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I recently spent four great days on the Refugee Tales walk – it was the event I wrote about in this blog post, and I was pleased to be joined for part of it by one of Jae’s colleagues – Gina – of “The Cornrow Five“, who had decided to come after reading that post.  The route followed the North Downs Way, starting in Dover and taking nine days to reach Crawley, where the headquarters of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, who organised the walk, are based.  On each of the four days I did, there were between 70 and 95 walkers, divided up into smaller groups of about 20 people.  I think I probably did about 40 miles in total and am pleased not to have a single blister or muscle ache as a result.  Most of the walkers were doing the whole nine days, sleeping in their sleeping bags in church and village halls en route.  I am afraid I chickened out of that and slunk off home at the end of each day for a bath and a comfortable bed.

It was pointed out to me by several people, however, that it would have been good practice for roughing it on Kili, and that is certainly true.  I think the last time I slept in a sleeping bag was probably in 1971, when Stew and I spent a weekend under canvas in the West Country camping with an American couple and their two little boys.  It was Stew’s one and only experience of sleeping anywhere other than in a bed, and he has not chosen to repeat it, so I haven’t either – though I did have some camping experience before that.  Come to think of it, it is rather strange that Stew didn’t take to camping, given that for many years as a student he worked in Roberts Stores, a camping and sports shop in Glasgow to earn money at weekends and during holidays. Somehow that experience didn’t turn him into either a keen camper or sportsman, although he is extremely knowledgeable about many spectator sports.

One of the highlights of the Refugee Tales walk was meeting the other walkers and talking to them on the way.  Sometimes two or three miles would just vanish, when I was deep in conversation with one of the many very interesting people I met.

For example, at one point I walked with Alan, who used to be the British Ambassador in Senegal.  He was a really nice guy, who wanted to hear all about our plans to climb Kili, and who has since actually made a donation on our VirginMoneyGiving site.  This is despite the fact that he is heavily involved in fund-raising himself for a very worthy small charity in Senegal called Femme-Enfant-Environnement (AFEE), which works to improve the living conditions for women and children, and to protect the environment.

Another interesting person was Joe, who was born in Tanzania, and who had climbed Kili when he was quite young.  He remembered how cold it was, especially at night, despite the mountain being on the Equator.  He is now resident in the UK and is looking forward to embarking on a university course.

John was the person I met who had most to teach me.  He has climbed Kili many times as a leader, but his latest project is to cycle right round the base of Kilimanjaro later this year – a total of 360km across rough undulating country – to raise money for primary education (Village Education Project Kilimanjaro) in the Kili region – even though he is not a cyclist!  He said he has been practising.  He was good enough to answer lots of my questions:

Should I take Diamox (medication for altitude sickness)?  Yes, but just a small dose.

Should I pad the toes of my boots with foam for coming down? No, just make sure your boots fit and are tightly laced (and he got down on his knees to show me how) and your toe nails are well cut.

Will my water freeze on the walk to the summit?  Possibly not, if you lag the tube to your water bladder with neoprene cut from an old wet suit (he showed me his) and put hot tea into your water bottle.

…..and so it went on as we walked, and the miles flew by.

I talked to a Kurdish asylum seeker, who had been a criminal lawyer in his own country; to a woman who was very excited about having met a long lost friend in the course of the walk; to a female barrister specialising in housing law who wanted to do the whole walk, but who might have to leave to do a court hearing for Shelter the following day; and to a lovely young painter called Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, whose first big exhibition was about to open and who was a bundle of nerves about it. If he becomes famous, remember you read about him first here!

We walked and talked through the most glorious Kentish countryside, and the weather was very kind to us – in fact there were quite a few sunburned faces.  There were lovely wild flowers, including expanses of ox eye daisies and some startling red splashes of poppies.

We stopped at churches and pubs on the way.  The Warden of Patrixbourne church managed to provide more than ninety of us with tea/coffee and cake in a church which has no running water!  Water had to be fetched from a nearby stand pipe and the dishes washed outside on a gravestone, while we were entertained in the church to a saxophone concert.

I could go on about the evening performances of music and Tales, about picnic lunches in exotic locations and lots more.  I have had a little taste of walking day on day and really loved it.  The next time I do that will be on Kilimanjaro.  A bit different from rural Kent, but I am so looking forward to it!

Today’s post is by Sheila’s cousin Alex Morgan. Alex wrote the novel “Tandem“, and is currently working on her next one. Thanks for the post – we love always love reading your stuff Alex!

We spend so much of our lives moving at a mechanised pace – by car, bus, train or plane – that walking has become a luxury to be treasured, a chance to enjoy the birds and insects and be dazzled by hedgerows dotted with yellows, purples and pinks.

Trevor and I are on the Llyn Peninsula this week, staying in a little house on the beach, walking small sections of the gently undulating Wales Coast Path and marvelling at the wild flowers.

Having grown up by the sea, I love watching the clouds creeping across the bay, the water shimmering in the changing light, and the small boats coming and going.

The past few days have been as sunny as it gets in northern British summertime, and the back of my neck and the top of Trevor’s head are nicely red. Coming from even further north, this is as hot as I ever want to be.

I can’t imagine what it must be like on the slopes of Kilimanjaro right now. The highest mountain I’ve climbed as an adult is Scafell Pike, and on the summer day we chose to do it, there was snow at the top and driving rain all the way down. When we finally reached the Wasdale Head Inn, I had to go into the ladies to wring out my knickers.

As a 12-year-old, I spent a miserable ‘holiday’ in the Cairngorms at Glenmore Lodge – a kind of prison camp for school children – and dawdled up various high things with my classmates. The names were lost on me, but I still remember the cold and mist, wearing a sweaty knee-length cagoule and eating a huge amount of sliced white bread slathered with sandwich spread.

Not long after that, I visited Sheila and Stewart in Canterbury. Jae was a toddler called Janey, and Gwen was a baby. We went for what felt like a very long walk one Sunday morning and, as I began to despair of ever getting any lunch, Sheila confided that she’d recently had a pork pie epiphany.

After years of feeding them cold to Stewart, it had suddenly occurred to her that they were actually meant to be served hot. So she’d heated one up for him – and was utterly crushed by his less than enthusiastic response to this culinary innovation.

Sitting here now on our roof terrace, almost forty years later, listing to the swoosh of the tide on the pebbles and the chatter of the drinkers outside the Ty Coch Inn, the furthest I feel like walking is the fifty or so steps across the slipway to place an order at the bar.

They don’t serve pork pies – hot or cold – or, thankfully, sandwich spread on white bread, but they do have excellent rare roast beef sandwiches and a fabulous choice of beers.

When Trevor and I get back to our terrace, we’ll be raising a glass to all three of you. Good luck, Sheila, Jae and Oscar – stay hydrated, and have a wonderful walk!

Your cousin, Alex

Here is Sheila celebrating her birthday this weekend with a splendid cake baked by Katie, Queen of Cakes.

Note the strawberries. Because Sheila’s birthday falls in July, strawberries have always been a very special part of Sheila’s birthday, sometimes, accompanied by cream, being substituted for the cake itself.  Since our grandparents grew strawberries in their garden at Woodgate, as children we had frequently stolen quite a few strawberries, before they officially appeared on the table. We weren’t too greedy, just a few here and there so that the gardener and grandparents didn’t notice (as if). Same policy for pinching peas, and tiny tomatoes from the greenhouse, with that wondrous smell that you just don’t get from shop-bought tomatoes. We could legitimately pick as many wild strawberries as we wanted, and they were delicious too.

Probably it is not surprising that Sheila continues in her very grown-up life to pick fruit which is just waiting there to be eaten on the spot, or brought home to be baked or cooked in wonderful ways. She lives in Kent, the garden of England, of course, which is a help. She and Stewart live near the edge of Canterbury and within easy walking distance there are many orchards, some of which have apple trees which are rarely attended to. She comes home from walks laden with plums (including damsons), mulberries, pears and blackberries too.

Thank you to all the kind people who, instead of giving Sheila a birthday present, have this month contributed to the 3G Kili Climb charities instead. Leslie x

Today’s post comes from Mary – Sheila’s sister in law (brother Robbie’s wife). Thanks so much for supporting us with this Mary. Do let us know if you anyone else out tbere fancies doing a guest post – we’ve had some brilliant ones and there’s only six and a half weeks before we go now. Eek! Over to you Mary…

I’ve tried very hard to come up with something witty or profound to write for the 3GKili blog but with little success!

So, here goes – as those of you who have read previous blogs (like this one) will know, Sheila’s brother, Robbie, and I are definitely very doggie people.

Whilst on holiday in Argentina two years ago, we were staying on an estancia near Bariloche and decided to go on a hike through the surrounding mountains. The owners said we didn’t need a map because the dogs would come with us and show us the way. Sure enough, these two wonderful golden retrievers came with us on the boat for the start of the walk and then escorted us for 4 hours – stopping at every junction in the path where we could possibly have got lost and at every waterfall or stream, where they watched their pathetic humans negotiate the rocks until we were safely on the other side and they could set off again. When we were almost back, about half a mile from the hotel, they obviously felt their job was done and ran down to the beach for a well – deserved swim.

The next day a Canadian couple who were staying at the same place decided to do the same hike. They looked like professional hikers with sturdy boots, poles, rucksacks with drink bottles and straws attached etc. We asked them if they were going to take the dogs and they answered very dismissively that there was no need as they knew what they were doing.

So, early morning off they went – lunchtime came and went with no sign of them, afternoon teatime came and went too. Eventually they reappeared in time for dinner, having taken 9 hours to do the same walk. “Didn’t you take the dogs with you?” we asked. The reply was a very grumpy ‘no, we thought we didn’t need them’!

I would offer Rhuari, Finlay or Mungo as guide dogs for the Kilmanjaro climb, but unfortunately I know that they would lead you, not to the top of the mountain, but to the nearest food source!

Note from Jae: I love your post and images Mary! We know just how useful a dog with local knowledge can be; you may have read about the dog who came up Vesuvius with us, and on one of the famous “girls holidays” (I think to Fuerteventura, but that may be the wrong Canary Island!) we went for a desert walk and had a lovely little dog follow us and bark when we went too far off track.

I don’t know how I happened into it, but while looking for information about Kili, I came across a reference to man-eating baboons, and of course, I had to look into it a bit further.  I kind of wish I hadn’t, and if you aren’t into horror films, maybe you shouldn’t read any further!

It seems that in the early eighties, Kenya was in the midst of a terrible drought. The people and wildlife began to run low on food and water.  This caused something unusual to happen.  The baboons of the area, who regularly left the human population alone, began to turn on them.  A few attacked humans and ate their flesh to feed themselves.  Most scientific and ecological experts would have said the baboons would first have started killing and feeding on each other.  In this case, however, several different species of baboon, at odds with each other during the normal run of things, organised.  They hunted together, stalking their prey and invaded villages. That’s where the truth of the story ends, and here’s where the fiction begins!

“In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro” (1986)

Based on the above events, this film tells the story of an incident in Kenya in 1984, when, because of a severe drought, 90,000 wild starving baboons went on a murderous rampage, killing and eating humans and animals alike in order to survive. Some people find themselves being hunted by the starving monkeys and must do whatever they can to stay alive.

I am happy to report that despite extensive research (well, a quick look round Google!), I can find nothing like this in the Kilimanjaro area in more recent years, although there are some accounts of attacks by baboons in South Africa.  Having discovered this horrible gory film – all reviews say it is pretty terrible – I then looked further back in time and stumbled across:

“Killers of Kilimanjaro” (1959)

In this film an engineer plans to forge through the wilds of Africa to lay tracks for his railroad company but must first contend with hostile tribes, man eating lions, stampeding elephants and angry crocodiles.   Apparently the film was based on the Tsavo Man-Eaters.  They were a pair of notorious lions responsible for the deaths of a number of construction workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway between March and December 1898.  Well that is long enough ago, so I doubt if lions pose much risk now!

Of course, the one film (and book – I read it recently standing in a charity shop!!!) most of us will have heard about is “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1952) with the gorgeous, moody looking Gregory Peck. I couldn’t remember details of any scary animals in it, but the film begins with the opening words of Hemingway’s story: “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngje Ngi,’ the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude”. The story centres on the memories of the disillusioned Peck from what he thinks is his deathbed from a severely infected wound, caused by a thorn.  (Yes – don’t worry anyone – I have had prescribed a course of antibiotics to take with us, for use in just such an event).  He remembers past years and realises how little he has accomplished during his life, and that he’s never made a written record of the events

He lives to see morning come. He watches vultures gather in a tree as he lies in the evening. He recapitulates his life and talks to his current girl-friend Helen (Susan Hayward). He tells her about his past experiences; then argues, then comes to a realisation about his attitude, and finally reaches a sort of peace, and even love, with her.

So there we have it!  Man-eating baboons and lions, then leopards and finally vultures hanging in there, waiting for the end.  However, one thing is for sure: after writing my share of the Kili blog during the last five months, I will not be lying on my deathbed like the swarthy Gregory regretting not having put pen to paper – or at least finger to keyboard!  It has all been written down in unnecessary and undignified detail for all and everyone who comes after to see.

Sometimes when I send one of my Guest Posts to Sheila for her censoring, she will ask how I know so much about her life and her family and tell me that in effect I am reminding her of things she had forgotten.  There is one easy answer for me to give, namely,  that I was getting versions of the same stories from both Sheila and her sister Leslie at different times.  The harder thing for me to admit to is that I remember so much because the Wilson family made such an impression on me.  They were so damned exotic and I felt so dull by comparison.  When I got to know them in my early teens I found everything about them was like something from a completely different world.   Years later when I read “Brideshead Revisited”, I could understand just how overwhelmed Charles Ryder must have felt when Sebastian Flyte took him to met his family at Brideshead.  (Please note; while I am likening myself to Charles, I am in no way suggesting that either Sheila or Leslie shared anything with Sebastian.  As far as I can remember, neither have ever been sick in my presence, let alone through my open window!)

I met Leslie first, when she arrived with a bang in my class at school, just after I had turned thirteen.  She was an exotic creature even then; my goodness, she had lived in Edinburgh (to Glaswegians a foreign country then) and been to school there.  She lived in a ‘big house’ – at least compared to where most of us lived and she had a stepmother and four siblings.  She even had grandparents in Hawick with, wait for it, an outdoor swimming pool!  Even today very few people in the icy north have an outdoor swimming pool.

Her two older step-siblings sounded particularly exotic.  Jan was at nursing college and she knew about ‘body parts’ and Leslie was soon spilling the beans to a regular group of wide-eyed teenage girls in the cloakroom. (Note: in our school days there was no such thing as sex education.) Hamish was at Drama School aka the Royal College of Dramatic Art, and he knew Actors, real Actors that we could sometimes see on the stage of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre when we went on the organised, educational school visits.  Even more exciting, Hamish had been in a film about Greyfriars’ Bobby, a tear-jerking story of a dog that wouldn’t leave his master’s grave in Greyfriars’ Churchyard, Edinburgh.  Leslie and I went to see the film together and I still don’t know if I was more embarrassed or proud when Leslie jumped up and down in her seat each time Hamish appeared, shouting ‘That’s my brother, that’s my brother’.

It was also the time of the famous trial about Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  Can you imagine the kudos Leslie gained when she brought a well thumbed and page marked copy to one of the cloakroom meetings?  I was so naïve I didn’t understand the marked bits.

Then I moved a step closer.  I stated to be invited for Tea in the ‘Big House’.  In these days ‘Tea’ in Scotland was an early evening meal, normally of one course supplement by cakes and biscuits with a cup of tea.  Then I met the rest of the family, including Sheila.  Sheila was a ‘blast’ even then and as I have already written about her,  I will quickly move on to other members of her family.  Next I met the father, Robert.  Despite it being a large house, there was only one bathroom; some houses didn’t even have a bathroom and weekly baths meant a visit to ‘the Public Baths’, usually beside the ‘Steamie’ where housewives did their family washing.  Anyway, the bathroom!  I went upstairs to it and I met Robert coming down.  I was rather taken aback as he was wearing a bowler hat, but always a perfect gentleman, he doffed his hat to me.  Unfortunately he then let slip the towel that was the only other item he was wearing.  I was shocked, horrified and I admit I couldn’t pull my eyes away from an area of male anatomy I had never seen before!  (I was the only child of quiet, older parents and had never seen my Dad in a state of undress greater than not wearing a tie.)  Robert just smiled and asked whose friend I was.  I just couldn’t get over the casual way he accepted a stream of unknown people wandering through his house. Anyone I asked to my home was carefully vetted and spent some time with my parents, who remained in the house for the duration of the visit and often ‘supervised’ any food I was to offer to my friend.

Step sister Jan, sometimes rocked home for the weekend from the Nurses’ Home to add a new dimension to my Friday evening visit.  She would arrive full of stories about the parties the student nurses had been to – a lot of them seemed to involve bedpans as sick bowls after experiments with alcohol!  I was both shocked and excited.  She was also highly political and was very against nuclear weapons.  She brought her soapbox with her and tried to persuade anyone who was in the house to come on the next ‘Youth Against the Bomb’ march.  My rather conservative (note the small ‘c’) parents would have snatched me away from such a hot-bed of ‘communism’ if they had known!  At these stories I felt thrills of subversive delight – even if I never went on the March, I knew somebody who did.  Jan would wave aside the meal Leslie had organised, usually Bird’s Eye Chicken Pies and frozen chips.  (Robert and his wife always ate out on a Friday so the children were allowed to have their friends round and choose the food.)  Jan would raid the fridge or the cupboards and produce something exotic like curried leftover lamb made with curry powder from a wee blue tin and cooking apples and sultanas.  Believe me that was exotic in the 1960s.  Hamish sometimes appeared and I think he once had his fellow actor Tom Conti with him; much later, Tom Conti played the Greek heart-throb in the film ‘Shirley Valentine’ as well as whatever role he had been playing then in the Glasgow Citizens’ along with Hamish.  How exotic could it get?  It sure felt exotic to me.  Leslie and Sheila had a younger full brother and like most younger brothers of bossy girls he kept well out of the way.  The few times I saw him he was a thin, long legged kid with a mop of dark hair falling over his eyes and always a rather sad look in his eyes.  Having met the grown up Robbie a few times I find it hard to connect the sad boy with the larger than life, very colourful, confident, successful businessman.

These memories still play in my life; I hadn’t realised how much when I started writing this,  wondering if I could remember enough for this post.

I started by saying how my early and formative experience had been very influenced by the Wilsons, just as Charles Ryder was by the Flyte family in “Brideshead Revisited”.  So, to those of you who have read the book or watched one of the films I ask,  “Was the Wilson household my Brideshead?”  Maybe the end for me is somewhat different in that I have grown through the contact – and I am still being treated to Wilson inspiration and exotica through Sheila, Jae and Oscar’s 3G Kili adventure.

I was interested to read in Kate Gordon’s inspiring Guest Blog on 9th June about a man confined to a wheelchair who had climbed Kilimanjaro. I am so pleased to live in an age in which modern technology combined with positive attitudes and sheer determination can make such a thing possible.

A couple of generations ago, people with his degree of disability were doomed to a life indoors – possibly even bedridden.  I feel like celebrating whenever I hear of or see someone who breaks new ground by accomplishing something against all odds.

It might be something that would be considered quite normal, for someone without a disability.  For example the other day, when I arrived back in Canterbury West station, I saw a guy in the car park going round bagging up the rubbish in all the bins.  Nothing special, you might think, but he was zooming from bin to bin in an electric wheelchair.  I am so pleased that thanks to having the right gadgetry, that he has been enabled to hold such a job.

I had a chuckle a couple of years ago, when I was ‘liberating’ a few apples in the orchards near my home.  There are acres of apple and pear orchards in my area of Kent, and the farmers never pick all of the fruit, so I regularly help myself to what’s left and often redistribute it to friends.  Jae’s boys enjoy joining in this activity, sometimes even engaging in apple fights at the end of the year.  My chuckle was caused by seeing a man on a mobility scooter moving through the orchard, filling his carrier bag as he went.  I love my meanders through the orchards and I rejoice that these days it is possible for him too to do something that gives me such pleasure.

I was lucky enough to get taken on as a volunteer driver during the Paralympic Games in London in August 2012.  Being a “Games Maker” was one of the most exciting things I have done in my life – though I have to admit that the prospect of climbing Kili does outrank even that great experience.   I drove all sorts of people around the London area, including a young Japanese girl who was a gold medal winner, Mr Cycling Australia (I forget his real name, but you get the gist), various referees and officials and high-flying people from the media.  It was absolutely inspiring to meet some of the competitors and to see how people helped each other.  For example I was sitting outside the Paralympic Village one evening in my BMW, when I saw a train of about a dozen wheelchairs appear, all attached to each other.  The person at the front had a super fast electric wheelchair and all the rest were in normal unpowered wheelchairs.  The guys behind were holding on to the handles of the chair in front and the whole chain of them went careering across the road in front of me at some speed, heading towards the Stratford shopping centre.  They all had great grins on their faces and we drivers leaned out of our windows to wave at them and smile with them.

However, the person who gets the most respect from me for her diligent embrace of all available technology and for her sheer determination not to be defeated, lives rather closer to home.  She is Jae’s mother-in-law Pat, who has Motor Neurone Disease.  Pat can neither walk, nor talk because of this horrendous illness, but uses machinery to make it possible for her to live independently.  Pat is very adept at steering her electric wheelchair to wherever she can possibly get it and takes real pleasure in being able to go out for ‘walks’.  She has found a taxi company, which has a taxi with a ramp, so she can drive her chair into the taxi, having texted the taxi controller in advance with details of pick up time and where she wants to go.

A very useful piece of her equipment is a ‘talking’ machine, happily provided by the good old NHS.  Pat types into it what she wants to say and when she presses a button, the machine both speaks her words and displays them on a screen.  She and I recently visited a friend who had just turned 100, but was a bit hard of hearing.  Pat joked afterwards about how it was useful to have me along as an interpreter for the woman who couldn’t hear and the woman who couldn’t speak!!!  The friend was too deaf to hear what the machine said, so I had to repeat all Pat’s words at top volume. The necessary loud repetition and the delay for typing didn’t make for easy communication, but we got there. Pat compared it to an old “Two Ronnies” sketch – always a sentence behind!

So here’s to the guy who climbed Kili in a wheel chair, to Pat and to all the many other people who daily defy people’s expectations by their determination to get on with their lives against all odds and to make jokes about it all too.  Good on you!

Note from Sheila: Sadly I’ve just learnt that, in the few days between our visit and this post going to press, Pat’s 100 year old friend has passed away. Our sympathies are with her family and friends.

Which book? It’s one of the questions Desert Island Disc celebrities are always asked at the end of the programme. Automatically given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and either the Bible or another religious or philosophical work, they have to decide, what will the third book be? In the next few weeks 3G Kili climbers will have to make hard decisions about what to pack, and for them, of course, it is for real. I wonder, will they make space for books? Sheila says she can put anything she likes in her bags, so long as she carries her day pack and the bag for the porters is no heavier than 15kg.  She actually does have “books” on her list of things to take, but has not chosen anything yet – so please, dear readers, feel free to advise!

Reading can be a problem as dark happens early, but she will definitely take something to read, maybe snuggled in her sleeping bag with her cat headlight on. Or she could take a Kindle, with built-in back light to read in the dark and that way carry any number of books. But batteries run out very quickly in cold and at altitude. Maybe better to take an old fashioned book that can be dropped, bashed, soaked or squeezed and still be a huge source of comfort and pleasure.

One of the many hundreds of kindnesses my compassionate sister has done for me down the years was to rescue some of my beloved childhood books. Parents were moving, leaving lots of stuff behind in our old house. Sheila made a plan. I was to walk past, pushing my baby Katharine in her pram and Sheila would bring out The Color Kittens (who were American), the Flower Fairies, Dinkle Donkle Doo, Margaret the Fieldmouse, and Brumas the Polar Bear Cub. They were all laid on the base at the foot of the pram and transported to safety. I think Little Dog and the Rainmakers were there too but they have gone missing. The others I still have and treasure more than I can say. But at least I can say, thank you Sheila.

Brumas was quite a celebrity. Born in November 1949 and the first polar bear to be reared at Regents Park Zoo, this tiny cub became an instant attraction with the public, generating books, toys, postcards and other souvenirs, so much so that in 1950 the zoo’s annual attendance rose to over three million, an all-time record. At first, Brumas was thought to be male and so was named after his keepers, Bruce and Sam, but by the time my book was published, March 1950, Brumas has kept her name but is now referred to as she.

The day earlier this year when we visited Jae’s sister Gwen and Gwen’s husband Ste in Sydney was quite special. Samson aged five had just been promoted! He’d moved up to a higher reading group and to celebrate, read an exciting story aloud to us. Maybe that’s what will happen on those cold nights on Kilimanjaro. Will 3G read stories to each other?

Recently, someone who had read Paula’s Guest Blog of 22nd June wrote how colourful and interesting the food looked in the picture of Paula in the kitchen at Catching Lives – quite unlike the beige food often served up in NHS and other such establishments – so I thought I would let you know a bit more about the food and where it comes from.

First of all, though, I have to emphasise that Catching Lives is not a soup kitchen – in fact far from it.  The main purpose of the charity is to try to help homeless people into accommodation and work, and if necessary to get essential medical attention or counselling, with the aim of getting them back into mainstream society.  There is a bank of computers with people on hand to assist clients make applications for housing, benefits or work; qualified medical personnel to carry out assessments and treatment if appropriate; laundry and showering facilities to help people spruce up as well as the opportunity to meet others by participating in a yoga class, a game of scrabble, or an art class or follow another such interest.  No-one sleeps in the building and there is no television!  Providing good nourishing meals, therefore, is only part of the picture – but an essential step in the process of enabling clients to step back into having a meaningful life, when they have been living on the streets.

I have been cooking in the kitchen at Catching Lives on Wednesdays for over a year and a half now.  Paula has been there for more than six years and there are two or three other regular Wednesday people, whom I look upon as friends, as well as the occasional student or helper who just turns up to work with us for a few weeks before moving on.

One of the great joys of cooking there is that until we arrive, we have no idea what we will be cooking or what ingredients will be available.  Often when we arrive shortly after 8am, the central working surface is heaped high with produce and donations that have arrived late the day before.  The first job is to sort it all out and think about what we can use immediately and then to store the surplus appropriately in fridge, freezer or larder.  All of us chip in with suggestions of what to make, and once we have decided, we get on with it.  The first clients arrive at 9am – well actually they are often outside long before that, but that’s when they get in  – and make straight for the counter for breakfast.  Tea and beans on toast are much in demand and there is cereal, supplemented with fruit, juice, cheese or cold meat, when available.  One of us normally looks after making the toast etc, while the others get on with preparing lunch, which is served fairly early – between 11.45 and 12.30. One of the gadgets I yearn for in the kitchen at that moment is a “conveyor toaster” like you often see in hotels – it would get hot toast out to those who really appreciate it much faster than our pop-up.

We never know how many people we’ll be catering for.  Since I have been there, we have served lunch to anything from 15 to 48 clients.  There are generally more clients in the winter and fewer in the summer, when casual jobs on local farms are more likely to be available.  However, nothing much is ever wasted: if there are surplus meals, the volunteers and staff can tuck in too and anything which can be used the next day is carefully covered, labelled and refrigerated.

Catching Lives uses part of its budget to buy essential food such as bread, margarine, milk and sugar from a local supermarket.  However, most food comes from rather unconventional sources.  Until I started cooking in the kitchen, I had never heard of FareShare. Basically, what they do is collect surplus food from supermarket chains, which donate it, and distribute it to charities such as ours.  We pay a small donation towards FareShare’s transport costs – perhaps £1 for a tray of a dozen chops or chicken pieces.  On their website FareShare say:

“We save good food destined for waste and send it to charities and community groups who transform it into nutritious meals for vulnerable people. The food we redistribute is fresh, quality and in date surplus from the food industry and the charities we work with can be found across the UK.  Last year we redistributed enough food for 15.3 million meals. But it’s about more than meals. The organisations we supply food to – from breakfast clubs for disadvantaged children, to homeless hostels, community cafes and domestic violence refuges – are places that provide life changing support, as well as lunch and dinner.  By making sure good food is not wasted, we turn an environmental problem into a social solution.”

So most of our meat comes from them at a token price.  We made a delicious chicken and sausage bake with their meat recently, which definitely hit the spot.

Another great source of food for Catching Lives – mainly fruit and veg, but often cheese too – is the Macknade Farm Shop in Faversham.  Stew and I have been shopping there for years: it is such a treat to go into their fab shop and look at all the exotic produce that they sell there. They are extremely generous to our kitchen and donate excess food, or anything that isn’t saleable.  I have cooked things that they have donated that I have never even tried before, such as oriental mushrooms, black cheese and some amazingly unusual vegetables.  Boxes of their stuff seem to arrive regularly on Tuesday evenings: it is a great joy to look in the boxes on a Wednesday morning.

Another supplier of useful and delicious ingredients is our local Nando’s. I’d never been into a Nando’s before I started cooking at Catching Lives, but I’ve been in a few times since – it’s good to eat somewhere that I know supports its local community.

Recently there was a lovely box of fruit and veg in the kitchen, and I was told it had come from Webbs Garden, which was created with the aim of providing therapy for St Martin’s Hospital’s mental health patients, as well as offering a base for the site’s Estates Department. It is based in the grounds of the hospital in Canterbury and benefits from local volunteers, who go in to help with growing food in greenhouses and poly tunnels.  Much of the food grown is sold to hospital staff – but we were the lucky beneficiaries of fresh lettuces, cabbage and tiny little new potatoes, which must have been surplus to requirements.

Often, however, people just come in off the street with donations.  Sometimes it is when there is a glut of one particular thing on their allotment – or perhaps they have turned that glut into jam or chutney for us.  A fairly elderly couple come in about once a month with sausage rolls and cakes they have baked specially for us: I think at some point in the distant past they were homeless themselves and their gift to Catching Lives is in recognition of the support they themselves received when they most needed it.  We got a bagful of jars of herbs and spices delivered to us recently: a local landlord was clearing out a student house at the end of term and handed in what they had left in the cupboard.

All of this food means that we can cook delicious lunches at a very low cost – and we have lots of laughs in the process.  Our food gets many compliments from clients, staff and volunteers alike: we love their feedback.  We make everything as fresh and colourful as possible in the hope that it will nourish and put a smile on faces.  We know that having a full stomach helps contribute to the overall aim of Catching Lives – getting people back on their feet again.  It is pretty difficult to do anything much in life if you are hungry and don’t know where your next meal is coming from.

If you want more information about Catching Lives, look at their excellent web site.  I hope you agree that they are a worthwhile charity, and if you haven’t already donated to 3GKiliClimb.com maybe you will think about doing so, if you are able to.  They will be getting half of everything we raise – and your donation will be matched by a very kind friend who has offered to double all donations we receive before August, up to a total of £5,895.  What’s not to like about that?

It is strange how the thought processes of old friends – even ones who don’t meet often – sometimes converge.  After reading another of Sheila’s blogs, I was thinking how lucky Sheila’s grandchildren would be to have all the postings about her life and family Sheila has been doing recently.  I am sure that one of Sheila’s brilliant, tech savvy daughters will capture all the postings in a less ephemeral media than Facebook.  And of course Oscar at thirteen will be sharing one of Sheila’s bigger adventures to date.

The vision of Oscar as an elderly gentleman in 2083 arose before my eyes, still with his cool quiff (they’ll have invented something to prevent male baldness by then) and maybe a bit greyer. In it, he was surrounded by a group of his grandchildren, and perhaps those of his Australian cousins, and they are all clamouring to hear about the time he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with their delightfully dotty great-great-grandma Sheila.  In fact the same Sheila had become one of their favourite subjects for ‘granddad’s stories’.  Oscar’s work will be easy – he will read them pages from Sheila’s blog.  Maybe he will need to do a bit more of an explanation about how life was in those days.  These children will indeed be lucky to have this thread of family stories now that families are becoming increasingly fragmented and family albums of photographic memories reside on technology that becomes dated.

The more I thought about it, the more enthusiastic I became for Sheila to expand her memories backwards and sideways.  And that was where I was when I read Sheila’s blog (17 June) about needing to find a new project when the Kilimanjaro Climb is over.  Sheila mentioned in an early posting that I had put together a family tree for her father’s side; it is relatively easy to do that in Scotland because it is a small country and the records were centralised at an early stage. (Elsewhere, more and more data is becoming available on-line.) Sadly I wasn’t able to do anything about her German mother’s side, but I know that Sheila and Leslie are in touch with distant cousins from that side, so there is scope for that.  Also, I only went backwards in time, with a little bit about siblings of the older generation, some of whom Sheila knew about.  The tree has nothing about the family members younger than Sheila or her father, or about Stewart’s family. So there is plenty of scope for expansion of that skeleton, after which Sheila could flesh it out adding any anecdotes she can dig up.  I am certain it would all make interesting reading now – and when Oscar is entertaining his grandchildren!

And maybe, as a keen family historian I can make a plea to anyone else who reads this.  What memories have you stored away for the generations that follow you?  Will your grandchildren and beyond find anything to tell them what you were like, what you did, what you cared about?  We all lead such busy lives, with so much on Facebook and other media that might not survive – unlike all the old family albums.  So maybe you should start writing about your memories and encourage the older generations to write down anything that they would want their descendants to know about them.  Megan Russell (14 June, the Butterfly effect) wrote a lovely post about the little acts of good or change that people might make because of Sheila, Jae and Oscar’s adventure.  Wouldn’t it be a splendid legacy if we all left that little bit more of us for future generations?

Last weekend I saw Tanzania! I won’t set foot in the country until our 3GKiliClimb trip, but I had a good look across the Sand River at it last weekend. I was in the Maasai Mara in Kenya watching the wildebeest and zebras collecting on the Tanzanian side of the river in the Serengeti. A few hundred made the crossing but most of them turned around and headed back within a few minutes.

Believe it or not, this trip was work (how incredibly lucky am I to get to visit East Africa twice in a summer?!). I had taken four journalists out to experience an Exodus photographic safari in Kenya. We were being instructed in by Paul Goldstein – arguably the best wildlife photographer in the world – and staying at the incredibly well appointed Kicheche Camps. Not at all like the type of tents we’ll be sleeping in on the way up Kili!

I was surprised by how chilly it was during the day – I didn’t take my fleece off until almost noon most days. We were quite high and I think that makes more difference than I’d ever realised before. I think Ma was quite right in her “Cold, cold, cold” post – by the time we get near the top of Kili we will be wearing every item of clothing we have with us.

In many ways it was a very different experience of East Africa than I’ll be be having in August, but the generosity and sense of fun of the people, is likely to be very similar, and I can hardly wait to get back. Both Tanzania and Kenya have had their tourist trade negatively affected by Ebola (despite the fact that they are both slightly further from the outbreak than London is!), and by terrorism. It’s such a shame – many of the people in these countries depend on tourism for their livelihood, and the current downturn is making it very hard. Many of the locals I came across in the Maasai Mara told me to make sure I told people back in Britain that “Kenya is safe”. I must say, I felt nothing but safe the entire time I was away.

Ma has mentioned lots of animals in various blog posts – mainly pointing out how little she’d like to come across them on Kili, but obviously being on safari, we were very keen to come across wildlife – so I thought I’d share a little gallery of the beautiful animals I came across on my visit. All photos taken by me; the good ones are thanks to Paul’s expert tuition. Enjoy!

 

When Jae first suggested the Kili Climb, I was very ready to agree to joining in – what a treat to be invited to  spend twelve days with my lovely daughter and number one grandson Oscar, even if it did mean taking my life in my hands  – but I also felt that it was an opportunity to do something more.  As I have been a volunteer with Catching Lives for the last year and a half, assisting as a cook, mentor and unofficial legal advisor, it seemed right that we should do something for them.  We decided that they should receive half of everything we raise, a quarter should go to the Tanzania Porter School Project Jae wrote about here, and that small charities with which Exodus regularly work in the third world should receive the rest.

Catching Lives works with homeless people.  They work with folk to help them get back into accommodation and work: they are not just a soup kitchen.  They carry out mental health assessments, help people to register with doctors and dentists, provide showers, laundry facilities, and computers to enable people to apply for jobs and benefits – and much more.

A few people have looked at me askance when I have said that I volunteer there.  They say something along the lines “No-one I know has ever been homeless – in my family we all work and look after ourselves”.  So I thought it might help people to understand how homelessness can come about, if I told a bit of the stories of a couple of people I have been involved with there:

Alin is Romanian.  He is a young man who lived with his mother in a rural area, where there is very little work.  He saw an advertisement in his local paper from an agency in the UK for fruit pickers and packers to work in a farm in Kent for the UK minimum wage – currently £6.50 an hour – more than twice as much as he was able to earn in his local area.  He applied for work, was accepted and came to the UK to work at a farm just outside Canterbury.   He had read that Kent is the Garden of England and had an idealised image of working in the sunshine, living well and earning money to send home to his mother.  The reality was somewhat different.  He quickly discovered that he was actually much worse off.  The agency which recruited him sends about two thousand people each year to the farm in Chartham outside Canterbury. The farm does have fruit trees which need to be picked, but their main business is fruit packing.  Enormous lorries arrive there from all over Europe with melons, peaches, grapes and other fruit which have to be unloaded and packed immediately, ready for distribution to supermarkets in the UK.  This work involves standing in cold sheds for long periods of time – not quite what Alin had envisaged.  What was worse, as far as he was concerned, was that the work was unpredictable.  Some weeks he would only be called on to work for one or two days – he rarely got a full week of work.  The agency want to have a captive labour force on the farm so that they can spring into action when the lorries arrive – but in between, there is no work to be had.

Alin was accommodated in a caravan in the grounds of the farm.  He shared it with five other people and paid £37 a week for the privilege.  It was a very old static – possibly one like my family have in Seasalter, which had been retired to the farm in its old age.  He was not provided with any bedding: he had to go out and buy himself a sleeping bag.  The caravan was cold and the walls ran with condensation.  The only heating was metered electricity, and the meter was very hungry indeed.  The cooking facilities were in a filthy communal kitchen, which was used by several hundred people and he hated going into it.  Alin and many others working with him would walk the four miles into Canterbury regularly to shop for food at Morrisons on the outskirts of the city.  It is a very common sight to see foreign workers walking through the country lanes with their carrier bags.

It was over a year before Alin realised that he was in a hopeless position.  He was living hand to mouth in miserable conditions.  He barely earned enough to eat, after paying for rent and heating.  As winter approached, he was getting hardly any work at all, and felt there was no alternative but to walk away from the farm.  He had no money at all and lived rough for some time, until someone pointed him in the direction of Catching Lives.  He spent some of the winter nights in the rolling night shelter organised by Catching Lives in local church halls, during the worst of the weather, and by the spring he had signed up for Jobseekers Allowance and had been found accommodation in a house which accommodates about twenty men, each in their own small room.  He desperately wants to get back to work, but has not found any, despite using his best endeavours.  He does not have enough money to return to Romania.  He is an optimist and is convinced that he will find work here, but in the meantime, he  enjoys volunteering in a local charity shop repairing furniture for resale.

Unlike Alin, Ray is a Canterbury local.  He is in his late forties, and has worked as a painter and decorator for more than twenty years.  He is married with four children.  Last year, his wife began an affair with another man, and threw Ray out.  He was absolutely devastated and was too embarrassed to tell anyone what had happened or to ask for help.  He decided to live in his car, but became increasingly depressed and failed to turn up on time for work.  He became unkempt, didn’t eat regularly and eventually got the sack from his job.  It is very fortunate that he was directed to Catching Lives.  By that time he was in a miserable state and mentally quite unstable.  With help from Catching Lives and proper medication, Ray has been brought back to life.  He now has a room in a shared house with three other men.  Recently, he was thrilled to be offered what he thought was a painting job on a building site where new student accommodation is being built.  He gleefully went into the Jobcentre to tell them that he was soon going to have a job.  He worked at the site for two days, but at the end of the second day, was told not to return until he heard from them.  He heard nothing and did not get paid for the two days work he had done.  He was very shocked a few weeks later when he got letters saying that both his Jobseekers Allowance and Housing Benefit had been stopped.  It was the day he expected to collect his money.  He called round to the Jobcentre twice that morning, but was told there was nothing they could do.  They gave him a phone number to phone, but he had no money and no credit on his phone.   Luckily for him, someone from Catching Lives was able to help him that day.  A volunteer went back to the Jobcentre with him and insisted on them investigating why his money had been stopped.  They said it was because he had a job.  The volunteer helped Ray write a statement about what had happened, explaining that he had never been paid, and managed to get his benefits reinstated.  On enquiry at the building site, the volunteer was told that Ray had had a “trial” – not a “job”!   I wonder how many people do two days work for nothing there for them?  Without Catching Lives’ support, Ray would have been back out on the streets again, as a result of his eagerness to work.

Bad employment practices don’t just happen here: they happen on Kilimanjaro too.  There are some unscrupulous travel companies, who will take on porters to work for a week for what to us is the price of a cup of posh coffee.  People are desperate enough for work to take anything that is offered to them and often they don’t even have walking boots or the necessary warm and waterproof clothing.  Their lives can be put at risk: some porters die on the mountain every year.

I hope this goes some way to explain why we have chosen the charities we have, to benefit from the climb.  They all do enormously valuable work with vulnerable people, who have frequently been badly exploited through no fault of their own.  We are absolutely thrilled to have already raised more than £3250 for the charities and are optimistic that we will have reached our target of £5895 by August – which a wonderful donor has agreed to double.  Just imagine: we might raise more than £11,000 to help these small charities.  That would really make a difference.

 

I mentioned North Berwick, a beautiful town on the coast near Edinburgh in the blog post of 30th May.  I referred to four of my aunts regularly meeting up there every summer in their old age.  Actually, my family has had connections with the town for five generations, and some of them still live there.

I remember hearing stories about family trips to North Berwick in the 1920s and 1930s.  Sometimes it would be just a day trip, but in addition, my grandparents would rent a big house there for the month of July – that is when the school holidays are in Scotland – and the whole family would decamp there.  All of the necessary household equipment would be packed up, such as bedding, cutlery and dishes.  A van would be requisitioned from the woollen mill where my grandfather was director and it would be sent on ahead with some of the household staff to get all the beds ready and prepare food ready for the mass arrival.  The family would then be driven to the coast by the chauffeur to take up residence there.  I guess there must have been more than one carful of them, given that I had three grandparents (see the blog post of 27th April) and they had eight children, plus of course a cook and numerous maids would have gone too.

I have some photographs of the family on the beach from that time, and also a snip of a film made there.  What I love is that not only are the family children on the beach, but so are the children of the chauffeur!  The film shows the driver – still wearing his official hat – with his trousers rolled up, splashing about in the waves with my aunts and also his own two daughters.  My grandfather ended up successful and wealthy, but he always maintained that he was a socialist; clearly he did not forget his own humble roots.

I love to think of them all on the beach: it is often pretty chilly and windy there, but that has not prevented family visits there by me and many of my family during the last ninety years.

One of the features of North Berwick is The Law.  As a child, I thought North Berwick Law was a big mountain, and climbing it was always one of the highlights of any visit there.  At the top are the jawbones of a whale, which seemed pretty exciting.  Well, they are replicas now, but real ones were there when I was little.  I thought it might be worth comparing climbing, what to me once seemed an enormous mountain, with the challenge of climbing Kilimanjaro.  So in the spirit of Baby v Mountain (1st March) and Marathon v Mountain (29th April), here is North Berwick Law v Kilimanjaro!

The similarities:

1. Both are volcanos formed millions of years ago.
2. Kilimanjaro is the highest free standing mountain in the world and the Law is the highest free standing hill in North Berwick.
3. Both look very beautiful from a distance and have truly amazing views from the top.
4. Both are conical in shape
5. You get a great “high” from climbing both.

The differences:

1. You can climb the Law (187 metres) before breakfast: it will take us seven days to climb Kili (5895 metres).
2. You can climb the Law as a toddler in nappies – Oscar’s brother Milo did – but (unless you lie) you are not allowed to attempt to climb Kili under the age of 10.
3. You need a guide and porters to mount an expedition up Kili: the Law can be attempted unassisted, although a piggy back is sometimes nice, if you are little.
4. If you feel the call of nature on Kili, there are some bushes and rocks to protect your modesty: on the Law, you are in full view of the whole town.
5. You might raise a few thousand pounds for charity by climbing Kili, but unless you are very tiny, you are unlikely to raise much by climbing the Law.

No doubt those of my family who still live in North Berwick will be able to add to the list!

It is good to know that the 3G Kili Climb is a family trip. Only families with a teenager are allowed to go, so there will be other teenagers to share all the excitement with the youngest member of 3G.  Not that he lacks experience of travel. Compared with his Grandma Sheila and me at his age he has already crammed a lot of travel into his lifetime. At his age the only foreign country we had visited was Holland.

We went there in 1950 when I was 4 and Sheila just 3. Sheila remembers our car, a little green Austin 7, borrowed she thinks from our grandfather, being lifted in a big net on to the deck of the boat that took us from Harwich to the Hook of Holland.  We stayed at a hotel near the beach at Scheveningen, making day trips to Amsterdam, the town centre of the Hague and Marken which today is linked to the mainland by a causeway but was then an island in the Zuiderzee (Southern Sea). There we went into an old fashioned fisherman’s cottage and dressed up in national costume.

Our parents bought us two pairs of clogs there which for the rest of our childhood hung on our bedroom wall, a reminder of our only foreign experience. The souvenirs our parents brought back were paintings.  Whereas I have absolutely no memory of the green car I do remember going into dark shops with cavernous anterooms and seeing mysterious dark paintings hanging on the walls or propped up on the floor. This one was my favourite.

Of course we have foodie memories, the smell and taste of raw herring eaten at the harbour and the first rusks since we were babies at hotel breakfast. Our first taste of chewing gum and the stern warning: “Don’t swallow it or you will DIE”.  We didn’t swallow it but seem to have misbehaved in other ways. Sheila remembers being put out of the car for bad behaviour. “I remember seeing the car with you all in it disappearing up the road without me – a long flat road.  I was surprised when it turned up again to pick me up a bit later”. I remember us playing on a deserted beach with wet sand and no adults around (Sheila says they were on the veranda outside the hotel watching us which I suppose is a good thing). We were having a great time climbing in and out and over the huge basket chairs placed on the sand and then a Dutch woman scolded us.

Whatever Oscar sees or hears when he climbs Mount Kilimanjaro, I can guarantee, he will remember for the rest of his life.

During the last few months, since I have known about the proposed trip up Kilimanjaro, I have bought the odd item which we will need, whenever I have seen anything at reduced prices.  I have accumulated quite a lot of stuff, including a head lamp styled like a cat.  I am not a great cat lover, but it was only £1.99!  I bought warm ski clothes in sales at the beginning of the year, and have also picked up a surprisingly large number of items at good prices in Aldi at various times.  I am particularly pleased with my £29 Aldi waterproof breathable jacket: I wore it in heavy rain on two consecutive days recently, walking for a total of about eighteen miles and stayed absolutely bone dry.  Similar jackets in specialist shops cost three times more plus.

I decided this week that I should go through all these odd items and list them.  Given my increasingly dodgy memory, it occurred to me that I might be unnecessarily duplicating items.  When I went through everything, I was pleased to note that the only item I have inadvertently duplicated is mosquito repellent: it won’t hurt to have too much of that along.  When I saw how much stuff there was, I realised I had to categorise stuff and pack them carefully in separate waterproof bags, if I was ever going to locate a particular item in the kit bag, which Exodus will provide me with.  I can’t imagine anything worse than being absolutely exhausted and frantically searching through a tightly packed bag of motley items, looking for something in particular.  I had to do that once before in my life, and know I don’t ever want to be having to do that again.

The occasion on which I did that was, funnily enough, another 3G experience, involving Jae, Oscar and me!  I was absolutely delighted when Jae and David were expecting their first child and David asked me if I would be present at the birth.  He said he felt nervous about it, and would feel happier if I was there too.  I certainly felt happy to be there – and very privileged.  Jae phoned me one Wednesday in April and said she was in early labour, so I set off to Bournemouth, where they lived then.  I remember we had quite a nice time – at least that’s how I remember it, although she may not. We walked along the sea front, where she leaned against bins or piles of chairs during contractions, ate at a beach cafe and practiced yoga, lying on a double bed together, during the next couple of days.  She was in labour, and having regular contractions, but not in terrible pain.

Late on the Friday night, Jae’s midwife said he was becoming anxious about her, and would be happier if she was in hospital, so Jae, David and I transferred there.  Either David or I was with Jae at all times, until Oscar finally made his appearance in the early hours of the Sunday morning – the 21st of April 2002.  We were absolutely thrilled to greet a gorgeous perfect baby boy after a labour lasting more than four days.  None of us had had much sleep for quite some time by then.

After the birth mother and baby were sorted out, and the staff wanted to transfer Jae and Oscar back to the ward for the remainder of the night.  I was asked to locate a clean night dress and other items for Jae and clothes for Oscar.  The bag Jae had packed for hospital was there on the floor, and I started to go through it.  Everything in it had been tightly jammed in, and seemed to be in a total jumble!  I remember wanting to shout at her for not having packed in a more organised manner, but holding my tongue, because she had just given birth and had to be much more exhausted than I was.  I remember tears welling up as I started trying to sort it all out and find the required items.  I held it together – but only just!

I imagine that I might be just as exhausted on Kili: it can be extremely difficult to sleep at high altitude, and I am not a great sleeper at the best of times.  I am going to make absolutely certain that my pack is carefully organised, everything is labelled and appropriately bagged.  I will not be reduced to grovelling around through a jumble of stuff again, while totally exhausted.

Note from Jae: Sorry Ma – I never knew that had driven you mental! Surprisingly, I remember those four days of labour very fondly; we had such a nice time walking locally when we still thought I might be able to have him at home. And even when we had to go into hospital we had loads of laughs and good chats (despite getting almost every type of intervention possible barring a c-section, and an epidural which helpfully worked only from my thighs down!). I was very glad you were by my side.