"The climber tackling Cenotaph Corner to my right was a blur, an insect buzzing on the periphery. There, but only in the grey mist of my sub-conscious. Buzzing. A minor distraction. I lock off, the muscles in my shoulder tense, shake out, chalk up, study, plan, breathe deep with control. Prepare. Once committed to the sequence of moves I would be continuing in one of two directions, reverse was not an option. The insect moved to my right. A move he will not forget for the rest of his life. A move I will never forget for the rest of my life. He pulled on the pudding stone, a house-brick lump of rock wedged for years into the crack of Cenotaph Corner. The Pudding stone ripped from the corner as easy as a vegetable-knife is pushed into a Prison Officers neck on a quiet evening in Gartree Prison.
The clarity coursing through my veins, heightening my senses made me watch with deadly fascination. Slow motion. End over end, the block spun, plummeting. The insect stopped buzzing and screamed. His belayer took no notice. I watched with deadly fascination, still unable to pull my eyes away from the 5kg lump of death spinning its way to misery. The insect screamed again. The block twisted and turned closing in on its target. I watched with deadly fascination. Only several feet above the skull that the stone was about to smash into a grey-splintered mess of pulp the belayer looked up and jerked his head back. The pudding stone missed his brow by an inch, ripping into his bare arm. Blood shot high into the air covering the grey rock. The belayer collapsed, the insect whimpered, no longer on belay. Mayhem ruled. Blood spurted."
