Prologue

15 September 2015

We twist through the forest festooned in lichen in heavy rain. Wooden steps, slimy with this rain, had been laid over moss covered rocks which have droplets of water suspended motionless on the tiny leaves. The old forest smells of this wet moss combined with damp soil, wet bark and pine needles. I remember this smell. I remember the feel of Raph's walking sticks that I had borrowed. I remember the feeling of breathing and the squelch of my feet on the waterlogged soil and watching water rise to the surface and seep onto my boots. I remember what I was thinking about and my heartbeat. Clear and precise details … We stop to have tea sheltering under the orange bivvy. I sip the hot tea, rolling it around my mouth. We talk and laugh, listening to the sound of the rain on the bivvy. Hearing, feeling, smelling, seeing, talking and tasting before yet another climb … Then complete blackness. Blackness utterly devoid of any senses until I am in Annecy hospital … the doctor tells me I have broken my back in more than one place. I look away and say nothing as he continues to talk about my injuries.

Disclosure: the accident, remembering and forgetting

Some 45 minutes after that tea was drunk and packed away, I fell 30 or 40 metres – depending upon whether you read the police, emergency room, or my climbing companion Raph's accounts – in a rock-climbing accident. The recollection above is drawn from the diary I kept for the year following this accident. I have deliberately not re-edited the words of this entry as I do not want to edit it to represent the ‘I’ that sits here today, aware that accounts ‘written after recovery, or after years of living with a particular disease or disability, lack the authenticity afforded by real-time life writing’ (Eckstein, 2013: 463).

I reached for this diary and wanted to recapture the ‘authenticity’ of the early post-accident self, as I came to write this paper.