I love bouldering. I don’t have much time for it at the
moment, but I’ll get back to it at some point, especially now my brother is
living up in Sheffield – one of the true homes of English climbing. Watching
Edith learning to cruise around the furniture & walls of our house over the
past few weeks makes me realise that bouldering is just the vertical
continuation movement on a horizontal plane, or walking, as we tend to call it.
Bouldering is continuing where most humans left off at the age two basically.
So Edith is at the intermediate stage between crawling and
walking, which has the unfortunate name of ‘cruising’. I can think of better
names ‘finding one’s feet’ seems good – the balance adaptation. Watching Edith perfect the skills of
Bipedalism day-by-day over the last couple of weeks is like watching human
evolution on fast-forward. She drives herself through the learning barriers
with her emerging muscular and neural development. Initially her whole weight
was placed on each object she leant against. Now she moves freely and can
balance in quite sophisticated ways against all sorts of surfaces. So our
kitchen is her climbing centre. Lucky girl, I’d be a much better climber if I
could practice in our kitchen. By the way, Edith is one today. Happy Birthday Edith!
Or as the Espanoles say feliz cumpleaños!
(Happy year completion).
