A Proper Introduction

So, as a first post I suppose I should explain what this is all about. I'm James, and I'm a student in London about to enter the second decade of his life. In the bare basics this is a simple blog that follows me whilst I make a bit of a tit of myself learning the finer points of mountaineering. It's slow, it's not necessarily fascinating and I can tend to get bogged down in annoying little details.

Still here? Well, your choice I suppose. Let me explain further:

I've always had a hankering for the outdoors; before I was six months old my parents were taking me on walking holidays to Brecon or Dorset or any number of middle-of-nowhere locations and lugging me around whilst they 'enjoyed what was left of their youth' as they put it now. It seems that being carried on an old steel army rucksack frame, lolling about not quite comprehending my surroundings (apart from a healthy dose of fresh air and rain) triggered something inside me that left me enthralled with climbing mountains. I'm not a huge walker; give me a patch of flat ground to walk across and I'll be bored stiff, and I'll let you know about it. But give me a challenge; a mountain, an arduous route, difficult conditions and I'll lap it up and ask for more. I've climbed Pen y Fan, completed the Fan Dance challenge, trekked across Dartmoor and even spent a week hiking in the jungles of Brunei. However there is one itch I've never been able to scratch: I've never climbed a proper, snowcapped mountain. I've dreamed about it, read books and magazines, watched films and read blogs, but the opportunity to do an alpine ascent myself has never presented itself. There's only so much that the British Isles can offer you in the way of true mountaineering and whilst I haven't ever climbed anything in Scotland, it's still not the Matterhorn.

Fast forward to October 2012 and I start work (whilst still a student) at Blacks Outdoors and meet my boss, Charlie. Through conversations we discovered we both shared a burning desire to be up mountains, but where I had only dreamed of it, Charlie had been there and done it, had the expreience and the knowledge and was willing to share it. Slowly an idea formed in my mind, and just before the start of 2013 I approached him with the aim of going to the Alps in the summer and making my first mountain ascent. He agreed, and here we are today, starting out on our training. It should be fun, so stick around.

I might even make a tit out of myself. I'll let you watch.