Climbing defined Paul Pritchard's existence and signposted his horizons. From his Snowdonia base he gained a reputation for routes of extreme technical difficulty and meagre protection. He had climbed in mountain ranges as diverse as the Himalayas to the Andes, Baffin Island to the Pamirs. When he won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 1997 he spent the prize money on a world climbing tour that found him in Tasmania climbing a slender sea stack called the Totem Pole. It was here that his whole life changed.
A falling boulder inflicted such terrible head injuries that at the hospital they thought he might never walk or even speak again. Pritchard spent the next year fighting the hemiplegia which robbed his right side of feeling and played cruel tricks with speech and memory. In his fight for recovery the reader triumphs with him when his brain remembers how to use each forgotten muscle. The book laces great climbing memories with coming to terms with selling his gear and becoming an onlooker. It paints a wry picture of himself and his fellow patients at the Wirral Neuro Rehabilitation Unit at Clatterbridge; and examines his adjusted relationships with family and friends, and his former partner, Celia Bull, whose superhuman efforts secured him after the accident.
At the end of this humane, perceptive and totally unself-pitying book Paul, his wheelchair given back to the hospital, returns to Tasmania to film and reflect on a new existence.
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