Boxer John and his Hammock 19 9 21 (8) 2025 2 4

It was during my last visit to this very popular bothy which I had visited 4 or 5 times before but this was to have been my longest stay: arriving Thursday evening 19th Sept with my two nephews who had finished work early so they could join me for a long weekend, driving up as they did from the town of Bury in Lancashire where I too grew up, at least from the age of 1½, on Friday the 20th Sept we three had climbed Beinn Mheadhoin and Beinn a' Chaorainn which, with D clocking the round trip at 18,6 miles almost 30 km, with his new Garmin wrist watch/GPS etc., meant I would be having a rest day on the following day a Saturday, while D and G went out for another walk when they would bag another 3 Munro hills.

Well staying on at the bothy with the idea of just pottering about I wasn't expecting it to be anything special since most of the bothies I had stayed in these last few trips had been sparsely inhabited save for myself, so to my surprise and delight I got to meet some very interesting people: on the first night's stay there had only been one other person staying, an Aberdonian lady, one Irini, whom we got to meet again later in the day as she was descending B. Mheadhoin with a companion she had met en route, as were ascending.

Then for our second night's stay there were two guys whom we met as we came off our hill the day before: one a guy called Andy who was one of the maintenance people of the MBA (Mountain Bothies Association) who had brought with him a white plastic chair he had planned the next day to ferry up to the Hutchinson Memorial bothy, and a West German guy, Daniel, who had his tent erected outside the bothy but who chose to eat his meals inside it, both very nice guys who contributed much to the pleasure of staying there. Before he left the next day reinforced my thought about the sadness Europeans felt at the prospect of Britain exiting the EU, in addition to explaining much of the way Germans as a nation regard the EU too. But the younger guy, John, wasn't staying in the area of the bothy but was camping on the other side of the Derry Lodge in his hammock. He had come to the bothy he said because it was only place he could get a Vodaphone network for his phone.

But when he mentioned the word “hammock” my curiosity was immediately awakened because one of my grandson’s A was given a hammock by his girlfriend’s family as a gift. This interest on my part elicited the fact that John had slept 8 months in his hammock in Afganistan during his 6 years as a Regular soldier in the British Army, further discussion about which drew the comment that he had been a boxer to begin with in the army, and winning a championship aged 16.

He also told how the day before he had walked it the whole way not only from the Lin of Dee as we had but all the way carrying all his equipment from Braemar quite a good distance. The conversations with John took quite a bit of my rest day because he would return to his camp but reappear some time later to use his telephone once more. Then I got to hear more about his life story how he had been married but was no longer living with his former wife, perhaps divorced already, and how he had got interested in snakes as a hobby, with a collection of a boa constrictor, 3 vipers and a number of corn snakes. He volunteered the information that he would be showing them to a group of school children in a few weeks’ time and how in springtime after winter’s hibernation snakes mate and how the females can lay 14 eggs which after incubation can produce many offspring which he claimed gave him a was a useful supplement to his income.

So taken with the enterprise of this young guy I had to go round to inspect how he had erected his hammock between 2 mature Scots Pine trees, all as he awaited the arrival of his father before they headed out for the hills themselves.

It was then that another walker arrived to the bothy for a brief visit, only this guy belonged to the group of people who know everything worth knowing about everything: how inadvisable it was to rely on a hammock for example to which John simply said he didn’t plan to camp high beyond the tree line as the other fellow, and when this new arrival took issue with John’s choice of stout calf-length leather boots, preferring himself to use very lightweight boots bereft of ankle support which he had used many time to traverse the Pyrenees, from both directions, John simply said how he in any case in the relative isolation of where we were would not like to injure an ankle… When Mike, John’s father, arrived during this conversation I could not resist the temptation simply to congratulate him on having such a savvy and accomplished son!