Climb every mountain
MADELEINE FERRAR wants to join in the fetish for ticking off achievements – but on a gentle scale
I WAS struck the other day by the story of 66-year-old Mags Thomson from Livingston, who has set herself the task of visiting every Wetherspoon in the country. She’s been at it for more than twenty years and has got to about 900, but still has some way to go. Wetherspoon’s, in recognition of Mags’s endeavour, has provided her with a directory with a tick box beside each entry. Now I’m a big fan of Wetherspoon’s, with its all-day breakfasts and 99p mugs of coffee with free refills, but struggle to understand the attraction. I can’t help thinking of the old adage ‘When you’ve seen one…’ But that would be missing the point. This isn’t really about Wetherspoon’s at all: it’s about the challenge. Seen it, done it and – this is the most important bit – ticked the box.
Perhaps we’ve all got too much free time on our hands because it strikes me that this kind of thing is on the increase. When it comes to personal challenges, though, Mags would be outclassed by a particularly enthusiastic – or fanatical – group of people: the hill-baggers. Most people have heard of Munro-bagging, a Munro being a hill above 3,000ft. There are 282 Munros, the majority of them in the Highlands of Scotland. When you’ve done the Munros, you can do them again (and I’ve met people who have climbed them two, three, even four times), or you can move on to the Corbetts, hills between 2,500ft and 3,000ft. Then there are the Grahams and the Donalds, hills above 2,000ft, not to mention the Wainwrights in the Lake District.
When you’ve done all the above, you can start on the Marilyns. A Marilyn is a hill at least 150m (about 500ft) higher than anything else around it. Absolute height doesn’t come into it, so that Ben Nevis is a Marilyn (and a Munro, of course), as is Leith Hill in Surrey. It was Alan Dawson, in his Relative Hills of Britain (Cicerone Press, 1992), who introduced us to Marilyns, and gave hill- walkers a whole new list of hills to climb – a whopping 1,556 in all.
Only a handful of people have actually climbed all the Marilyns, partly because two of them are sea stacks in the St Kilda archipelago and therefore pretty inaccessible. It turns out that the first man to complete them, Rob Woodall, is the archetypal hill-bagger who did, indeed, start on the Marilyns when he had completed all the other lists. In an interview last year he was asked the inevitable question: ‘What next?’ He replied – and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by this – ‘Trig points’. Apparently, there are 6,500 of them – the bad news, in some ways, being that Rob has bagged nearly all of them all already.
I have decided that my life is lacking in purpose. Like Mags and Rob, I need a challenge, something to give my life more meaning. Most of all, I want an inventory with tick boxes running down the side so that I can complete my very own list of something before I die. Being less ambitious than Mags, and nowhere near as fit as Rob, I’m thinking of setting myself the task of visiting every Wimpy Bar in the UK. Yes, there are some left, about ninety in all. The majority are in run-down seaside resorts on the south coast, but no matter. It’s not supposed to be fun.