Nick Bullock - Tides: A climber’s voyage

Ive lived too long.

My parents, now retired, live on a canal boat moored permanently at Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire. When I visited on my way south from Llanberis to Chamonix for the winter, I walked the towpath. The day was washed out. Grit clung to the soles of my shoes, rotting leaves floated on the dark surface of the canal. The canal museum was closed for the winter. A mallard stirred the water. I bent and stepped into the crouch of the boat. It rocked as I opened one of the small wooden doors leading into the overheated living room.

Ive lived too long were my dads opening words. Paddy, the Jack Russell terrier, skittered across the wooden floor to jump and claw at me. I pushed him away. Dad sat in his wooden-framed chair with a cup of tea in one hand and a roll-up clamped between yellow-stained fingers of the other. The oil from years of manual labour that used to line Dads crevassed finger skin had long gone. Wisps of smoke belly-danced toward the discoloured ceiling. I sat surrounded by paperback books, china figurines, glass paperweights and photographs of my sisters grown-up children. A birdcage stood on an old oak table. Barney, the African Grey parrot, was perched on top of the cage, pulling out her feathers.

Its easy to listen to something like my dads statement and not fully take it in.

Ive lived too long.

Whats too long? Do many of us take life for granted, treat it as something that may be frittered away? Is there really such a thing as Ive lived too long?

Recently, Ive been waking up at 4 a.m. The wind shakes my van, and the rain plays a xylophone on the metal roof. I turn on the light. Perfect almonds of condensation have formed on the red ceiling. The wind grasps the van and an individual drop clings clings and hangs, hangs and stretches. Stretches and finally lets go falling, falling, stretching, falling the drop holds together. Until after just a second it thuds on to my sleeping bag. I lie and worry about not having a fixed abode, a career, a partner or enough money to last until I die. As I lie staring, I see homeless people sleeping in doorways. I see buskers, beggars, the unemployed, the lonely.

Later, walking through the long grass of the clifftop, I watch shafts of sunlight penetrate the cumulus, illuminating the dark sea and embracing an oystercatcher that silently skims the waves. I see the wind catch the curling leaves of an ash tree and the trickle of water weaving a course along the dusty surface of yellow limestone. And all this reminds me that life, at whatever level, whatever frailty, has to be worth living.

The sun dips for another day, quenched by the green Irish Sea. High in the distance, a pair of gannets rise on a spiralling thermal.

I stepped out through the small prison door and every sound changed. There was the distant rumble of a lorry, a snatch of a faraway police siren. Cars swished down Leicester city centres Welford Road. I could hear the dull whine of planes descending into East Midlands Airport. A few pigeons huddled in the shadow of a prison turret were briefly mumbling to each other. I turned my face upward to feel the rain, and imagined the stars beyond the sodium street lights. The acidity of the rain felt cleansing. The exhaust fumes in the air smelled of freedom. I inhaled deeply. I listened to the air enter my body.

I breathed out, turned, and walked away.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years of aggression, violence and stress. Fifteen years of learning bitterness, prejudice, loneliness. Fifteen years of building walls. Fifteen years. The prison service had given me all of these things, but in some way it also had given me parole: I now had health, fitness and climbing. It had given me the money to pay off my mortgage. I was grateful for these things.

Looking over my shoulder, I followed the straight line of red brick. The prison wall stretched above with a thousand uniform bricks. Rain soaked my shoulders. High-level lights lit the street. Shadows hid, clinging to the corners as though scared.

I had done it. I was thirty-seven years old and I had resigned from my job as a PE instructor in the prison service. I had walked away from a job guaranteed for life. The job which earlier in my life was everything I desired: security, pension, stability, a regular wage, a profession. I had walked. And as I walked, the water beneath my feet squelched, and the stars hidden behind the clouds were burning bright. They were close enough to grab and take hold of. Close enough for me to grab and lock away. Lock away like some of the people that were no longer a part of my life, some of the people still serving a sentence: Reggie Kray, Hate-Em-All Harry Roberts, Bobby Dew, Rookie Lee, Houston, Charlie Bronson. I felt free.

Almost.

At the age of sixteen, I had taken out a loan to buy a motorbike. Each time I stamped on the kick-start, the engine screamed and my nose filled with the unburned tang of an oily two-stroke; the inches became miles. Cheadle, the town in Staffordshire where I was born and where I grew up, with its red brick, factories and fumes, gave way to verges stuffed with wildflower blurs. Red, green, yellow, pink; hedgerows that were home to pink-breasted bullfinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, chaffinch. In those boundless times, the miles turned to days and the days to weeks. That 50cc engine was a time machine, and our time was infinite.

Now, at the age of thirty-seven, I was sitting on the brand new carpet in the empty and newly decorated living room of my beloved house in the village of Burton Overy, in Leicestershire. Burton Overy had been my bolthole for fifteen years; it had been my escape, sanctuary and therapist. My treasured place. Mature oak and horse chestnut, tawny owls, the thatched post office, the pub, the house with warped walls and a tin roof, the grazing sheep, the telephone box, the humble medieval church built from ironstone, and the rabbits, rooks and lapwings. I didnt feel at all like a focused projectile, I felt more like a piece of wood careering down a river. What had I done? I was scared of what the future held, but the excitement of not really knowing where or how my life would move forward was simultaneously intoxicating.

Since walking from the prison I had felt my heart beat. Tomorrow I would leave Leicestershire, the day after catch a plane heading east for Nepal, and the day after that someone would move in to my home and start paying rent.

The motorbike accelerated over the Kathmandu cobbles, speeding through dust and shit. White knuckles, wide eyes, hair on the back of my neck standing erect. It was going to be close. Why did I repeatedly find myself in these life-threatening situations? One move was hopefully all it would take to get us into a position of safety. One move, that was all, but the constriction we were now aiming to squeeze through was getting smaller by the second. Gripping hard. Squeezing. Knuckles white. The situation was out of my control.

All swinging hip bones, a black cow nearly finished us as she lurched into the gap. A passer-by whacked it, shooing it away. The atmosphere was overflowing with heat and dust and humanity. I could almost feel the warmth of the brightly clothed, sweating bodies packed into the narrow street as we passed. The gap grew bigger. Dawa twisted the throttle, and we hurtled through a human corridor of arms, legs, jeans, rags, robes. Silver-coloured metal boxes, stacked and shining; barking dogs; green, blue, red, a pile of blurred plastic buckets. Leaning to the right, to the left, the Nepali climbing agent handled the Honda with the skill of someone used to dealing with the chaos of daily life in Kathmandu. I, on the other hand, had only just returned from a month in the mountains, and it had been a long time since I had owned that white Yamaha.