Day two

Up pretty early, 0730... More successful porridge adventure this morning, courtesy of a plastic mixing bowl purchased yesterday from Morrison's = exploding porridge proof! Set of with Helen for the hospital again, attempting to make the 0830 board round but obviously needed to leave more than 15mins as arrived a few minutes late. Sidled in through the door to a packed doctor's office to hear the tail end of the patient reviews. After that tagged onto a surgical ward round, saw 2 patients! Ward rounds here tend to be a bit quicker than the 4 hour endurance fests in London!

I then decided to stick with the surgeon who did the round and followed him to a minor ops outpatient clinic where I spent the morning and early afternoon. Saw an incredible variety of patients, ranging from perianal problems and IBS to dermatology and medically unexplained symptoms. I guess one of the consequences of being a general surgeon in the rural highlands is that you have an wide variety of cases walk in your door. I 'assisted' him with some suspicious mole excisions which was fun, before being freed at 1330 for a late lunch; I was pretty hungry after not eating since my 8am porridge!

After lunch I went back onto the ward and watched a venesection, which involves the therapeutic drainage of a bag of blood from a patient. Basiically the same as when you give blood. Including the MASSIVE needle! Also observing this were the two new F1s, who have just started shadowing week. So now in the hospital there's 2 about-to-leave F1's, 2 new F1's shadowing them, and 6 students, all vying for patients... Hopefully there'll be enough to go round over the coming weeks. I was then introduced to one of the anaesthetists, who kindly went through some notes for tomorrows surgery with me.

Noel having fun at the wall!

It was mid afternoon by this point and things were pretty slow, so I took off back to the house, grabbed my climbing stuff and hit the road to Kinlochleven to meet Noel for a climb at the Ice Factor wall there. Noel had spent the day walking a stage of the West Highland Way from Fort William to Kinlochleven, and in the process had caught the sun! We then hit the wall there - I'd never been to it before and was expecting quite big things - it's the biggest wall in the area and serves the outdoor capital of the UK, Fort William. However once in I was pretty surprised by the small size. I guess the big attraction is the indoor ice wall, similar to Brigham's in London. Peering in through the window it was obvious it gets a lot of use from the multiplicity of pockmarks in the ice from tool placements. We started on some autobelays, some routes having been set over 6 months ago, to get warmed up before moving onto some top roping. I don't have a lead rope with me, so unfortunately had to top rope - I made it more of a training session by downclimbing routes as well. So I'd climb the 6c, downclimb the 6b, climb the 6b, downclimb the 6a, then climb the 6a before being lowered off. Definitely got a pump going and it was pretty warm in the centre! This was another thing I was surprised by, the low grades. I didn't see a route in the centre above 7a. The vast majority were in the 6's, which I was surprised by given (presumably?) the number of climbers in the area operating at a high level. Also the route setting seemed pretty poor, endless 'right hand up, left hand up, right hand up' sequences, you could draw an almost perfect zigzag up the middle of some of the routes, joining hand holds together. There were a few nice routes set by Dave Macleod that had some cross overs, bits of traversing, hands swaps, undercuts etc. but the rest were pretty dull. After smashing out most of the rop rope routes Noel and I sampled the bouldering, but this was a real let down - a tiny room with what looked like a potentially decent 45 degree board, but on which the holds looked they hadn't been changed in about 3 years. No finger boards. Some of the holds were obviously used for dry tooling as they had squares of carpet behind. The room was also pretty dark, with these strange LED lights that cast a really unnatural white light over parts of the wall, leaving others in shade. Felt a bit weird - needless to say didn't boulder for very long! Overall impression not that great, and for £8 concession, plus 35+ min drive each way from Fort William I probably won't be heading back. Apparently there's a small bouldering wall in Fort William itself that I'll be sure to check out. But anyway, the weather WILL improve so I'll be able to go outside instead!

Amazing views over the sea

Bit of self timer action

Drove back through some awesome landscapes, we stopped to take some photos of the rain on the other side of the sea, illuminated by shafts of sunlight piercing the cloud. It was pretty spectacular. That's one of the things I love about the West Coast of Scotland, the way mountains just erupt straight out of the sea, resulting in incredible combinations of rugged hill scapes and ridges with coast lines and sea. We went back to Noel's hostel to cook a massive carb fest - pasta with a veggie tomato based sauce containing peppers, onions, garlic, courgettes, mushrooms... lovely and exactly what we both needed! Poor Noel, he'd done 15 miles walking and then been dragged to the wall for 2 hours - he was knackered! Amusingly whilst we were knocking up a culinary feast there was a group of 3 mountain bikers attempting to cook a pizza in the electric worktop oven. Turns out one of them swore there was an oven in the kitchen whilst they were in Morrisons, and so they bought 2 massive pizzas, but on arrival back discovered there was an oven of sorts, however it was a tiny work top electric one! Consequently the only way they could fit the pizzas in the oven was to cut each one into quarters and cook them seperately, meaning in the entire time it took Noel and I to prep, cook, eat and wash up our meal they just managed to cook and eat 2 pizzas!

Double rainbow!

After dinner I said farewell to Noel - he has friends from London arriving tomorrow that he's going camping with and so I might not see him again before he leaves. It's been great to have a friendly face up here to meet up with, just until I get settled down and into the swing of things here. I headed back to the house in torrential rain, but saw a spectacular double rainbow appear over Fort William in the thundery showers. I could see the entire rainbow, both ends and a second paler rainbow curving outside the main one! Once back at the house I quickly Skyped Alice and home to catch up with everything before getting my head down. Early start tomorrow to get to the hospital for a 0750 tutorial... On the plus side the weather is meant to be good tomorrow, so might see if I can get out on some real rock!

Dramatic skies on the drive home