Marhofn 316.18 - May 2016

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The generation game:

Rowland Bowker

My first Marilyn was Great Orme in 1937.

My real interest was in travel. My father read only travel books. 'Tonight, I am going to China', he would say. He did no travelling at all as he ran a poultry farm, which was a seven-day-a-week job, so he travelled nowhere. In 1938, as a birthday present, he gave me a world atlas. This inspired me to collect countries. The Traveller's Century Club of California lists 317 countries in the world, of which I have visited 225. This is a rather generous list. For example, it lists Britain as seven countries.

I met Ann in June 1964 on a Ramblers holiday in Glen Coe, when she agreed to leave the party to ascend Bidean nam Bian with me by a more exciting route. I decided she was worth pursuing. From then onwards collecting countries had to be combined with climbing mountains. We have reached the highest point of about fifty countries, including Mount Ararat in Turkey, Qurnat as Sawda in Lebanon, Ponta do Pico in the Azores (the highest in Portugal), and Mount Catherine, the highest in Egypt. Many of these are now difficult to access. We failed on Jebel Toubkal one April when it was too icy.

In June 1992 I climbed Baosbheinn with Ann. My first words on reaching the summit were 'I have never been here before', so it became my last Corbett. Next day it rained and we visited Inverewe Gardens where we bought the RHB book. This took us to climbing Marilyns and a wonderful new era. I had sunk low. I had been collecting waterfalls.

At home, I found I had done over 600 Marilyns. Next date 1000, March 1995. Next 1500, July 1998. I really intended to stop at 1500. St Kilda was good. I would like to regard Conachair as my last Marilyn, on 6 May 2003. Enthusiasm has waned now but the Marilyns were great fun, especially when we were racing to keep ahead of Tony Payne.

Eventually I persuaded myself to reach 2500 Humps, which I did on Hoo Kame on Shetland, my last Hump, on 30 April 2011.

The strangest thing that happened to me in my current job, where I work for the United Nations, was the time I was asked to get Kofi Annan a gram of cocaine. I picked up the phone. 'Kofi', I said, 'right now the only one I can think of is oceanic'.

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