THE MOUNTAINEER

I suppose someone, somewhere, might have two left feet, so this is his/her story

Ogilvy Dancer was a young dare-devil, and nothing like the sort of man his name might suggest. To start with, he had two left feet, which meant he couldn't dance.

And I mean he really did have two left feet. If he stood with his legs together there was no way you could think that one foot mirrored the other. They were both identical left feet.

Which made mountaineering a problem, and he did love the thrill of the idea of mountaineering. One day, he told himself, I'll conquer Everest and then they'll know!

He wasn't quite sure who would do the knowing or exactly what the knowing would be, but he thought it anyway.

How anyone who found walking to be such a difficulty could contemplate mountaineering as a past-time I'll never understand. But walking, especially in straight lines, was something he could barely do even when he concentrated. He tended, when he took his mind off the task in hand, to walk in circles. It's just possible that it crossed his mind that walking up a mountain in a sort of spiral way might be made simpler by the unusual arrangement of his feet even though experts advised him it wasn't so, but being a dare-devil he decided to give it a go.

So he saved up and acquired the equipment, and being handicapped by the possession of two left feet and consequently being obliged to spend long periods in the unemployment queue, it took him quite a long time to accumulate the funds for the all the stuff he'd need. Mountaineering tackle does not come cheap even though the second-hand market is splattered with this and that bit of tackle donated to charity shops by the relatives of failed mountaineers who are either mutilated beyond repair or actually dead.

Eventually Ogilvy got what he needed and stashed it in his shed. It was quite a big shed. It had to be. Mountaineering tackle needs space for the storage.

Then, on a fine spring day, he set off. He would like to have gathered a team about him, mostly so that the carrying of all that equipment could be managed in greater comfort, but any potential mountaineers, when they noted the odd arrangement of his feet, declined the invitation to join him.

So he set off on his own.

His chosen peak for his first foray into the skilled world of mountaineering wasn't so far from his home, and in all honesty wasn't that huge. Most people called it a hill and the road over it could be tackled in fourth gear by even the most modest little car. But climbing it off-road would have presented a challenge to most mortals with normal feet carrying a heavy load of tackle, and was an almost unbelievably impossible target for Ogilvy Dancer and his pedestrian problems.

All started well in that he reached the foot of the … let's not call it a mountain because no-one else did … hill. He established his base camp (in the middle of a corporation playing field, there being a housing estate not far off) and he made his first (and only) attempt at the climb.

His theory, that his feet, both of them being left, might give him some advantage, fell flat on its face when he discovered that they didn't. It was hard work and even though he had left the greater part of his accumulated equipment behind he was exhausted by first nightfall.

He found a shadowed corner in which to sleep, and he tried to erect his one-man tent, but couldn't because, truth to tell, he was exhausted and there was nowhere soft enough for him to hammer his pegs into. So he slept on the ground instead, the hard, knobbly, rocky ground.

That night was far from easy. Sleep, despite his weariness, wouldn't come �" and it started raining.

Now, that rain could have been a gentle washing of moisture from the heavens, but it wasn't. It was a proper downpour and incorporated within its violent heart great chunks of ice.

He got battered and soaked that night, and by dawn he was ready to recalculate his plans, an activity that would require his return to home and his drawing board.

Shivering, with the beginnings of some dire illness percolating every fibre of his being, he managed the return journey home.

“What in the name of goodness...” said a neighbour, horrified by what he beheld “What you been doing, Ogy?” (Ogy was a nick-name that Ogilvy wasn't so fond of.)

“M...m...mountaineering...” shivered our hero in response.

“But you're ill, man!”

“R...r...rain and h..h..hail...” he responded in a tone of voice that suggested that it was no weakness on his part that had sent him back home, but a massive and very personal assault by Mother Nature herself.

“But with two left feet like you've got? Why, man, why?”

And here he came out with the mountaineer's reply, and didn't shiver once as he said “because it's there, man, just because it's there...”