Blog

Sport and keeping fit have played a big part in my life.  When I got too old to play football and cricket my interests turned to golf, hillwalking and keeping fit.  Over a 12 year period I climbed all the “Munros”, the 284 mountains in Scotland over 3,000 feet high.  In 2009 my younger daughter Mairi and I decided to do a week’s climbing holiday in the Alps.  The picture above is of us climbing the “Jagihorn” near Saas Grunde in Switzerland.  For our last ascents Mairi climbed the “Matterhorn”, probably the most technically difficult mountain in the Alps.  My knees weren’t flexible enough to cope with that so I climbed “Gran Paradiso”, Italy’s highest mountain.  We reached our respective summits at around the same time, 9am (4am starts in the Alps!) and could each see the other’s mountain although they were too far apart for us to be able to see each other.  The weather was warm and sunny all week and we had a fantastic time, conquering 4 peaks in 5 days, 3 of them over 4,000 metres high.