God I Hate Bloody Ironing

With wife and newborn baby due to return within 24 hours, I notice with feelings of horror and loathing, the mountain of ironing with my name on it. I am reasonably sure that once I get started, it won’t be so bad but finding the motivation is proving to be a deal breaker.

In March 1923, in an interview with The New York Times, the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and replied, ‘Because it’s there’. The answer became famous, not least because Mallory himself was lost on Everest in the following year. It was sometimes suggested that he and his fellow-climber Andrew Irvine, who were last seen ‘going strong for the summit’, might in fact have reached it before their deaths, but there was no proof.