Life and times

The writer on donating blood, book-festival bruises, and fell running without a sense of direction

Writer Rose George

I AM SQUEAMISH. I still shut my good eye when scary films come on. I don’t like horror. A Tarantino film would have me watching one-eyed throughout. I don’t like to see blood spilled in violence. But otherwise: I love it.

I can think of nothing more soothing than lying in a plastic donating chair and watching about 480ml of my blood, just under a pint, flow into a clear plastic bag at my side. I love to give blood, but my records at NHSBT – National Health Service Blood and Transplant – show that I have done only eight donations. (‘Only’ because the man in the donating chair next to me last week was giving his 100th donation, aged 81.)

For decades, I travelled too frequently to places that disqualified me for months or years. I stayed in the lands of malaria or West Nile, and so my blood was not wanted. Now that I can usually give, I never watch the TV that is always playing at my local blood centre. I like to watch my blood, and think about how something so extraordinary has come to be seen as ordinary. Here I am, giving a part of my own body for nothing, to someone I will never meet. And in return, I’ll get gratitude, a text telling me in which hospital my blood has ended up, and at least one Club mint biscuit and a cup of tea. Which seems a fair bargain.

I LOVE BOOK FESTIVALS. At various festivals, I have been danced off my feet by a BBC war correspondent; walked down pitch-black lanes with an expert in spook security; gone early-morning running with a poet; watched monkeys with a sketch writer; and made firm friends.

One of my favourites is in Wigtown, a place reached by heading for Dumfries and then for the sea. Galloway is a beautiful place, and Wigtown is wonderful: it is now Scotland’s book town, and has more than a dozen second-hand bookshops, and a thriving books festival which this year had 29,000 visitors, the most ever. It is the only festival I go to where I can listen to the Bookshop Band – they sing in bookshops about books; what is not to like? – sing melodically about Thomas Cromwell before breakfast, and from where I can easily return with bruises (from the festival ceilidh); sore toes (from running up the stunning Galloway hills); and sand in my socks (from swimming in the sea as the sun sets on a September afternoon).

I AM A FELL RUNNER, which translates in Scotland, prosaically, as ‘hill runner’, and anywhere else as ‘well, it’s not trail running’. In a fell race, I may be on a trail, but I may be on a sheep trod, or open moorland, or fighting my way through chest-high bracken, or up to my nethers in a bog, or scrambling pell-mell down scree. The route may be marked, or it may not, and you have to get yourself from one checkpoint to the next. I don’t have a good topographical memory: my partner, also known as Human Satnav, can run a route and afterwards say things like, ‘But don’t you remember the enormous conifer forest, north-north-west after the third kissing gate?’ I won’t even have noticed the conifer forest.

I love autumn, but it is also a testing season for me on the hills, when even routes I know can be obscured by clag, and I won’t know about the clag until I get to the hill and look upwards. I’m running a big race in November – 17 miles up, down and around Pendle Hill. I’ve run the route in a blizzard and not got lost, but I have got lost in a heavily touristed dell at Hardcastle Crags and on an out-and-back race. Anything is possible. Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood (Portobello Books, £14.99) is out now

I have got lost in a heavily touristed dell and on an out-andback race. Anything is possible