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One thing is for sure: I will never forget in which year the 3GKili challenge took place.  I will, I hope, always know that it took place in the year in which Oscar became a teenager.  I hope I will also always know that it was about Kilimanjaro and that I will not become confused about which mountain it was.

However, it seems I cannot be so sure about some other things that have happened in my life.  When planning our recent holiday to Charmouth,  we knew that our group had been on holiday in the town before, but we were absolutely certain, having looked at the address of the house, where it was on the map and having discussed it among ourselves, that it was quite some distance away from where we had stayed before and therefore we would have an altogether different starting point for our walks.

It was only as we drove into the grounds of the house we had rented that we got the feeling that maybe we had been there before.  The outside looked remarkably familiar – but perhaps there were two fairly similar houses in the town?  The house we were renting this time boasted fifteen bath/shower rooms.  The one we had before had only half a dozen – but could they perhaps have added a few?  It was only upon entering it that we were certain that it was in fact the same house.  As soon as we clocked the dining room table, we knew it had to be.  The entire dining room is taken up with the most enormous roundish table – probably about ten feet in diameter – and everyone has to sit around the edges.  There is no way anything can be passed across the table – no human being could reach across without clambering on to it.  There could not be two such tables!  I remember on the initial visit climbing on to the table – when no-one was about to see me lying prone on it – to remove the vase of dying daffodils from the centre and then again to replace it with fresh ones.  This time there was a vase of rather nasty red plastic flowers in the middle.  It was a couple of days before I got enough privacy to replace it with a vase of the lovely bluebells and wild garlic growing in the garden.

We have tried to work out in which year we were in Charmouth before.  We know it wasn’t 2001, as that is the year we missed because of foot and mouth disease restricting movement and walking in country areas.  I had to send a message out to some of the original group who can no longer walk long distances, to see if anyone remembered.  What short memories we have for relatively recent events!  Happily, someone has now told me that it was in 2000 that we were originally there: she remembers because she arrived a couple of days late due to attending her father’s funeral.

We have always tried to ring the changes with our group holidays and to find new locations.  However, it has become increasingly difficult in recent years because we are not now willing to be packed in three or four to a room with shared bathrooms.  We all want our own rooms and en suite facilities, and that is not easy with twenty people.  But Ken has come up with a great idea.  He says we should choose the best four or five houses we have stayed in over the years and just rotate them.  By the time the house comes round again, some of us may have forgotten we have ever been there and we are absolutely certain to have forgotten what walks we did on the previous occasion.  We have got to reap some benefit from old age and failing memories, after all!

Sometimes I worry that unlike my courageous sister who is preparing her arduous climb of Kilimanjaro so energetically and whose actions constantly belie her age, I am getting to be rather like our grandma. Like her I enjoy sitting in gardens and afternoon tea, preferably the two combined, and neither of us will be remembered for our love of strenuous activity. However, unlike Grandma, who advocated at the most one bath a week, believing they remove our natural oils from the skin, I love having a bath, preferably with a good book and lots of bubbles. Even the introduction of water meters didn’t stop me, although I have cut back a little. The good news is that since Sheila pointed out to me that I needn’t sit with my back to the taps any more (see Sheila’s blog post, How Many Years at The Tap End) I now sit wherever I please.

When “I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here” contestants leave the jungle the first thing they want to do is have a nice hot bath. I expect when our 3G Celebrities get down from the mountain they will savour every moment in the showers at the lodge; not as luxurious as bath time but a great deal better than twice daily “washy washy bowls”. Hats off to them all.

Note from Jae: Well done Leslie – I’m so impressed! How very brave the generation above me is. Did you see Ma (and Gerda and Jean) appeared in the Kentish Gazette this week? 

My paternal grandmother, Lizzie, was a woman – or as she would have said – a lady, with many mottos. She used to bring them out regularly, as the mood took her.  One of her favourites was “Think you are beautiful and you will be beautiful”!  I actually think it probably did work for her: she was still quite a striking woman when she was eighty, with her piled up pure white hair and straight back.

I think her motto can be applied in quite a lot of other areas too.  Really, if you make up your mind to something, you are halfway there.  I worked for many years for someone who believed that if you have average intelligence, a modicum of common sense and lots of determination, that you could become anything you want, whether that be a doctor, architect or lawyer – or whatever else.  She proved it too.  On several occasions in our legal office, we took on youngsters who had left school without qualifications – even at sixteen – and turned them into solicitors a few years later.  It took a lot of hard work, but several solicitors are practising today thanks to her philosophy of life.

I wonder if the same theory is true of mountain climbing?  If you are averagely fit, sensible how you go about it and determined to do it, can you climb Kilimanjaro?  I am starting to believe maybe the answer is yes!  When I watched the film of many of my friends and relatives in the “Climb Every Mountain” blog on 19th May – that amazing film – I really started to believe it is possible that Jae, Oscar and I will be standing at the top at the end of August, belting out our own rendition of the song.  With the support we have behind us from the lovely singers, those who have donated money and things to take with us and those who have even provided us with art works, we have everything we could possibly need.  I believe we really might make it!

Stew and I spent a day recently with an interesting bunch of people on a walk between Shepherdswell, an old mining village in East Kent, and Canterbury.  It was a practice walk for the people who are organising the Refugee Tales, which I blogged about way back on 22nd March.  They have come up with the great idea of re-enacting something along the lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with a modern day twist.  The walk will start in Dover and end in Crawley, taking nine days.  It starts on Saturday 13th June, so takes in two weekends.  It is possible to sign up just for the odd day, so I have signed up for the first four days, as I will be able to get home to my own bed at the end of each day.  However, arrangements have been made for those doing the whole thing, with church halls to sleep in, food provided and luggage being carried.  Among those walking are musicians to entertain and also experts on wildlife.  There was an amazing such expert on the practice walk.  Every so often he would ask us to stand quietly and listen.  He could identify every bird we heard: a wren, a woodpecker, a blackcap and “an excited chaffinch” as well as many others.

At the end of each day there will be a free performance, which will include some “Tales” by some quite famous authors such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chris Cleave, Marina Lewycka and several more.  These will include the Detainee’s Tale, the Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale, the Lorry Driver’s Tale etc – reflecting the stories of modern day refugees and detainees.  You can find out more about the walk here.

I owe my existence to voluntary groups working with refugees, such as those who are organising the Refugee Tales. My mother was Jewish, born in Germany in 1925.  In one night – the Kristallnacht – when she was thirteen, thousands of synagogues, Jewish shops and businesses were destroyed by Nazi troops and their supporters. Jewish people were terrorised and 30,000 Jewish men were seized. Ahead lay concentration camps, torture, slave labour and death.  Jewish parents were desperate to get their children to safety.  Kindertransport, the Refugee Children Movement, was a rescue mission set up by volunteers in the UK to assist in bringing children out of Nazi occupied Europe to British foster homes, hostels and farms. My mother was lucky enough to be one of the 10,000 children who fled to this country on the Kindertransport trains between 1938 and 1939.  It has been estimated that nearly one and a half million children died in the Holocaust: she was indeed one of the lucky ones.

When my thirteen year old mother arrived in London she was fostered by a family there who came to love her.  They had two teenage sons, one of whom a few years ago told my sister Leslie (who has written a detailed memoir all about this) that their house became a much happier place, when my mother moved in.  Although some of her close family did subsequently manage to escape to the UK, my mother remained living with her much loved foster family for the remainder of her childhood.  Had it not been for such families, who took children in out of the goodness of their hearts and amazing volunteers who paid for and arranged for the trains, I would never have been born.

There are many people in this country who are unsympathetic towards refugees. They seem to think that they should be sent ‘home’.  What they don’t seem to realise is that large groups of people never leave their homes unless forced to do so by war, famine, persecution or natural disaster.  They don’t have a choice in it, if, like my mother, they want to survive.

This was brought home to me by one of the women I met on the recent walk from Shepherdswell.  She had climbed up Kilimanjaro some years ago, so I was very keen to hear about her experience.  She told me about two young girls – perhaps about sixteen – who had signed up as porters to carry luggage and equipment up the mountain.  She told me that they had walked hundreds of miles in the hope of getting such work, and there they were in flip flops and bare legs carrying enormous burdens up a mountain in the snow.  I am quite certain these girls must have been fleeing from some man made or natural disaster.  I understand that still there are dozens of people standing at the gates of the Kilimanjaro National Park begging to be taken on as porters and many of them have probably fled their homelands because of humanitarian disasters.

Exodus, who are supporting the 3GKiliClimb, only use properly trained and equipped guides and porters – but they also raise money for local charities, which help to give people the skills they need to get such work.  A quarter of the money we are raising by our walk up Kilimanjaro will be going to the Tanzania Porter Education Project which Jae wrote about yesterday.  I can’t do much to help the many millions of people who have no choice but to flee their homes every year, whether on foot or crowded into a boat, but I hope that a few of them will be helped by your very generous donations – both through TPEP, and through the other projects we are all supporting.

 

One of the charities you are helping us fundraise for through the 3GKiliClimb project is the Tanzania Porter Education Project (which is funded via Friends of Conservation). Of all the funds raised 25% will go to this project, and if we reach our target, and that gets doubled by our kind match-funder, we will have enough money to support the project for a whole year!

Generally the traditional rural incomes in this area are complemented with seasonal employment as porters and guides. However, outside of these seasons, during the long (April-June) and short rains (November), employment opportunities are limited. The TPEP teaches English to the porters during these times.  Better language skills, environmental awareness and service levels, not only increase their employment opportunities; they help deliver a better experience for trekkers, who in turn may encourage others to come in future years.

Since its set up in conjunction with Exodus Travels in 2004, over 800 porters have been through the programme, and nine porters have also been sponsored to become qualified guides. TPEP accepts women as well as men at the school – allowing both to make good money safely from their mountain.

As we are now coming to the end of the long rains, we have just received an update from one of the tutors:

I am pleased to report that the English language training sponsored by Exodus has recently finished. The training was based in Arusha and lasted for 5 weeks with 2 classes; one of ‘beginners’ and the other ‘intermediate’ for those porters with some experience in English already. There were English language classes 5 days a week through this period.

The Project had 10 ‘beginners’ and 12 ‘intermediate’ students, and they finished with the 13 most improved students being selected to work as porters on an Exodus departure. These students benefited both from this extra work during the rainy season when there are very few climbs and also they were given the chance to practise their English with these Exodus clients. On summit day a couple of the intermediate students also went along with the clients and guides to the summit gaining further experience useful for their future.

Many thanks for funding this course.

We also received the following from Said Swalehe – a porter who attended the 2015 English course:

I was born in Babati in November 1983 and after completing primary education I was not selected for secondary education so I started to do various odd jobs to make some money. In 2002 I moved to Arusha and a year later went for the first time as a porter on Kilimanjaro. Later I joined African Walking Company as a porter. In 2013 I attend the free English course during the long rains. This helps me to improve my English and in 2014 I get a chance to attend the company’s first aid training. Since then I have been 15 times to the summit of Kilimanjaro as a summit porter. On these trips I have got lots of experience and I know the chance came only because of improving myself on the Exodus English Course. Again this year I get the chance to attend the course and further improve my English. I thank Exodus to help porters to reach our goal.

It’s lovely to be able to support a project which so clearly provides opportunities and skills to individuals, as well as bringing safe, responsible tourism to a community that benefits from it. And we know that porters on our trip in August will have been through TPEP, so it feels very personal. If you haven’t yet donated here’s the link, and if you have: thank you so much for helping to ensure this project’s continued success!

Jae recently reminded us of Jenny Joseph’s famous poem, Warning. Written in 1961 when the poet was 29, it starts with the famous line, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple”. Friends often quote just that one line when they see how I dress, purple gloves, coat, fleece, scarves, shoes, bags, even a hat! Not all of them are the same shade, so many purples. And I certainly don’t wear them all at the same time, well, not always…

The second line goes, “with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me”. About forty years after Jenny Joseph wrote it, this line inspired the creation of The Red Hat Society, specifically for older women (over 50!)  in the United States. Branches of the society have expanded all over the world  since then, or groups inspired by them, usually meeting for afternoon tea, all wearing red hats, not too bothered about whether the hats suit them or not, just having a laugh, not worried about what other people might say.

We knew a lovely red hat lady when we were little; our Auntie Lizzie, whose red hats were decorated with extravagant red feathers.  She was one of the many thousands of women left widowed after World War I, married for only a brief space of time to Gilbert Taylor, one of our Grandma’s brothers. (So just as Grandma had been, she was a Lizzie Tayor). They had no children. And when we knew her, she was in her sixties and retired, living on her own in a small top floor tenement flat. Everything was very different from our normal house: its tiny kitchen and the fact that we needed a key to use the toilet outside the flat, at the top of the stairs.  The Kili group will be carrying up chemical toilets for use morning and evening.  In between, it will probably be en plein air! At least that didn’t happen at Auntie Lizzie’s.

Just round the corner from her flat was Hawick public library. That suited her very well as Lizzie had the spare time and the appetite to do a lot of reading. But on one notorious occasion, when she returned books unexpectedly quickly, the librarian was foolish enough to ask her if she really read them, or just looked at the pictures. It was just a joke, I think, but she was greatly offended and would have boycotted the library after that had she not loved reading so much.

She often had Sheila, Robbie and me to stay for the weekend and she made a huge fuss of us. It was fun to be with her and we loved our visits.  A song popular at the time, sung by Guy Mitchell,  went like this:

She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt
She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt
She lives on just cokey-nuts and fish from the sea
A rose in her hair, a gleam in her eyes
And love in her heart for me

Hawick’s weather didn’t lend itself to hula skirts and or any other sort of exotica, but she loved the song and laughed her head off when we sang it along with her.

I have recently bought a few books detailing people’s experiences of climbing Kilimanjaro: and I had planned to write about one of these today, but seem to have taken off on a frolic into childhood instead!  One very depressing thing about every account of the climb I have read is the amount of diarrhoea and vomiting referred to.  I started to wonder if there was a better way of referring to this and remembered the much more delicate terminology my friend Gwyn uses: she and her family always refer to being unwell in this way as being “untidy”.  When I asked Gwyn how that came about, she said it came from reading about a bear called Mary Plain, when she was a child.  I have vague memories of reading about Mary Plain myself and decided to find out a bit about her on the internet – and have got entirely carried away!

Mary Plain is an orphan bear cub at Berne zoo who is befriended by the spectacled ‘Owl Man’ by means of the regular application of bear friendly treats (sugar carrots! condensed milk delivered by hose!).  She is persuaded to leave the safety of her home and her bear twin cousins Marionetta and Little Wool and embark on a series of adventures with him.  These range from winning first prize in a show, to capturing Nazi spies and outwitting kidnappers, from escaping a field of angry bulls to being washed up on a tropical island . Mary is always funny, practically fearless, wonderfully manipulative, endlessly imaginative and just the best company ever.  Her adventures are recorded in a series of novels written between 1930 and 1965 by Gwynedd Rae – yes, another Gwyn!

Mary had a few catchphrases which handily cover all moments of Triumph and Despair in life:

To convey sadness and uncertainty:

‘I wonder if the Twins are happy without me?’

Or when self esteem is more buoyant:

‘I am an unusual first class bear with a white rosette and a gold medal with a picture of myself on it.’

“Gracious! that’s the cock waking me up, it must be another day,” and Mary pattered over to the window and had a look. Yes it was. How lovely! Mary liked new days. You never could tell what might happen on a new day; so many things could and especially when the day was Mary’s…

There is a thread of glorious gluttony that runs through all Mary Plain books. She eats constantly and always things that sound completely delicious; hot bread and milk, chocolate eclairs and meringues. She is very fond of cream buns, though if she ate too many, could fear that she was going to be “untidy”.

I have decided that Mary would be the ideal companion for us to have along on our trip, with her delicate phrasing.  She would find a positive side to every possible difficulty we might encounter and would happily greet each new day as it came along, no matter what.  Come and have another Big Adventure with us, Mary Plain, please!

“Asante”. Swahili for thank you. Perhaps the most useful of all the Swahili words and phrases the 3G KiliClimbers will learn. It’s a little word that makes a huge difference, whatever language it is expressed in.

Ever since Sheila was little she has been saying thank you, and the moment she could write, she was writing thank you letters. Our mother was adamant. She would draw pencil lines with a ruler on a special notelet with “Sheila” printed on the  front, and after every birthday, every Christmas, the thank you letter routine would roll into action.

Recently a dear relative, our mother’s cousin Marianne, sent from Norway  a bundle of treasured black and white  photos and among them were thank you letters from Sheila which Marianne had kept for over 60 years. Spelling and handwriting in pencil are endearingly child-like, but the presents seem odd. A book about galleons (Sheila was seven at the most as her address is Lintalee) and a gummed paper outfit that might help her win a prize. What was that? Maybe Sheila remembers these presents better than I do.

Thank you letters are totally out of fashion. Even a spoken thank you cannot be taken for granted. But I was pleased to see that in emoji, apparently the UK’s fastest growing language, there are many emoticons with which to express thanks.  And the iWatch, which has only a preset range of messages as there is no keyboard, can send thanks in four ways, cheers, thx, thanks! And thank you. Which is what I want to say to everyone who is reading this, thank you to everyone who has donated, to all the supporters of the 3G KiliClimbers behind the scenes and front of house. Above all thank you to the 3GKiliClimbers, the three actors on the stage, who by climbing Kilimanjaro in August, are helping three charities, Catching Lives, Friends of Conservation and Baraka, a small charity working with under-privileged schools and communities in Zambia, Morocco, Laos and India. To all, I say ASANTE.

Rubbish is an important issue on Kilimanjaro.  It is a “clean mountain” unlike some other high peaks in the world, which are covered in cast off litter.  Kilimanjaro is a National Park and entrance into it is carefully regulated with lots of rules.  Everything, except food and fuel – you have to take your own fuel as you are not allowed to burn wood or trees – is weighed before you are permitted through the park gates.  This is partly to ensure that porters are not too heavily laden, and also ensures that nothing is left behind on the mountain.  When the group returns back to the gate, the packs will be weighed once again, and if there is any discrepancy, the tour company will be fined.  The fines are quite hefty, which means that very little gets left behind on the mountain.

I am very happy to be climbing somewhere with such a fine green reputation.

Rubbish is quite a big issue at home too. Canterbury City Council have now issued us with six different bins, each with a separate purpose.  When we had only one or two bins, it was on occasions difficult to fit everything in, especially around Christmas when all the family were here and there was lots of packaging to dispose of.  I would quite regularly have to climb into the bin to trample everything down to make enough space to put more in.  I only occasionally have to do that nowadays – mostly in the gardening season, when there are lots of hedge cuttings and branches to tamp down.  The back of our house is rather like “Bin City”.  We have one bin for non-recyclables, one for garden rubbish, one for papers/cardboard, one for tins/glass/plastic, and two of different sizes for food refuse.   We can, at least, fit all of the bins into our garden: others are not so lucky.  The result of this is that walking down the streets can be extremely difficult and nigh impossible for wheel-chair users and those pushing prams. I am not sure that there is any easy answer to this.  Different countries and areas have different systems, each of which has its pros and cons.

Jae’s boys were in my house when I said that I was going to blog about rubbish, and that I might rise to the “Calendar Girls” challenge put out by Jean in the blog of 14th May, and followed up by Gerda on the 26th of May, by posing naked in a bin.  The boys were very shocked at the idea and said they didn’t want to be anywhere near at the time: what if someone passed by and saw me?  It was only after some discussion that we realised that the boys thought I intended to pose in a bin in the front garden on the street!  As if!  They calmed down a bit when I assured them it would be in the back garden and hopefully witnessed by no-one save the photographer.  Stew and I thought it best to get on with the job while the boys were out in any event: I don’t know what they will think of the result!

Note from Jae: I don’t care what the boys think Ma – I’m mega proud. You look amazing!
(PS Maybe I’ll show them Calendar Girls one day and they’ll at least have a clue what we’re talking about)

On our recent drive to the South West, we were very struck by the large number of roundabouts on the roads, particularly in the Southampton/Portsmouth area.  My memory is that there no roundabouts when I was a child and I think that in the south of Scotland, there definitely were not at that time.

Google tells me that the first ever roundabout was built in Letchworth Garden City in 1909, but that roundabouts as we know them have only been built since the 1960s, when the powers that be hit on the idea of giving drivers already on the roundabout the right of way.  Before that, there were some “traffic circles”, which gave those entering the right of way and caused more jams than they solved!  It seems that the USA has taken even longer to work that out.  They didn’t grasp how roundabouts should work until the 1990s. It seems that early experiences resulted in total gridlock!

Jae used to work in Hemel Hempstead, where there was a so called “magic roundabout”. We used to quake when we saw this sign, but funnily enough, it wasn’t so bad once you got into it.

There are plenty of roundabouts in Scotland now, as four of my paternal aunts found out to their cost about ten years ago.  The four used to meet up every year for a holiday in North Berwick, which is a delightful seaside town about twenty-five miles east of Edinburgh.  They had all read Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” and were intrigued by the scene which takes place in Rosslyn Chapel, so decided to mount an expedition to visit it.  At this time three of my aunts were well into their eighties, so they decided that the “young one”, Irené should hire a car for the occasion and drive them there: after all, she was only in her late seventies!  However, what they didn’t factor in, is that Irené has spent the last forty or so years living in the USA.  She said she was game for the trip, so long as it didn’t involve any roundabouts.  She had never driven round one in her life and was not about to learn how to negotiate this new fangled idea.

Going by any sensible route, they could have been at the Chapel, which is south of Edinburgh, in about forty-five minutes. Irené managed to work out a route without roundabouts which turned out to take more than three hours!  Her sisters did not return from the trip very happy bunnies.  They had been cooped up in the hire car for more than seven hours by the time they got back, and had had to rush round the chapel when they were there, as they were anxious not to be out on the roads (too right!!!) during the Edinburgh rush hour.   I am not sure that poor Irené was ever forgiven for the nightmare trip it had turned out to be – all because the USA has been slow to embrace the roundabout.

I understand that at times we will almost be walking round in circles on Kilimanjaro, though happily we will not be encountering traffic as we do so!  Some of the paths meander around and we will be taking in the meanders as a way of getting gently used to the higher altitude.  Often we will go up, only to drop back down again late in the day, to set camp.  The reason for this is that sleeping is difficult at high altitude, and we are more likely to sleep if we have been higher in the course of the day.  Also, it makes it easier to get going again in the morning, if our bodies think we have encountered the increased altitude the previous afternoon.  So I won’t mind if I feel like I am walking round in a circle on the mountain: I will be in a much better place than being cooped up in a car trying to avoid going round in a circle on a roundabout!

Note from Jae: Talking of roundabouts – look at Ma and Osc on one!!

I keep thinking about how cold it will be, especially at night, when we are climbing Kilimanjaro.  I know now that we can expect cold evening and nights from the first night onwards.  The down sleeping bags and thermals will get plenty of use.  It may well be below freezing at night: it seems that Kilimanjaro has its own weather system.  Cold winds blow down from the snow covered top, despite the fact that the mountain is on the Equator.  With a bit of luck we will get warmed up if the sun comes out during the day.

Thinking about cold nights brought back memories of chilblains, which were the bane of my life during my teens and twenties.  In fact, it was not until we moved into our present house in the late 1970s and had central heating put in, that I was able to forget about them.  I was always in absolute agony whenever my feet got warm.  I remember at times sitting with my feet in a sink of cold water, just to get some relief.  It could have been worse: I did google possible cures and I see that putting your feet in a bowl of urine is considered of benefit to chilblain sufferers.  I am glad no-one suggested that one!

An article in the Guardian health section on 15th January 2012 declared:

“Chilblains are caused by poor circulation in response to the cold. The tiny blood vessels under the skin narrow in low temperatures. When the skin warms up again they become leaky and fluid gets into the surrounding tissue, causing inflammation. To prevent them you should warm your skin gently after being out in the cold: don’t wrap yourself around the radiator when you get home. When outside keep your limbs and face warm with thermals, layers of loose clothing and a hat. Don’t rest your feet on a hot water bottle in bed but wear socks instead.”

I don’t suppose there is much risk of me running into a radiator on Kili, so maybe I will be alright and I will make sure I keep these bed socks on.

When I was a child, there was no thought of heating bedrooms.  There would be a coal fire downstairs, and that would be it.  One of the joys of winter was when “Jack Frost” came and made patterns with ice on the inside of our bedroom window.  On winter mornings my sister Leslie and I would be really excited about opening the curtains to see whether Jack Frost had left ice on the window.  If he had, a line would be drawn down the middle of the window and we would have one half each to decorate further, scratching pictures into the ice with our nails.  I looked up on the internet to check that my memory about this was right and found a nice explanation aimed at children:

“You can see that the frost on a window is always on the inside. And if the outside temperature warms up, or maybe if a window is right in the sun, the frost may melt into water that runs down on the inside of the window. So, you can see that the frost is made out of ice that formed on the inside of the window.

Frost forms on a window when the temperature outside is below freezing. Inside it is warmer, and there is more water vapor in the air. Any water molecule in the air that hits the glass will stick to the surface. As it sticks, it is hooking up to other water molecules to form ice crystals.”

So now I know!

When Stewart and I were first married, one of the things we bought was a paraffin heater.  Electricity was an expensive form of heating and in our first couple of flats, we relied on the paraffin heater to a great extent.  The place always smelled as a result: I am pretty sure such heaters would now be considered a health and safety risk in homes in this country – though I note they are still sold for greenhouse use.  They were in such common use that the “paraffin man” used to call round door to door once a week in a van selling it and doing pretty good business.  Despite such heaters, we were still always fairly cold: most people expected to wear many more clothes indoors than is generally done nowadays.  It still amazes me now that some people routinely wear only a T-shirt or blouse on top indoors in winter, coming as I do, from a generation which often had three or even four woolly layers on indoors.

So at least I have had some practice for the several layers I will have to wear on Kili, though for Oscar, who has always lived in a warm house and has never spent much time in a very cold place, it will be a new experience.  We have been told that Jae and I should sleep on either side of Oscar to make sure he keeps warm at night.  Welcome to the 3G cuddle in!

Some of you reading Sheila & company’s daily postings must, like me, wonder what Sheila’s secret is.  Every day there is some uplifting, touching or funny anecdote about her life.  All her friends and family are lovely, great or wonderful and it is so obvious that her two daughters – and five grandchildren – simply adore her.  Sheila appears to sail through life, learning new things, having fun or helping others; and very often she seems to manage to do all three at the same time.  Even her memories of childhood – her BOGOF grandparents, her holidays with aunts and cousins, and her early years in Hawick – all seem touched with the romance of Enid Blyton or some of the ‘comic’ books for girls of Sheila’s generation where they all have ‘lashings of ginger beer’ and super dorm feasts.  I think of my own life, which at best I can call interesting, and feel a tinge of envy.

But then I remember some of the early bits that Sheila doesn’t talk about.  When she was twelve her parents moved to Edinburgh, taking Sheila, Leslie and Robbie away from her beloved Hawick, friends and lovely grandparents (there I go with the ‘lovelys’ but I knew her grandma and Yanos and they really were lovely – both to look at and by nature).  Leaving Hawick was hard, but much more pain was to follow about six months later when her mother died in her early thirties.  And not very long afterwards another major upheaval when her father remarried and they moved to Burnside, on the outskirts of Glasgow.  Perhaps it would be better to draw a veil over what Sheila thought of her stepmother, although she became very fond of, and supportive to, her elder step-sister all the way through her sometimes troubled life.

Sheila coped!  I met her slightly older sister Leslie first when she arrived in my class at school and we were seated together – she was a Wilson (no relation to my husband) and I was a Wishart and in these days you didn’t get to choose your BF.  Sheila started to pop up, sometimes with my young cousin, and Sheila was so different from Leslie.  I thought Leslie was quite serious and well- behaved, and I must confess I had her soon tagged as a serious contender for the ‘top of the class’ slot, for which I had only a couple of serious contenders (Stewart was one of them).  (This is where I confess that I was a swot, and as serious as Leslie -although I managed to get over that to some extent!)  Sheila was a different kettle of fish with her wild curly hair, her great grin and madcap ideas.   Now that I am older, I look back and wonder if Sheila was covering a lot of her sadness with a happy-go-lucky persona.  But you know, if that was what she was doing, it soon became second nature.  That must have been how she managed another traumatic experience a few years later when she was diagnosed with a back problem that meant her being encased in a plaster cast from hip-bone to arm-pit (we called arm-pits ‘oxters’ then – a lovely word used as in ‘having to oxter him home’).  At home or school, she couldn’t sit on anything more upright than a deckchair.  Sheila called on her by now wide circle of friends to carry her deckchair, and the tray on which she wrote, from classroom to classroom, giggling and clowning all the way.  Nowadays, most teenage girls seem to expect stress counselling if they break a fingernail – well maybe not quite.

So I think part of Sheila’s Secret was her early experiences of coping with upheavals and traumas that few youngsters had to deal with.  I think she learned that she only had this life and that it was better to get on with it than to sit and lament over what might have been.  She obviously learned how helping a friend in need – even if only by carrying a deckchair – helped form bonds and did give mutual pleasure.  And a smiling welcome always helps, usually by bringing a smile in return.  I hope Sheila will forgive me if I say she reminds me a bit of our two lovely black Labradors (there I go again with the “L” word – it is catching) who assumed they lived in a world inhabited by people who loved them.  So they always approached people with tails wagging, a smile on their faces, expecting to be liked, and the strange thing was that many people who were afraid of dogs would reach out, tentatively at first and then with a more vigorous pat or tickle.  Like our dogs, Sheila always expects good from people and in return she attracts positiveness.  I have only very rarely known her to speak ill of anyone, always looking for the good points, even in some of the flawed characters she’s met in her various jobs and pursuits.  We could all learn so much from Sheila – an inspiring friend.

A mini gallery of Sheila smiles!

I think all children love playing near water, whether it is a lake, a river or the sea.  My children were lucky enough to be brought up in Canterbury, from where you get to the sea pretty quickly if you go for a few miles in three out of four directions.  My grandchildren all love the sea.  When Jae’s boys come to visit they love having the opportunity to run about and throw stones on the beach, and daughter Gwen’s children in Sydney have the opportunity to run about on the splendid beaches there.

As a child, I lived quite a distance from the sea, but we had beautiful rivers running through the Scottish Border countryside where I lived.  I spent a lot of time down by the river going “baggie catching” – baggie being the local term for minnow.  I don’t know if they still call them that, given that a baggie now seems to be the term for a Ziplock plastic bag.  I would set out with my friends, the main equipment being jam jars with string tied round the neck and a piece of bread.

We would go down to the river Teviot, which meanders through the park in Hawick, climb down to the river and carefully lay the jar on its side with a piece of bread inside on the river floor.  You just had to sit quietly beside it until the baggies swam into the jar, when you got hold of the string and pulled the jar back out.  It was a good way of catching two or three fish at a time.  We would admire them and eventually carefully return them to the river.

My grandfather knew I spent a fair bit of time fishing, and one day, after a fair bit of nagging on my part I think, gave me a present of a baggie catcher.  This was a bit of shaped plastic which you could tie over the mouth of your jar: the fish would swim in, but couldn’t get out again.  I think he used it to catch baggies as bait for real fishing.

I used it once only!  I left it in the river with my jar overnight – a bad mistake.  I returned in the morning to find my jar absolutely packed tight with the poor little fish.  I was pretty horrified at this jar full of squirming baggies and got them back into the river as fast as possible.  I am not sure I ever owned up to my grandfather what had happened.  I guess the baggie catcher cost quite a bit: plastic was not readily available then.  Nowadays you could make a catcher by cutting off the neck of a plastic bottle, but in these days there were no plastic bottles – drinks came in returnable glass bottles.

Another favourite outing was to go “up the Borthwick” with my mother and family or friends – it seemed to be a women and children only outing.  The Borthwick was another nearby river which was shallow enough for us to safely paddle about and try to learn to swim in.  Rugs would be taken to spread by the riverside, together with sandwiches and drinks.  We happily spent whole days there making damns, and running around or sitting on the grass.  When our cousins came over from Belfast in the summer, we would spend days on end in the river.

It seems looking at the photographs, that my mother was fairly cavalier about the passing on of swimming costumes from one child to the next!  Poor Robbie at the front seems to be wearing the costume, which I guess belonged to me previously and probably Leslie before that!  He is the only child without a smile on his face, poor boy.

I don’t expect to encounter many rivers while climbing Kilimanjaro – though it appears that the first people recorded to have climbed it, which was surprisingly late – in the second half of the nineteenth century – may have expected to do so.  It seems that it was generally thought at one time that Kili was the source of the Nile.  However, there are some mountain streams formed from water running off the glacier at the top.  I see that some sites say that the porters collect water from these streams on a daily basis to use as drinking water.  I am not sure whether our porters will do this, or carry the water with them.  I don’t think I will bother with taking my swimming costume up the mountain though – water off a glacier would be a bit on the chilly side, I reckon.

Talking with Sheila and my sister Els about Jean’s suggestion of a 3G Kili striptease in her guest blog of May 14^th, we had some ideas about our own Calendar Girls’ moments.  Sheila was very outspoken about mine: “hats, of course it will be hats for you!”.

Els and Sheila have to tell themselves about their own moments – here is mine.

I have always loved hats. At the end of the sixties as a student I had a few. When I married in 1969, in a Bordeaux suit with a miniskirt, I was wearing a pink one.

In the seventies, busy with study and children, I just had some cotton summer ones and crocheted, practical  ones, especially in winter. At the end of the eighties I lost a job, was a little bit depressed and worried about never finding a job again. Solution?  I decided to start wearing hats again: when depressed to cheer myself up and when feeling good to put an exclamation mark next to me (on my appearance).

In the course of the years I bought lots of hats: daily summer and winter hats, special occasion hats for funerals, weddings and other festivities.

Every spring and autumn I like buying a new one. In every town that I visit, I will easily find the hat shop. At the moment I own about 90 hats. Those for the current season are in my hallway. The rest are in boxes in every room in my home. And another possibility: open any cupboard, except in the kitchen, and find more hats!

–   just a cloud of 3 layers of pinkish straw, worn on one occasion, which was a photo shoot for the hat shop on the steps of the big church in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where I live.

Just before coming to England this spring for a walking holiday, I decided that I needed a new hat that would go with my walking coat – but it also went with a red cardigan, when I was  playing cymbals in an exhibition in the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate.

I love all my hats and, as long as I have got the guts, the money and pleasure in wearing them, I won’t stop buying them!

Jean has thrown the gauntlet down!  I am looking forward to seeing the other 3gkiliclimb.com bloggers’ Calendar Girls’ Moments.  Can we get twelve pictures together to make a calendar to raise funds for the great charities Oscar, Jae and Sheila are supporting?

Note from Jae: Goodness Gerda – you look totally amazing – happy, and classy, and naked! I feel like both gloves are well and truly on the floor now. Hats off! Eek!

I recently walked into a second hand book shop attached to a National Trust property we were visiting, and as I went in the door, I saw this book in front of me.  I tried to ignore it at first, but couldn’t resist having a quick look and, of course, ended up buying it.  I thought there might be a few ideas for me in it, given that it is in fact full of retro tips from history’s greatest female adventurers.  There is no way I will be going up Kilimanjaro in a skirt, although I note Jae has got herself a rather natty little walking skirt.  I rarely wear a skirt in normal life – maybe on half a dozen days a year – and the week of walking uphill on the mountain will not include one of these days.  However there are a few gems in the book that are worth sharing, and I suppose Jae and I are sort of “lady” adventurers.

The book goes into some detail about a trip made towards the end of the nineteenth century by May Sheldon.  “She organised and led an expedition through the East African bush from Zanzibar to Mount Kilimanjaro” having hired “138 porters to carry her goods and equipment”.  I am not too sure that we can expect to travel in quite such luxury: I doubt anyone is going to carry us in a Palanquin!  Actually, to be fair to her, I think she only travelled to the foot of the mountain – there is no indication that she was actually carried up it.

In the book I came across this lovely clothing list: a bit different in style from what we will need, although we will have to cater for similar temperatures.  I have looked in vain for a photograph of a “knitted kidney protector”: it seems to have been a kind of corset made out of wool.

I have been more successful in finding out what a “Jaros combination suit” was.  In fact I have found pictures for both the male and female suits: I imagine Oscar would look quite fetching in one! They were made of a “wool knit fleece material” and were recommended for “hygienic, therapeutic and prophylactic application”.  As children, we wore something not dissimilar to the Jaros combination suit as pyjamas – I suppose it was the precursor of the babygro and the onesie.  Ours were made out of fine cream coloured wool and had buttons up the front, and quite a large buttoned flap at the rear for obvious purposes.

Alison Hargreaves was an English mountaineer in the second half of the twentieth century and like many women adventurers was vilified in the press for embarking on risky expeditions.

“During her life and after her death … she was frequently accused of selfishness for going on high-altitude expeditions and leaving her young children behind.  Male explorers, by contrast, are never criticised for leaving their families to go off on expeditions, however perilous”

Well – that’s just the usual guilt trip that women with children always have to face, isn’t it?

Another recent mountaineer, the American Arlene Blum, planned an expedition to Annapurna in the Himalayas in 1978.  She had great difficulty in raising funding for the trip until she

“came up with the bright idea of selling an expedition T-shirt, and someone came up with the even brighter idea of using the slogan, ‘A Woman’s Place is on Top……. of Annapurna.’  Its mixture of humour and sexual assertion was perfect for the times; Blum and her team managed to sell over 15,000 T-shirts, which went a long way towards financing their expedition.”

I must say that I am extremely grateful not to have to resort to such lengths.  Thank you very much indeed to Exodus Travels and Ethiopian Airlines for helping to make our record breaking attempt possible.