Fifty Years a Quicksand Guide

[BogDog]

Is he ready to retire? Perhaps one of our "experts" ( ) could assume his role and become the new guide.

Oh, the REAL stories that could be told here....

[Lomax]

Is he ready to retire? Perhaps one of our "experts" could assume his role and become the new guide.

Despite being aged eighty (though not looking a day over sixty), he has no thoughts of retirement. His father lived to the age of 104, and he reckons he has a good few years in him yet.

I've purchased his book - though I now realise that it's one of several he's written over the years. Whilst there's not much in it for dedicated sinkers (and he's not the most gifted writer who ever picked up a pen), this is nevertheless a charming book. Here is a simple man living the sort of simple life that ought to have vanished a century or more ago. Though his cottage has been equipped with mains electricity - and a telephone - his only means of heating water is still a wood-burning fire. He grows his own vegetables, keeps turkeys and chickens (selling the surplus of all three), catches fish, gathers cockles - and once visited London, where he was bewildered by the traffic. In between, he leads walkers (for free) over some of the most beautiful and most dangerous terrain on earth, in the process rubbing shoulders with a veritable gamut of the Great and the Good - from A J P Taylor to Bill Bryson. And he seems perfectly content. He has almost nothing, but everything he wants. A lesson, perhaps?

Oh; and in addition to being awarded an MBE and an honorary degree (in Science and Technology), he has also had a beer named after him. Now THAT'S the sort of immortality I want.