Travelling up to Scotland in February, I nurtured the secret hope of sneaking away to the hills and enjoying authentic Scottish winter conditions. I was out of luck. Mild weather had melted much of the snow on the tops and what was left in the gullies was hopelessly soggy. "If only you'd been up a couple of weeks ago!" I felt like murder. "Never mind. We'll go for a walk", I suggested with exaggerated cheerfulness. Phil and I left Callander early and met Nigel and Roger at Tyndrum about half-past-eight. The cloud was low with intermittent drizzle. Central gully on Ben Lui, our original objective, was clearly off. Nigel, speaking in his capacity as an "outed" Munroist, came in with a strong pitch for Béinn Achaladair. He pronounced it Achaladare, by analogy, presumably, with "Where Eagles Dare". Despite local guru Phil's delicate promptings of Achàllader, Nigel persisted unperturbed with his sassenach pronounciation. Oh God, the humiliation!

We parked the cars by the wildly romantic ruined tower at Achallader farm, got geared up and set off, following a helpful sign indicating "To the Hill"! Ten yards further on we stopped to get our bearings. There was a map-board which recommended the path by the Water of Tulla, while stating unequivocally that it was forbidden to walk on the railway-line. Phil, familiar as he was with the area, confirmed that the waterside track was a particularly agreeable and pleasant saunter. Nigel would have none of it. The railway was shorter, the railway it had to be. He cut short the last murmurings of debate by accusing me of betraying my anti-authoritarian principles. We caved in, plodded up to the top of the embankment and scrambled down onto the track. Is it deliberate? Perhaps not, but the fact remains that railways sleepers are cunningly placed at a distance from each other such as to make simple walking a near-excruciating experience. It gives some idea of what it must be like to be a Chinese woman with bound feet. Walking on the ballast was equally uneven and laborious. At times it was possible to follow a slight path alongside the track, but this required awkward lurches up mini-embankments, upsetting both to equilibrium and equanimity. Still, at least it had stopped raining. We blundered on towards the constantly receding vanishing point until we met with the path crossing over the track and leading up into Crannach wood. The path wound its way in and out of heather hillocks and scots pines, largely following the railway track, but infinitely more pleasant. There is something very special about these remnants of the Caledonian forest which, it is claimed, once covered the whole of the Scottish Highlands. There are those that argue that it should be encouraged to grow back. Phil disagreed. "It would take away their uniqueness". Possibly, but there's still an awful lot of Scotland which is just bare hills!

Reaching the end of the wood, we headed south-east and started up the long steady pull to the top of the first summit of Beinn a Chreachan. There was just sufficient hint of sunshine above the cloud-cover to give some limited grounds for optimism, but, for the time being at least, we pushed unrelentingly up the slope through enveloping mist. Phil and I somehow got separated from Nigel and Roger, but there was little real cause for concern and, sure enough, we bumped into them again as we converged on the gradually narrowing ridge. More unimaginative plodding finally brought us to the first top at 894 meters. Still in the mist, we sat down and got out our sandwiches. Having each prepared our own, they revealed themselves to be a motley collection. This generated an ill-informed, but nevertheless wide-ranging discussion of the relative merits of various food groups. Roger seemed somehow to have acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. The near boundless, yet hopelessly cryptic information on the packaging of my own "Freerange Egg and Cress", looted from the previous day's train hamper, provided a surprisingly rich point of departure. Having first exhausted the much-vexed question as to whether the "freerange" qualified the "cress" as well as the "egg", we then drifted onto the subject of quick as against slow release sugars. Roger trumped my sandwich with his very own oatmeal and honey elaboration which, he claimed with unrebuttable confidence, matched all relevant release criteria. Routed, I suggested we press on quickly before my blood-glucose was exhausted. We headed south towards top 961 and then, in a more south-westerly direction, towards the highest top at 1081. The last part leading up to the summit narrowed to quite an impressive snow ridge. With a sugar issue to prove, I found myself in the lead, and without an ice-axe or even a Leki stick to steady me, I suddenly became very conscious of the mountain falling away steeply to both right and left. It would have taken quite some falling off, but I have never been indifferent to exposure. We did not linger long on the top but continued on round in the direction of Beinn Achaladair proper. We were very pleased with ourselves when our mist-navigation brought us out exactly onto the intermediate Meall Buidhe at 978. We carried on easily to point 813. Our progress was slowed by the steeper climb to the mountain's first top at 1036, but after a short rest, we followed the ridge to the slightly higher summit proper and swept on from there. We had been in mist throughout but had enjoyed our own freedom of movement and that intimate feeling for the mountain which mist-walking evokes.

It was Nigel who spotted it first. As we arrived at the third, southernmost top, there was a sudden beam of sunshine coming out of the west. "Look, Glories!" he called out. And turning, we saw our shadows projected onto the mist, with each of us seeing the head of his own shadow, and his own shadow alone, framed by a halo of refracted light. It was an amazing, if unrealistically flattering sight. A portent of some immanent Pentecostal gift perhaps? But we were not worthy and the effect passed. Still, a full Brocken Spectre with Glory, was a miraculous though unsought reward for a day spent prosaically ploughing through cloud. As the visibility improved, we hurried down the mountain in order to be able to return to the car before nightfall. Down Coire Daingean and then on down Coire Achaladair, from where, looking back, we could see up into the impressive northern corrie of Beinn an Dothaidh and its enticing snow gullies. Some other time, perhaps. In fact, returning the following weekend in better conditions, Phil was able to climb the West Gully with his fiancée, our daughter, Victoria.

Roger had to leave us that evening to drive back to Lancashire. Phil had some work of his own to do, so Nigel and I would be left to our own devices for the following day.

-A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen

Jari passed this on to me with an arch and knowing look! The title is more than a little "nudge-nudge", but I suppose even philosophers need a marketing strategy. To be perfectly honest, I don't really like "philosophy". As currently practised it seems to have precious little to do with any genuine love of wisdom. Philosophical argument always sounds to me like a too-clever 6th-former trying to talk away the embarrassing reality of the elephant in the room. The elephant is the tremendous, terrifying, naked reality of existence itself, which is per se beyond the comprehension of mere discursive reasoning. To protect his sense of self-importance from the horrendous implications of the infinite void of space, our schoolboy sage arms himself with vocabulary. Like a horror-movie spider he spins a web of mind-numbing verbal complexity around the elephant until it is entirely immobilised in a silken shroud, utterly at the mercy of our arachnoid-penseur. The life-blood is then slowly but steadily sucked out of reality. The dried and shrunken carcass is then fought over by an army of fellow-spiders, who, unable to extract any real nourishment from the dessicated remains, nevertheless continue spinning in order to enhance their personal status through attempting to weave the most pointlessly ingenious web.

Having said that, "A Philosophy of Boredom" remains just about readable, although there are enough "ontologicals", "epistemologicals" and "hermeneutics" to cause me to release the safety-catch on my critical pistol. Thanks to Pierre Bayard (see previous entry), I have lost all shame and turned directly to the end to see what conclusion the philosopher was able to reach:

Boredom has to be accepted as an unavoidable fact, as life's own gravity. This is no grand solution, for the problem of boredom has none.

Well, thanks. If I were Jari, I'd ask for my money back!

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, "The Problem of Boredom", basically says that there are two sorts of boredom: 1. Temporary boredom, when something interesting will come along later, and 2. Existential boredom, which is essentially a sort of depression resulting from a failure of meaning. This second type is increasingly prevalent in the modern world. Part Two is "Stories of Boredom", historical examples of boredom. An interesting section here on Andy Warhol who affected to embrace meaninglessness and boredom as an aesthetic stance. Part Four, "The Ethics of Boredom", basically says that that's the way it is and we have to learn to put up with it. Part Three, "The Phenomenology of Boredom", is the most interesting. Svendsen explores (and high-handedly rejects) Heidegger's contention that (I summarize) existential boredom is a precursor of a transcendental epiphany. I can go through boredom and come out the other side, in other words. A bit like Kirkegaard's "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope" (see earlier entry). If I were truly able to experience and acknowledge my inner emptiness, I would have in me a space which could be filled with a sense of reality. As it is, I am never sufficiently bored with the dreams and pretensions which bolster my ordinary imagination of myself to be able to leave a space for something greater, something unknown. But the elephant is always in the room. Do we dare embrace it?