I generally don’t do much in the way of hero-worship, at least not since I was a teenager. In 1964 a 22 year old Welsh athlete by the name of Lynn Davies won the Olympic Games long jump event in Tokyo, an achievement that gripped my imagination. I decided there and then I would be a long jumper too and I wrote a long letter to the Welshman, congratulating him on his success and, rather naively, asked him for some tips! Much to my surprise Lynn replied to my letter, the beginning of a correspondence that lasted for years. Some…

For over four years in the early 1990s, when I lived near Stirling and travelled to work by train, I walked a short distance through the convulsions of Edinburgh’s Old Town from Waverley Station to a small close off the Canongate. I don’t need to labour the magic of Edinburgh as a city to explore on foot, including as it does a volcano to climb, wheeling gulls and views to the Forth, and a National library housing eight acres of books in storeys climbing between two streets stacked one above the other. In some cities ‘enchantment engineers’ design temporary illusions…

Last week I found myself accompanying fellow lifelong snow enthusiast Iain Cameron to Creag Meagaidh for a second time. Our first visit (and indeed our first meeting) had been back in October 2014 when we headed to Raeburn’s Gully, high up in Coire Ardair in search of an unusually long-lasting patch of snow. That encounter inspired me to write an article…