Unknown Pleasures (eBook)

Andy Kirkpatrick (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
Vertebrate Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-911342-88-5 (ISBN)

Infos

'The idea of owning anything except the experience is hubris.' Unknown Pleasures is a collection of works by the climber and award-winning author Andy Kirkpatrick. Obsessed with climbing and addicted to writing, Kirkpatrick is a master storyteller. Covering subjects as diverse as climbing, relationships, fatherhood, mental health and the media, it is easy to read, sometimes difficult to digest, and impossible to forget. One moment he is attempting a rare solo ascent of Norway's Troll Wall, the next he is surrounded by the TV circus while climbing Moonlight Buttress with the BBC's The One Show presenter Alex Jones. Yosemite's El Capitan is ever-present; he climbs it alone - strung out for weeks, and he climbs it with his thirteen-year-old daughter Ella - her first big wall. His eye for observation and skilled wordcraft make for laugh-out-loud funny moments, while in more hard-hitting pieces he is unflinchingly honest about past and present love and relationships, and pulls no punches with an alternative perspective of our place in the world. Unknown Pleasures is Andy Kirkpatrick at his brilliant best.

Andy Kirkpatrick is an award-winning author and climber. With a reputation for seeking out routes where the danger is real and the return questionable, he has pushed himself on some of the hardest walls and faces around the world. He was born and raised on a council estate in Hull, one of the UK's flattest cities, and suffered from severe dyslexia which went undiagnosed until he was nineteen. Thriving on this apparent adversity, Andy transformed himself into one of the world's most driven and accomplished climbers and an award-winning writer. In 2001 he undertook an eleven-day solo ascent of the Reticent Wall on El Capitan, Yosemite, one of the hardest solo climbs in the world. This climb was the central theme of his first book Psychovertical, which won the 2008 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. His second book, Cold Wars, won the 2012 Boardman Tasker Prize. In 2014 he partnered BBC One's The One Show presenter Alex Jones as she climbed Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park in aid of Sport Relief. Andy lives in Ireland with his wife Vanessa.

Textauszug

– INTRODUCTION –

I sit in Las Vegas, the air conditioning making me shiver, typing away – backwards and forwards, type and delete – trying to write an introduction that I might actually take the time to read for a book of my words.

It seems funny to have such a book, with my words printed inside it, and it’s with no false modesty that I say I don’t really see myself as a writer – this writing stuff nothing to do with me. If I was to come up with a reason for this embarrassment of inadequacy it would be that writing has always been such a struggle, from the moment I started school, to now as I sit and shiver. There’s no way I can claim such a title as ‘writer’. To find something so difficult robs you of any feeling of mastery, mastery being a requirement for such a book as this, my ‘greatest hits’. And so instead of being a writer I see myself as being something else: part thief and part connector of discordant events, mining the past. Oh and last lines, I’m good at last lines.

First to the thievery.

The words in this book were most often not really freely given but taken, sometimes stolen against the wills of the characters described, from people who had no clue that my writer’s brain was casing away everything said and done and experienced. The more you can steal the better; the stuff people want left out is more often than not the only stuff to put in.

Having gone through so much past writing looking for the good stuff for this book, I would also add myself to the list of injured parties, my own life picked through for nuggets that could be forged into something of value to the reader – no thought to the crime in it. All that mattered was the words, even ones that did me harm.

There is also some criminal boldness needed to write stories that people want to read: a little raw, a bit edgy, car-crash uncomfortable – things that make people read through their fingers, things they’ve not quite read before, things they want to read but didn’t know it. I’m often asked if those who I’ve written about are still alive (yes, they are), or if others mind so honest a sharing (often not), or if I share too much (yes, I do). All that really matters is that the words are read, criminal or not. As I’ve said, I’m not a writer of skill, but a thief – have been so long before the words – and that urge to read what I write is often just the thrill of being in on the job.

As for connections, this really seems to be what I’m good at and has very little to do with the art of writing, of planning and structure and knowing your beginning, middle and end. I was once diagnosed as being extremely dyslexic, regarded as a problem at the time – an excuse. But I soon saw it as a gift, allowing me to deconstruct and rebuild complex things, a story nothing but a pattern of words and meanings that can be pulled apart. These stories I tell are very often confused and complex, going here and there, which some wrongly assume to be designed that way, that in the madness there is deeper meaning and intellect. There is not, I just start writing and see where my easily distracted brain takes me – oh look, a squirrel – but you’re welcome to extract a higher meaning if you wish. This distraction is also tied to my adventurous spirit, in that I don’t want certainty, to know what comes next, what lies around every corner, only the certainty that the next paragraph has the potential to be different to this one and unexpected.

Once upon a time and long enough ago to share and not face prosecution, I was more than a word thief.

My thievery did not involve diamonds, bars of gold, or fancy sports cars, but cheese. Maybe you can go to prison for such a crime, or be sent to hell, but in my defence, this was the cheapest of cheese m’lud, not the good stuff that stinks out your house. It was hardly cheese at all, more soft orange rubber, showing that at least back then I felt some shame. The wrapper of this ill-gotten gain was labelled Happy Shopper, Cheddar, strong, strong cheese the only one worth the risk of being caught for – after all, life is too short for mild.

Happy Shopper was a popular brand back then in the 1990s, each item like a little Red Cross parcel to the cash-strapped: single mums, men who lived alone, the elderly, the downtrodden, people spread as thin as can be on their small slice of life. And so such offerings were true to their word, bringing happiness to shoppers with an affordable bounty of cheap cuts and slices and measures, sold in corner shops and Asian supermarkets everywhere.

Back in those days my income was about twenty-four pounds a week – I was spread thin enough to be transparent, on the dole like almost everyone else my age. It was a substance I had to stand in line once a fortnight to receive, stand in line and recite my National Insurance number and then ‘sign on’.

Standing in line has a calming effect on animals, like cattle and human beings, some order to the chaotic scramble that is a life, the line that must hold for the sake of civilisation, but often without considering its possible abattoir end. When we humans stand in line we stand in line to demonstrate for fairness, in the belief that although slow you will be in some way rewarded for your patience and civic conformity, as well as the solidarity of the tut and grumble at those that push in, or who don’t wait their turn (Italians).

Everyone who worked for the DHSS1, the ‘SS’, where I stood in line waiting to sign on, looked like a teacher: stern, detached, disinterested, just clocking their days away, sheepdogs to us queuing sheep. ‘Next’ as good as a bark, the security guard standing ready to nip the unruly. The best thing about them looking like teachers was they created a seamless join between school and unemployment – made you realise you were as loved by the state as a paper clip. I guess it was around this time, facing the back of some fellow unfortunate, that the words in this book began to form, like a grain of sand within an oyster, some small thought that there must be more to life than this – even if it was via the one thing I knew for certain I was crap at.

Once signed on, and with no bank account, your giro would be taken to the post office, and another line. The money counted out by someone else who looked like a teacher, no chit-chat or ‘how are things?’, even though there was no shame in it really, that money given, like medicine, the hope being to keep the patient alive until the world got better. At the post office counter the money would be doled out, meant to last until the lines beckoned again.

Money was put aside for gas, electricity, water and food, and small loans of a pound or two paid back. Rent was taken care of by the fact that no one in the house paid rent, the owner of the flat seemingly disappeared. Drink and drugs would have been a nice distraction in those days, but not on such a tight budget, drugs only really affordable if you started dealing, any profit to be had squandered in a hazy and wasteful distraction. The only real frivolity was going out, pound-shop clubs, where dancing was free and other people’s dregs could easily be drunk. On tiny dance floors with low ceilings, to the beat of Iggy Pop or the Stone Roses, you forgot just who or what you were. Bodies brushed over crunching glass, the drumming moment your own little movie as the strobe bulb pulsed through the choking smoke machine. Life was good in the dark – until the lights came on and you realised where you were, other people’s sweat dripping down on you from the ceiling. Again, that small piece of sand spun deep within, the urge to somehow make a reality which worked with the lights on.

In this underclass of youth poverty – although we did not see it that way, more that we were equal – there also swam the student, who although looking poor and speaking poor always seemed to have money, education and the state’s largesse. They lived on loans, cheap credit and cash from home – always money for drink and drugs and patty and chips or pizza on the way home. I was so ignorant then that I was bedazzled by these students, these sophisticates far from here, unlike anyone I knew, doing degrees in English literature, politics or physics, even though all they ever seemed to do was sleep and drink. And yet I understood they had keys I did not possess, knew so much more about the world and things unknown by me – about real culture, movies, music, history and philosophy. Someone once spoke for twenty minutes about Gulliver’s Travels, how it was a satire on society and state and religion, the inherent corruption of me and how we could be corrupted, which was news to me, as I thought it was a kids’ book. It made me wonder what else I was missing. To sit in front rooms with such people was to hotwire my empty brain to theirs for a little while, a parasite to the current that seemed to flow between them all, not just drink and drugs but also knowledge. Books, films, bands: The Wasp Factory, Taxi Driver, Bongwater. Drop by drop I sucked it up, filled myself in, overwrote my ignorance, an education I had missed. Most of all I could see that these people were only passing through, but also that some around me were not, that thirty years later they would still be signing on. These students though, unlike me, would one day be leaving this place, and not by the abattoir.

Back to the cheese.

A block of cheese cost about a pound in the 1990s and so was a luxury I could not afford. We lived on cheap Happy Shopper white bread (if we were flush) and twenty-five kilos of potatoes, which is a lot of potatoes: fried, boiled, mashed and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.2.2018
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Familie / Erziehung
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseberichte
• Schlagworte: aleks gamme • alex jones • alison osius • Alpinist • Andy Kirkpatrick • Antarctica • bernard newman • boardman tasker • Chamonix • Childhood • CIA • climbing books • climb magazine • coire an t-sneachda • conflict • Depression • dick turnbull • Divorce • Donald Trump • dyslexia • El cap • El Capitan • Everest • frendo spur • gary webb • grand dru • ian parnell • jen randall • karen darke • Katie Ives • last great climb • leo houlding • les drus • Lesueur • mandy kirkpatrick • Manhattan Project • marriage • Mental Health • Mont Blanc • mountaineering books • one show • paul ramsden • petit dru • psychovertical • queen maud land • relationships • Reticent Wall • ricky bell • Rock and Ice • Romsdal • Romsdalen • Scotland • sea of dreams • Second World War • sport relief • sports relief • Suicide • tony whittome • tormod granheim • Trollveggen • Troll Wall • war • winter climbing • World War Two • Writing • ww2 • WWII
• ISBN-10: 1-911342-88-6 / 1911342886
• ISBN-13: 978-1-911342-88-5 / 9781911342885