The Forcan Ridge off Glen Shiel can be a tricky place this time of year. There wasn’t a huge amount of snow, but the rocks in places were encased in ice. Without crampons, an ice axe and a head for what you are doing there are plenty of opportunities to fall to your death, but I didn’t. I bagged my hills, drove back to the holiday cottage where I was staying, had supper and turned in for an earlyish night. The only casualty was my phone which I had sat on while descending a rock, delivering the fatal blow to an already cracked screen. So I emailed my wife from my laptop instead, regretting that there would be no glorious photos today.
Just after midnight the phone started to ring. I fumbled with it but there was no way to answer it. Then it rang again, and again, and again. It didn’t take me long to work out what was going on. My wife hadn’t picked up the email and was frantically ringing me thinking I had gone missing in the hills. If she hadn’t done so already, she was soon going to ring the police. I was officially going to be a missing person – even if I didn’t feel terribly missing.
But how to head off the inevitable helicopter search and the ‘hiker goes missing’ stories? The obvious answer – at least to someone of my generation – was to find a telephone box, but the nearest one marked on my map was a ten-mile drive along a single-track road. Moreover, my map was more than a decade old, and the chances of the phone box still being there were remote.
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