can women get man flu?

I think it must be possible, I mean I don’t think I have real flu or even swine flu, but this is definitely much worse than a cold (and it came on really quickly), it’s also not the lesser known ‘wine flu’ – that requires about 8 glasses in order for the symptoms to appear and sadly I have had none.

Anyway, today I have spent the whole day bumming around in my dressing gown feeling sorry for myself and occasionally dosing myself up with paracetamol. In my somewhat dishevelled state I managed to finish reading one of the books I currently have (had?) on the go - ‘The Real Heroes of Telemark’ by Ray Mears (book of a TV series maybe? We’re looking into that). Having climbed in Rjukan last year and having a 2 week sortie planned for February, it seemed appropriate to actually find out some of the real history of the place and what happened during WWII and the ‘heavy water’ sabotage raids, rather than simply leaving my knowledge at the ‘have watched the crappy hollywood blockbuster and so have no real facts in truth’ stage.

I highly recommend reading this book and/or finding out about these events – I for one had no idea that Hitler even had an atomic weapons programme, let alone that the simple yet incredible actions of a few highly trained men in destroying and disrupting the production of ‘heavy water’ (again, despite being interested in this sort of thing, I didn’t even know what heavy water was) in a small hydro plant on the edge of one of the most inhospitable wilderness areas on earth, could well have swayed the outcome of the war.

Right, on a different topic, today I have also knocked another item off of my chores ‘to do’ list – Phil very kindly bought me a new roll of self amalgamating tape to modify my ice axes with…

Before

After

Only trial will show whether my newly modified secondary grip position (oooh get me, sounding all techy) will actually be any good. My worries are that the construction of the shafts (hot-forged I-beam construction – more techy stuff, ooooh) will mean that the tape will get damaged/worn pretty quickly because of the big gaps behind it. A more standard shaft would not present a problem, but oh no, I have to have ‘different’ axes of course (don’t get me wrong here, I love them to bits!).

I will update on the state of these once they’ve seen some use on the board.