Back to the future

We are still struggling with gremlins that have infected the camera and when I was out first thing the paratroop sheep had broken out of Goatanamo establishing a bridgehead on the instant rockery (45 ton of rock fell off the cliff, a week with a jackhammer, instant rockery) and they watched with disinterest as yours truly attempted to capture their image. They might have some special jamming radar, unlikely, but the camera refused to focus or take pics without over exposing it. The clearest image is this one, the sheep are the white blobs. The camera is about to be consigned to recycling, as soon as funds are available to replace it.

Better luck with the shitlands who were frozen to the spot, the white on their coats is ice, they rushed the patio doors and had to be fended off with a dog bowl to prevent an incursion into the kitchen where they would no doubt have ransacked the fruit bowl and decorated the floor. Again.

One of the joys of living here is sharing. The blog gets 20,000 visitors a month, give or take a dozen or so, and from time to time we get visitors who have found us through the website. People who used to live here have found us, filling in gaps of the history of the place, sending us pictures and stories. Christmas brought a card from an old friend from way back with a phone number. Today said old friend, John, visited us here and took short a trip around and over Bonsai Mountain and a very long trip down memory lane. Tales were swapped of old climbing adventures, it was he who first persuaded me to go mountain walking after a long break, photos were looked at of our first trip into the wilderness, our over optimism when planning our first trip to Snowdonia, when there and back swiftly changed to just get there over two days, ice climbs remembered, extremes of weather while lost on mountains, who would we eat first, our friend Miereg or the jack russell, old friends were spoken of, army tales were laughed at, gaps in our lives filled in and the past years reviewed. Both of us are happier, older, one of us is fatter, but what remained the same was the way we were, it was like we had met last week, not a gap of six years or so and suddenly we were back to the future. He left with a few products, mainly pork based gifts and a promise to join us on the Big Black Mountain Challenge.