offer in Jim Perrins latest collection.

He is a rock climber: in his prime, one of the very best. As many of the essays collected in an earlier volume, Spirits of Place, testify, he found in climbing a subject that enabled him to tell honestly and directly the things he found to be true. Against the great abstractions he sets solid, tangible things, things he can be sure of, things felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, and this is the source of his power as a writer.

He is also a traveller, with the same sharp eye for the immediate and the particular. At the same time, he brings to his travels, whether in cities or wild places, a sense of the mystery and summons of creation. It transfigures almost everything he writes. By bleak Arctic shores, on Himalayan ridges and rock faces, or tropical rain forest, even by the burning ghats of Varanasi, always, whatever its defilements, there is the fullness of life, starting out, and astounding, as he puts it: the radiance of sheer presence.