The stars came together, very briefly. My old borrowed board, twenty plus years old, transported in a friends van five years ago from Cornwall to France. Stored at my parents in law in Montpelier. I have barely surfed in the last 15 years, but a memory lingered. After three years snowboarding off piste my love…
Category: Uncategorized
Targassonne. C’est la vie! You think you have found a benchmark boulder, but in the end it is a mere fiction and the game continues.
Nice conditions at Targassonne, happy day climbing Phantom Lord, 8A. It’s a bit of a weird boulder, with a chasm opening out at the base of the boulder. There is a bit of a feeling that things could go wrong and you could miss the mats and the wooden platform! I tried it three years…
River boulder, Laramade
Leaves are falling, autumn has arrived. Three or four years ago I found a really good boulder in the Vicdessos valley, near the popular and developed area of Laramade. I was very surprised no one had found it before, being about 45 degree overhanging some evidence of cleaning or chalk would have been visible, but…
sport or art
In 2015 I finished a Phd THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTING THE ‘BOULDERING’ EXPERIENCE AS IT EXCEEDS CONVENTIONAL FORMS OF REPRESENTATION in which I hope I argued relatively successfully that bouldering was in fact an art form. Since that time things have inevitably changed. Currently there are people practising bouldering as an art form consciously and…
Olympics
Climbing, skateboarding and surfing are this year all included in the Olympics. I can’t say this fact particularly excites me. In fact I felt distinctly underwhelmed. So I had a chat this morning with my boyhood self and asked him what he thought. He said he started skateboarding in the late 1970’s. At this time…
Aude, Ariege border
Lovely views, tired legs, flies, snakes. I think I prefer it in the winter.
hair
First haircut
squint
I look hard into the wind driven snow, a grey white depthless landscape. On the same day I look inside my Dad’s old glove, I couldn’t see much in there either.
andywhall.com 