Clearly enjoying themselves ... launching on the summit of Great Gable
The effect of mountain mist on cocktail nibbles isn't usually a topic of conversation at book launches, but our literary gathering on the summit of Great Gable wasn't in any way normal. Rather than jumping on a bus for Bloomsbury or somewhere chic in London's east end, our guests had to trek across bog, heather and moor grass before climbing a rock staircase to the seventh-highest place in England.
At least there were no worries about whether the celebratory white wine would be cold, even if visibility was so poor that passing the glasses meant handing out fizz into a milky pool of fog. It was a tribute to the grit of the Guardian's readership that 85 people turned up at Honister slate mine (itself swathed in cloud at only 1,100ft above sea level) and marched uncomplainingly into the unknown.
The youngest was 18-month-old Beth, swaying happily in a backpack on the shoulders of her dad, a teacher from Halifax. Equal oldest were Tim and Bill, 79 apiece and one of them about to scale 80 mountains in 80 days to mark his birthday and raise money for water projects in Tanzania.
We chose Great Gable because it chimed with both books - the Guardian Book of Mountains, edited by Richard Nelsson, the paper's librarian and head of research, and Wartime Country Diaries from the paper, which I have edited following the collection of Harry Griffin's Country Diaries (A Lifetime of Mountains) and a centenary book about the column, A Gleaming Landscape. Great Gable is self-evidently a grand mountain - no one who came on the launch would disagree about that - and it is also the biggest war memorial in the country. It was bought after the first world war, along with 30,000 acres of surrounding hills, by the Fell and Rock Club, and given to the nation (in the care of the National Trust) to commemorate the fallen. We gathered by the simple plaque on the rocky summit to do just that, and to hear readings from both books, plus reminiscences of great climbs from some of the mist-engulfed party.
It was typical of the erudition of readers that when Richard referred to an Edwardian climber of Everest, who claimed chain-smoking above 25,000ft relieved altitude sickness, a voice from the crowd shouted: "Ah yes - and he went on to become professor of combustion at Imperial College." There were at least 10 university professors and lecturers in our ranks, along with two teachers of the deaf, a car sales franchise holder, an American visitor from San Diego in California and Joe, a retired miner from Featherstone in West Yorkshire.
Joe was one of a posse in the long crocodile who helped to bring us all safely home; he volunteered to walk at the end of the column and as a result there was not a single stray. Another reader brought a global positioning satellite receiver and set us back on the path with its "crumb trail", when I inadvertently started the descent down the wrong route.
Crumb trails are named after Hansel, whose clever way of finding his and Gretel's return journey by scattering bits of bread, was frustrated by the appetite of German birds. Immune to this, the GPS plotted our outward route on its screen and then showed precisely where we were deviating, correcting us before we made an over-rapid descent down the sheer face of Gable Crag.
This was the fifth summit launch I've instigated, after Helvellyn, Cader Idris, Kidsty Pike and Helm Crag, and every time I stagger into the pub back at base swearing fervently: "Never again!" But now it's two days later and already I feel the call of the high and usually lonely places and the unique flavour of a Pringle at approaching 3,000ft.
