... but we were noticing the altitude a bit!

Now those are what I'd call shirts...

I can remember them so well, now that I see them again! But I don't remember them any more after the 'sixties.. We also had some Viyella shirts for the higher altitude stuff. The breeches were needlecord.

my twin bro and I have almost-matching orange goretexes...
I'm liking these photos, Gordon. Nicely nostalgic.

Yes, I just started looking at boxes of old slides last night (reaction to getting my accounts finished!) - and indeed they are very nostalgic. It all just seems aeons ago... which I suppose it is. I get quite funny emotions, quite sad in way.

at least it's nostalgia for things you *have* done rather than vicarious nostalgia for things you *wish* you'd done, I suppose. And yes, photographs are more interesting than accounts (to my mind anyway).

Yes, I am just so glad that climbing gave me such a great time for about 35 years, before I started to move away from (shoulder injury etc.)

Further comment: I think this is a really fantastic photo my father took. Mostly it's to do with the magic of the camera, because how can all that strain and sadness in my face simply be to do with the climbing?
It can't, and I don't think it is. It's as if in that fraction of a second of the shutter, some guard has slipped, and some deeper, much more painful truth has been revealed. I really don't think I'm reading too much in to it; I really think that shot somehow exposes, in an instant, something of the huge underlying personal grief and readjustment we were still going through as as result of a recent huge family tragedy.