Red Yeti's Blog

I hope I’ve managed to contact everyone who knew him personally and that this posting isn’t the first you hear of this.

Loz was involved in a fatal motor bike accident on Monday morning.

I just can’t believe he’s gone. It hurts like hell.

Although I’d done some bimbling about in the hills before I met Loz it was him that got me hooked on climbing and from there, more general mountaineering and hiking.

We met in the first year of the Computer Science course at COGS at Sussex University in 1997. We quickly became good friends despite the ten year age gap (I went late).

He told me again and again during the first year about the fun to be had in the University Of Sussex Mountaineering Club. Eventually he persuaded me that climbing was worth a try, despite my fear of heights, and I was hooked.By the third year I was club President and Loz was Gear and Safety Officer. It was a good year for membership, the USMC was the third biggest club affiliated to the BMC.

I learned so many things from him. I can still find my torch every time, in the corner of the tent, from the tip he gave me once. I still wake up with very little condensation on the foot end of the sleeping bag just because of the extra insulation that the waterproof jacket under my feet provides.

I also learned so much about how to look after people in the hills. We led many, many groups of students, young and not so young, in all kinds of conditions in all kinds of terrain. He had such a knack of knowing how everyone was doing. If anyone was flagging he’d see it. If someone was cold he’d notice first. And so often he could sort them out with nothing more than his infectious, endless enthusiasm. Just getting them moving faster raised their spirits and warmed them up.

He could be wise and pragmatic and then switch to boisterous and enthusiastic. Whatever the moment called for. More often than not, whatever someone else needed at the time. Even if it wasn’t what he needed himself.Of all the people I know, he would be the best at coping with something like this.

We were planning next year’s trips already. Starting to block-out weekends away and dates for longer trips. He’s been travelling around the world for a year and only returned in early November so we had much walking to catch up on.

I’ll miss so many things. The phone call to open a bottle of red as he approaches Brighton for a surprise visit. The big silly grin and head-bob as we slog up something steep. The phone call to run a cunning plan past me. His blunt and vocal intolerance of arrogance or aggression no matter where or from whom. The exchanged grins and shout of “Out in the cack again eh?” that’s almost taken by the wind and rain as we push up something steep in a hooley.

He was known as “Loz The Aquatic Mammal”, always drawn to water. Almost everyone that walked with him has a story of him jumping in some freezing-cold body of water, even with snow on the ground, for no reason other than the fun of it, and walking himself dry during the rest of the day. He radiated heat, often slept with his feet out of the covers. We could always tell whose half finished pint of Guinness was whose, mine was stone cold whilst his was like a cup of tea.

I’ll never forget waking up to the smell of bacon and eggs cooking on an MSR a couple of feet from my head, with Loz still in his sleeping bag, propped up on one elbow. Or the way he gutted up a balancey, sixty foot gritstone climb later the same day that could only be protected with Friends, that we didn’t actually have in our rack. Simply seconding that one and trying to imagine what it was like leading it and finding absolutely no pro’ was hair-raising to say the least.

Dan S found a something he wrote in the USMC Black Book around the year 2000: “A degree only gets you started, but the friends I have made I hope to keep forever“.We hoped to keep you forever too Loz.

Without you I wouldn’t have been helping out at a USMC climbing-wall trip and would never have met LB. For that I owe you most of all.

We miss you Loz. Always will.

I can’t believe that I’m writing this, but Joe H died a few days ago.

He had a very rare and apparently essentially incurable form of cancer that he fought with incredible humour and blogged with characteristic wit for around three months. As I said to him a couple of weeks before he died, I can only hope to write half as well as he did.

Even though I knew it was a possibility, it doesn’t feel like it hurts less for the forewarning.

Joe, along with Loz, Steph, Bob and Gray was one of the original 10 Trinity Street “household” from the second year of our degree course. The final Trinity Street party in 2007, nine years later, Joe attended “virtually” via a colour print-out of himself drinking a beer whilst he actually drank in Paris where he’d moved a few months earlier with Emilie.

He was a good friend from very early days in the first year at COGS at Sussex University. One morning he returned to lectures after a weekend at home seeing old friends and family and had that doubt that so many people starting university have; whether he should have come to university, leaving all his old friends behind at home.

But as it happens, I was asking him all about how his weekend went and saying how he seemed to have great friends at home like I did. It made him realise he wasn’t the only one to be feeling that way, and that there were good people at Sussex that may well prove to be just as much part of his life as those back home. So he stayed and so they became. As I know because he told me that story years later.

He was blindingly, startlingly smart. He would understand things before almost anyone else in a lecture and would happily take the time to talk anyone else through it. In pub conversations he could get to the end of someone’s obscure line of reasoning and have a reinforcing point or a rebuttal ready before others had even understood the point.

But always with the same humility. He would battle to understand someone’s opposing view even if he could see it was nonsense. As someone, in one of the many, many comments on his blog summed up so well; it was almost as if he wanted to apologise for inconveniencing you by his having cancer.

And yet he could get so passionate and so angry when he felt people were behaving stupidly or unjustly. I often felt that an element of that anger came from frustration at not quite being able to understand why people were being that way. Joe simply wasn’t used to being unable to understand something. It was just something that so rarely happened to him.

I have many happy thoughts connected with Joe and only one sad; that’s he’s gone.

The world is missing something important without you Joe.

My mum had been a little bit unwell for a few days recently. But to my surprise, a few hours before we were due to board the plane to Corsica and the GR 20, I got a phone call from my dad telling me that she had died, very suddenly indeed.

The doctor was equally surprised, since she only arrived a few minutes after my dad had found my mum lying peacefully in the hall.

It was very hard for my dad to find her that way, but we all know that it was the way she much preferred to go. She absolutely hated hospitals and doctors and the idea of ending her days in a hospital bed filled her with horror.

Everyone thinks they have a great mum I’m sure. My brother and I are no different. But the fact is, she was a great mum.

She was endlessly kind and self sacrificing. Despite being very grumpy about anything in the world that wasn’t done the way she thought it should be, she let us do exactly as we liked, whenever we liked. Never judging us harshly, no matter what daftness we got up to. For that, I have often been very grateful. There is no substitute whatsoever for being allowed to make your own mistakes, and your own successes.

And she always cooked proper, nourishing, traditional British food. Every day no matter how she felt.

I remember when her mum died, she still couldn’t be persuaded from putting a good plate of food on the table. I know now not only how hard that is to do every day without fail, but just how important it is for health and happiness to eat real food, not some rubbish from a packet.

And it wasn’t just us. She was always feeding some animal or other whether it was the succession of pets we had over the years or the birds and other wild-life wandering about in the garden. It’ll be a leaner time for many a creature around the Wood house, though dad is already planning to carry on where she left off.

And with my dad having a back injury and having great difficulty balancing, she took on more things even as she found it more difficult to get about herself. It wasn’t that dad asked her, she just did things, and couldn’t be dissuaded from doing them, even when unwell. He has a lot of adjustments to make and things to learn in the time ahead but he’s already working out plans to cope with daily things that mum used to do for him. It’s very impressive to see.

In the mean time, the Big Walk crew are making their way across Corsica on the GR 20 without us. After a great deal of agonising we’ve decided to go anyway (two weeks later than planned), and might even catch up with one of them to bag the highest peak on the island.

For now, we have the usual melee of things to work through and work out in the days and weeks ahead. Things that must be done when anyone leaves us like this. But once that is over, there will always be an awful gap in our lives where once we had mum.

(Those that knew her probably know that Mum hated money being spent on flowers at funerals and always preferred to make a charitable donation instead).