No AI training. Just stop. You don’t have my permission. #stopthescrape

I left home at seventeen. I filled the car – a tiny Fiat Panda – with everything I could fit inside it, gave my mum a hug, and drove off, heading north. I think it was the first time I turned north with purpose. I was due to start at Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside in the English Lake District. I had been accepted onto a Bachelor of Education degree, and I was going to be a primary school teacher.

I must admit, I didn’t read the large print.

I thought I was going to study Outdoor Education and Environmental Studies. That was my specialist subject or major, I think one might call it. But I had to learn how to teach everything else, from music to maths. Yeah. Maths was a problem.

Music was a problem.

Everything but the outdoor and environmental stuff was a problem.

I tried to leave within the first month, but my supervisor talked me out of it. And the same supervisor grudgingly accepted that I really wanted to leave several months later.

But this is just background.

The story I want to tell is about my trusty Swiss Army Knife, a.k.a. SWAK.

To this day, I use a SWAK every single day. This might be weird, but it’s part of my grooming kit. I know, you might be thinking that sounds crazy, perhaps even a little barbaric, or a limey version of Crocodile Dundee. I don’t shave with it, but… pretty much everything else. But the knife I have today is one of the simpler ones, with a scissors, two blades, screwdrivers spot-welded into the knife and never, never coming out, and tweezers. The scissors and tweezers are very important. The knife comes into play when I need to do something substantial. 😉

Anyway, the knife I had when I was seventeen was one of those SWAKs with every blade, screwdriver, ballpoint pen, bag carrying handle, magnifying glass… everything you can think of.

It was, to be blunt, useless.

No finesse.

I kept it in a cloth ammunition pouch I picked up at an army surplus store, together with a tub of lifeboat matches – the kind that can be lit in a storm – fishing line, hooks, and a signal mirror. This was my “survival kit” and I was very proud of it. I had yet to learn about embracing nature and becoming part of it. I was still of the belief – as were, and are many – that the outdoors was something to be survived, as in us against nature. It would take some years to knock that belief out of me.

Anyway, back to the knife.

I joined every outdoor club possible when at college, including the climbing club. On the first day of climbing, five of us piled into a car smaller than my Panda, and took off into the wilds.

I should say something about scale, here.

The Lake District is big and beautiful. But I’ve always thought of it as Bilbo’s Shire from The Hobbit. Scotland, on the other hand, is rugged and wild, and more like Mordor, but in a good way. You can get into trouble in the Lake District, and many people do, but it’s not vast, and it’s not wild like the wilds of America, or, as I would discover, the wilds of Greenland. Greenland is vast. But I’ll save those stories for later.

Back to the tiny car packed with people and gear.

We parked “in the wilds” and debussed, grabbing all the ropes and gear to carry them to the climbing area. The leader of the group locked the car and we headed off, only to stop when I shouted that I had forgotten something. He opened the car again and I grabbed my trusty survival kit. I mean, I wasn’t going to be caught out without it. Imagine the horror when the papers reported our broken bodies on the hill, and one of the mountain rescue guys said something like “If only they’d had a decent survival kit, they might have made it.”

The horror.

That was not going to be me.

Never mind that I would have been better off with a bottle of water, a malt loaf, and one of those orange plastic survival bags.

Nope, I had my trusty SWAK!

The climbing club were too polite to comment, but I grabbed my knife and we walked, oh, I don’t know, about fifty metres from the car to set up a simple top rope on a tiny crag for beginners.

We could see the car the whole time.

But I had my knife.

So all was well.

Chris