Well it's eleven days since that summit, I've been spoiling myself with luxuries for five days, and the world already seems a very different place. I'm not starving hungry for a start! I'm still not sleeping too well, because that ear of mine is remarkably tender...though everyone who now looks at it says it doesn't look as bad as they thought...they should try laying on it!!!

I'm surprised at the strength of feeling so many other people express about my success. It almost means more to them than it does to me. Odd. I'll be a five minute wonder, which is fair enough, and whatever I think, I have to say it's INFINITELY better than I'd be experiencing if I hadn't summitted...again...I must never lose sight of that.

I've thought a lot about my feelings on and around the summit. In particular, my lack of tears, or profound feelings of any sort really. Of course, I had some cerebral oedema or similar coming on by then, which may have affected my capacity to FEEL anything(other than confusion.....), but I'm pretty sure that by then I'd been adopting an attitude of "dealing with whatever comes next" for so long on the way up that I was in a strange place really...we're always told that the top is "only half way", with the emphasis on getting down afterwards, and I think that's EXACTLY where I was coming from psychologically. I wouldn't allow myself the luxury of a celebration of any sort on the top. Job to be done. Sadly, by the time I'd laboured slowly down, dehydrated as a prune, and got to the bottom of the icefall, I was too tired to react in the appropriately joyful way. I felt all the life in me was close to extinction by then. Still no tears of note. Relief aplenty, don't doubt it, but no tears.

I came to climb this mountain with friends. One by one they were taken away, or fell away, and I had to climb it on my own. Even on the top, with that dozen other climbers there, and my Sherpa too, I sat alone, and I felt alone. I descended some of the way subsequently with Nadir, but Nadir wasn't a close friend. I finished my descent two days later quite alone. If my friends had managed to summit, THEN we could have celebrated together, as we'd hoped to do throughout, but I know what it's like to miss out on the summit, and I couldn't enjoy my own success without my friends on board too.

I was not a strong climber for the most part on this trip. I gave no indication to myself or anyone else that I had the strength to summit in 6 days from Pangboche...where we gazed up at the summit poking over the Nupste-Lhotse wall and laughed at how high it was above us (5000m!!). When I set out from camp two, hot, claustrophobic, wilting already under my heavy pack, I had no idea that 40 hours later, having had just two hours sleep, I was going to manage to reach the summit 2500m above me, with a spring in my step and a smile in my heart. I thought I had no chance right then. But something happened to me later that night. I'll never know what, nor where it came from, but it came, and it made me absolutely determined not to give in, and it made me stronger, and NOW it makes me cry, because I'm SO glad it came that night, and it took me all the way to the top of the biggest mountain in all of the world, and I stayed there for a while,and I marvelled, and those memories and feelings will last me as long as I last, and nobody can take them away from me now...as if they'd ever want to.

I know it's only a mountain. Logically climbing mountains is all rather pointless, they say. Well just for a while, all the pointless things I've ever done in the mountains seemed to come together, and there WAS a point after all.. just for that little while.

It's only a mountain. But it'll be a part of me forever, and I'm a tiny, tiny part of it too.

My,what a business that all was. What a day I had. What a moment.