High Life | 12 September 2009

Gstaad

From my desk facing the garden I look out on a vista of wooded green hills with an unblemished blue background. Far beyond, the mountains are grey and white-capped on top. The sun is blazing, the cows are grazing, and I have to leave this paradise for karate and judo training in the Bagel. Plus I have a broken fourth finger on each hand, as if turning 73 wasn’t enough. But I’ve been mountain climbing, and I’m in good shape despite the boozing. The Ionian had purple hills and beautiful seas but this outstrips them all. There is nothing like mountain scenery when there’s an orgy of nature bursting all around. (Or any other kind of orgy, for that matter.)

Ruskin was raving a bit when he accused climbers of having ‘made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth, the Alps’. What bothered him even more were those who treated the mountains as ‘soaped poles which you set yourselves to climb and slide down with shrieks of delight’. I suppose Ruskin was lucky not to see what later generations have done to the Alps. At least climbers did not deface the mountains with ski lifts and gondolas, but made their way to the top step by step, sweating and groaning all the way. As with conquering a woman, it was eventually well worth it — or not, as the case may be. A little, or lots, of resistance, never hurt nobody, as they used to say in old Zermatt — or was it Brooklyn? Ruskin described climbers as ‘red with cutaneous eruption of conceit and voluble with convulsive hiccoughs of self-satisfaction’. Trollope, too, wasn’t a fan. Ditto Dickens. The latter scorned them for climbing the Matterhorn and the Eiger instead of concentrating on ‘bestriding the weathercocks of all the cathedrals of the United Kingdom’.