By ’eck, this mother-in-law’s so chilly she can give you frostbite
Yachts are female. so are guitars — B.B. King called his Lucille. the sea is a cruel mistress, and vintage motor enthusiasts talk about ‘taking the old girl out and giving her the beans’.
the only time you take an ‘ old boy’ out and give him beans is lunch with a senile relative.
But before Our Everest Challenge (ItV) it hadn’t occurred to me that mountains were female, too. amateur climber Ben Fogle gazed up at the five-mile-high peak and murmured: ‘ that’s the first time I’ve ever put my eyes on her.’
If Everest is a woman, she’s like Les Dawson’s mother-in-law. For a start, you really don’t want to be on her wrong side: the north face is notoriously dangerous. sunny one moment, she has sudden and alarming mood swings. above all, though once she was a provocative dream for men, now she’s just bloody hard work.
Ben and co-presenter Victoria Pendleton, the Olympic gold medal cyclist, had been in training for two years for the climb. this seemed surprising: Ben’s been ever-present on telly lately, at Longleat every day for animal Park and roaming the world meeting hermits on New Lives In the Wild.
But he was in undoubtedly good shape for the challenge. at 44, an age when many chaps start finding it an effort to walk round the block, Ben was raring for the training circuits across Everest’s perilous ice fields above Base camp.
Victoria was finding it tougher. though she has been a world-class athlete, the thin air affected her badly. crippling headaches left her prostrated. a medic helpfully explained that, at this high altitude, her brain was swelling and trying to escape down her spine.
an emergency helicopter whisked her off the icy scree. all credit to Victoria: she’s not the first young woman to be flattened by the mother-in-law.
Ben pressed on. Nothing was going to stop him, not even the failure of one oxygen mask after another near the summit. at minus 20c (minus 4f), six-inch icicles were dripping off his beard and he wasn’t making a lot of sense.
But it was obvious this climb meant the world to him. he wept as he seized the camera at the mountaintop, urging viewers to follow their dreams and never give up.
then he took out his mobile and phoned his wife. there’s a good signal at the summit, apparently. Behind him, a steady queue of climbers trudged past, like office workers lining up for a plateful of stew at the canteen.
Like Les’s mother-in-law . . . not so romantic now.
the landscape did look spectacular, though, especially the wheeling night skies shot in stop-frame panoramas.
We were spoiled for gorgeous imagery, with the third and final part of Extraordinary Rituals ( BBc2) travelling to India, Greenland, australia and all points in between.
this series has focused on the rites and customs that mark turning points in our lives, but it’s really been an excuse for beautiful photography. the shots of senegalese wrestlers, who perform magic spells before grappling in the sandy arena, had a dreamy, filmic splendour.
the street festival in Rajasthan looked ravishing, too, though it hid an alarming story. Graduate Bhumi had decided to become a Jainist nun, devoting her life to a naked male guru whose disciples begged for a living.
to prove her piety, Bhumi had to have her hair plucked out at the roots, one strand at a time, until she was bald. she wore a glazed, ecstatic expression. that ritual was not so much ‘extraordinary’ as horrific.