First And Last, Old And New

After believing he would never walk the high tops again, Cameron introduces his elder granddaughter to her first Munro

AS picnic lunch-spots go, it couldn't get much better. We were perched on a flat-topped plinth of granite, vertical drops on three sides, looking into a void of rock, water and sky. The cerulean waters of a mountain loch stretched away below us, edged by beaches white as any in the Caribbean. The pink slabby walls of the upper corrie corralled a number of lively streams, the Feith Buidhe, the Garbh Uisge Beag and the Garb Uisge Mor, their waters breaking the silence. Behind us, a deep chasm bit steeply into the crag, water dripping into its black recess. Hell's Lum lived up to its name.

To my mind's eye, the scene was alive with memories.

Over almost 50 years I had formed a special relationship with the spirit of this place, adventures that became building blocks in the life of this old Cairngorm wanderer. Today the views and the memories they resurrected were particularly poignant as I had more or less reconciled myself to the fact that I would never see them again.

Six months before, almost to the day, a surgeon sat in an Edinburgh operating theatre with my heart in his hands. Like a highly-skilled car mechanic he was doing a repair, fairly routine for him, nothing less than a miracle for me. I was wired up to a machine that kept me alive provided someone kept feeding the electric meter.

Once my heart was repaired, my breastbone stapled together and my chest sewn up, I was returned to a ward where I woke up to a kind nurse offering me a cup of tea.

"That's you fixed," she said. What are your plans?"

It may have been the lingering effects of anaesthesia or the simple relief of having come through six-hour open heart surgery, but I heard myself tell her that I wanted to take my two granddaughters up their first Munro.