The Fall

I have an acquaintance, a guy from my secondary school, who was a super fan of the group The Fall. I’ve never been able to get into them, to be honest. It’s a group like Pere Ubu, with a hardcore following of fans for music that never made the main stream. However if you didn’t have that moment, that click while listening to them, there’s no way into these bands from the outside. The Fall have so many albums and if you’re not already a fan, a good sized chunk of the music is un-listenable, partly because I think they released anything that passed through their heads.

This is about another fall though, that of my partner. To be very quick about it, he didn’t thread the rope through the anchor properly when we were finishing up a single pitch climb. I lowered him down a bit where it wasn’t steep and when he finally put his weight on the rope, it slipped out from his harness and he fell over backwards. It destroyed his helmet and he kept turning down, about fifteen meters. At the bottom of the cliff, he landed on soft, melty snow and continued to roll down the slope another six or seven meters. He’s scratched up and bruised, but he should be dead.

We spent a day or so recuperating and he wanted to head home to prepare for an avalanche course over the weekend, or at least try to go. A day later he realized it was impossible to put on ski boots so he cancelled. He was home alone and I wanted to be with him so I took the train as soon as I could to be at his house and…left my bag with my wallet inside on the train. There was nothing personal or irreplaceable in there; it’s just annoying and time consuming. I also bought insurance for loss on trains a long while ago (since I’m on the trains so much) and have never used it, I should be able to get that into play.

Oh, and the world is falling apart.

So I only have positive things to write about, I guess. My partner is not dead. My bag might show up in the lost and found, but it’s also just a problem I need to patiently work at to replace everything and it will be okay. And I saw a very cute movie with my (alive) partner this weekend Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. It’s very, very sweet. I am grateful.