Archive: February 2020

For all my latest news follow me on Twitter @redszell

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***Shared Vision coming to London and Salt Lake City***

Following a sold-out world premiere screening at The Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in Canada last November*, Shared Vision* is heading to London and Salt Lake City!

The 22-minute film was made by award-winning adventure cameraman Keith Partridge and documents my 2019 expedition to climb Am Buachaille, one of Britain’s most remote pinnacles, and so complete my quest to become the first blind climber to summit all of ‘The Tom Patey Three’ big Scottish sea-stacks.

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Saturday 7th March
The London Climbing Festival
HarroWall
Units 2a / 3a Neptune Trading Estate
Neptune Rd, Harrow HA1 4HX

The UK’s Largest bouldering climbing centre is hosting the first ever London Climbing Festival, where I’m delighted to be presenting a screening of Shared Vision followed by a Q&A hosted by top climbing instructor Louis Parkinson of Catalyst Climbing who has played a key role in improving my technique.

Doors open 10am
Film screening 3pm – 4pm
For more information, click here: https://www.harrowall.co.uk/2020/01/09/1060/

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Thursday 12th March
Arc’teryx
212 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HJ
7,30pm – 9pm

Arc’teryx’s flagship UK store will host a special screening of Shared Vision, followed by a Q&A with top British climbing instructor Louis Parkinson, after which there will be a raffle in aid of RNIB to win an Arc’teryx Nuclei FL jacket.

Admission is free but please RSVP to: https://community-events.arcteryx.com/sharedvision-filmscreening

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Wednesday 1st April
Wasatch Film Festival
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

3pm – 5pm: matinee screening for festival finalists. Click here for more details: https://wasatchfilmfestival.org

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Watch the Shared Vision trailer here:

I am very grateful to my sponsors for sharing my vision and helping to show that blindness should be no barrier to adventure:

• San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind who gave me the wherewithal to follow the example of James Holman ‘The Blind Traveller’.
• Arc’teryx, Above|Below, The Castle Climbing Centre, and VauxWall, who all made sure we had the best equipment and training for a successful expedition.
• Isokinetic Sports Injury Clinic, who ensured my full recovery when I got injured.

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Radio News – Latest

Read On is The Audiobook Show on RNIB Connect Radio. Hosted by me, it’s a blend of book news, reviews and author interviews.

Recorded at The RNIB Talking Books Studio in London, recent highlights include interviews with all the authors short-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize, a show recorded live at The Wigtown Book Festival featuring Natalie Haynes, Alan Johnson, Lord Bird, and Prof. Steve Jones, exclusive interviews with Lee Child, Joanne Ramos and Dame Stella Rimington, and so much more!

Download the podcast free from your favourite provider – simply search for ‘Read On: The Audiobook Show’ or follow the link: https://audioboom.com/channel/readonair

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I am also a regular contributor to Radio 4, most recently for Annalisa is Awkward, as well as frequent appearances on In Touch both as a talking head on round table discussions and with my ‘Seeing Red’ point of view pieces on life as a blind person.

To access all the features I have recorded for In Touch, including why Aussie cricketer Shane Warne made me see red and my feature about giving back a guide dog that was included in Radio 4’s Pick of the Year 2017, click here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?filter=programmes&q=red+szell

In 1967, British psychedelic rock band Tomorrow released their debut single My White Bicycle – a song I really must ask Hampstead rock legends Mad Dog Bites to perform at the next Gayton Road street party.

The song was inspired by a bike-share scheme organised in Amsterdam by the Dutch anarchist group Provo. In the summer of 1965 they painted 50 bicycles white and left them in various places round the town for anyone to borrow, use, and then leave wherever their journey finished.

The scheme was less successful than the single it spawned – within a month all the bicycles had disappeared – most of them to the bottom of Amsterdam’s many canals. Others were impounded by the police, for causing an obstruction.

Fifty-four years on there is a range of colours to choose from when signing up for a bike share scheme. And GPS tracking systems discourage punters from slinging their 2-wheeled steed into the nearest body of water when they’ve completed their journey. But while the technology may have got smarter, people haven’t.

Consequently, as if pedestrians weren’t facing enough obstacles already what with wheelie bins, sandwich boards, pavement cafes, free newspaper bins, parking signposts and dog shit, we now have the additional hazard of abandoned bikes to negotiate.

They may be painted in jolly candy colours but these lumps of pig iron are anything but soft centred.  They are angular ankle biters with unyielding heft when you trip over them.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m all in favour of pedal power. I am the proud owner of a mountain bike tandem (affectionately known as The Beast) that transported me and my climbing partner through The Highlands on my latest sea-stack adventure this summer. And I am all for any scheme that encourages people out of their cars and helps drive cars out of London. But…do it thoughtfully and responsibly.

It beggars belief that people who claim to espouse environmentally friendly policies and responsible living are so happy to dump the eco-bike they’ve just used, so carelessly. It’s like dropping litter in the street.

I’ve tripped over bikes left in the middle of the pavement (including one abandoned outside RNIB headquarters in Judd Street), propped up by trees, and resting against lamp-posts. I’ve even nearly been decapitated by a pedal dangling down from a bike wedged on top of a CA-H parking post!

The instructions to users of the bike-share apps are clear:

‘Park your bike responsibly and out of the way of pedestrians, cars and accessibility ramps. This means leaving your bike to the side of a wide pavement, where it won’t be in the way. Always park upright.

However these are listed as ‘guidelines’ and, in the case of the scheme run by those paragons of social responsibility Uber, couched in words like ‘should’.  They are not legally enforceable and so, people being solipsistic, selfish or too busy, just ignore them.

And lest you think that this is merely an issue for blind people, then ponder how you would negotiate a bike lying across a narrow Hampstead pavement if you were in a wheelchair – as witnessed a couple of weeks ago in Well Walk.  Only the prompt intervention of a builder and a dog-walker prevented the middle-aged lady concerned toppling sideways from the kerb and into the road as she attempted to manoeuvre around its heavy frame having tried unsuccessfully to budge it by hand and footplate. I wonder how Jump would have dealt with that personal injury claim?!

Other cities require bike-share firms to operate a docking system whereby you have to return the bike to a rack. These of course are invariably on pavements – if the aim is to get cars off the road why not co-opt a parking space? After all bikes, like motorbikes are vehicles and so belong on the road. But at least a docking bay corrals bikes at the kerb-side and stops them creeping into the path of pedestrians.

In July Hackney Council suspended dock-less bike parking throughout the borough while it seeks a deal with a provider who can stop bikes being dumped on pavements. It’s time Camden did the same…it could start a chain reaction.

Al Alvarez, writer, poet, critic and self-confessed adrenaline junkie: born 5th August 1929; died 23rd September 2019.

Only one book has moved me to tears on its first page – The Savage God by Al Alvarez, who has died aged 90.

A frank, insightful study of suicide it was typical of Al’s approach to life and literature in its uncompromising determination to explore the aspects that genteel folk shy away from. With his boxer’s nose and his high brow Al was a pugnacious intellectual who felt and thought about his existence deeply, particularly when the stakes were at their highest.

Born in Hampstead in 1929 into a well-established Jewish family, he attended school at The Hall and then Oundle. However he never felt part of the establishment: “I am a Londoner, heart and soul, not an Englishman.”

As a child he underwent a series of operations and had to wear a lead boot to correct a deformed ankle. His response to this set the pattern for his life: “I was a fragile child,” he recalled, “so I made a point of ceasing to be one. I took up mountain-climbing, rugby and boxing.” He broke his nose boxing and, in a cruel twist of fate, would eventually shatter his other ankle climbing.

At Oundle he excelled both on the sports-field and academically, but narrowly escaped expulsion for breaking all the rules, and in 1949 went up to Oxford as a scholar, to read English.  There the “not quite English” Al Alvarez rebelled even harder. He founded the Critical Society, whose manifesto opened: “In Oxford current literary criticism is both vague and ineffective.”

He disdained its lack of intellectual rigour and “high-table chat” so, despite gaining a First, rejected life as an academic to pursue life in the raw.

As a literary critic he did more to shake-up and re-mould the study of English than anyone of his generation. A fine poet himself, he was the poetry editor of The Observer for a decade between 1956 – 66.  There he lambasted the cosy “gentility principle” of leading British poets like John Betjeman and Philip Larkin, championing instead the emotional authenticity of confessional poets including Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.  He distilled his attack in his polemic introduction to 1962’s anthology The New Poetry. It was a self-confessed “fuck them” to the “London old boy’s circuit” and earned him a lot of enemies. But The New Poetry was also a hugely influential bestseller and went on to become a standard text at schools and universities.

Al expanded on his doctrine, that critical intelligence is forged in the white heat of extreme personal experience, in a series of books of what he called “fully existential criticism” that began with the publication of “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” in 1971. The book ends with a meditation on his own aborted and Sylvia Plath’s successful attempts at taking their lives.  They were close friends, both struggling to cope with marriage breakdowns, and Al not only did much to establish her reputation as a poet but was one of the last people to see Plath alive.

Other books in the “fully existential” genre followed, including Life After Marriage (1982) about divorce – which includes the memorable line “divorce transforms habit into drama”; The Biggest Game in Town (1983), about poker, a lifelong passion of his -“I don’t gamble, I play cards (and) I never bet on anything I can’t shuffle”: and Feeding The Rat (1988), quite possibly the greatest book ever written about climbing and the gnawing compulsion at the heart of it.

Al was a legend at Harrison’s Rocks, the crag in Kent where many of Britain’s best climbers cut their teeth, not least for relishing the falls he took. To me and other young climbers there, this seemed counter-intuitive, until you understood his rationale, at which point it all made sense and spurred us on to new heights:

“To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.” After all “when there is no peril in the fight, there is no glory in the triumph.”

Although he could no longer climb after shattering his ankle aged 63, he found some of the same frisson and much the same camaraderie in swimming year-round in the ponds on Hampstead Heath.  It also provided relief from the pain in his ankles and his final book Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal (2013), is a poignant meditation on the rigours of ageing.

Al and his beloved second wife Anne married in 1966 and made their home in Flask Walk where they spent many happy years raising their family and entertaining their many friends, including Mike King, Alfred Brendel and John Le Carre – who described Al as “an impassioned husband and a family man.”

At Al’s funeral, at Christchurch on October 5th, he and other friends, neighbours and his two surviving children, Luke and Kate, celebrated time spent sharing Al’s passion for living. They described epic climbing adventures, poker nights, Al’s lifelong love of poetry and music, unforgettable dinner parties and Al’s incorrigibly inventive use of the F word. I doubt I was the only one who left, to the strains of Ella and Louis singing They Can’t Take That Away From Me, imagining I could hear Al’s throaty chuckle.

His 1999 autobiography is titled Where Did It All Go Right? I would answer that it was in the insights he shared through his writing after he got back from the edge.