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you did,’ she said. ‘And I hope they put you in the papers for it.’
    She rubbed her eyes.
    Two or three weeks later someone I knew rang me up and asked me if I would like to go and learn rock-climbing in the sports centre at Holloway. Remembering how easy and pleasant it had been to reach up, lock off my arm, then pull hard at the base of the railings so that I was suddenly lifted almost without effort back into the street, I said yes. I was about thirty years old.
    At Hoghton Quarry the rhododendron flowers are a strange transparent lilac colour. They drift down past you as you climb, like confetti at the marriage of air and rock, while below you the tall straight trees filter out the light from the boggy aisle in front of the cliff. There are rhododendron bushes on every ledge, and when you are trying to get off the top you have to make your way down through a plantation of them, slithering helplessly about with the steep friable brown soil caking your feet and your nose full of their oppressive dusty smell, you clutch at the tangled stems with mounting hysteria.
    ‘Those,’ said Normal when I mentioned them, ‘are the rhododendrons of an Earl. They are an
Earl’s
rhododendrons, and those are his trees.’
    Normal had taken two or three of us up there in his car to try and free the remaining aid moves on a climb called Boadicea. We were trespassing. Hoghton is a secluded, impressive place whose pale sandy walls stretch above you, some as concave as the bow of a battleship, others raddled with enormous silent overhangs. Birds give piping calls in the green twilight. Between the fallen quarry buildings and overgrown hummocks the ground is spongy with sphagnum. There is a fur of lichen on everything; it gives an air of intimacy, but you don’t welcome intimacy on such a scale. You eye the huge corroded bolts sticking out of the rock: your gaze is drawn up further than it wants to go. Every silent figure you see among the trees might be the Earl, breathing heavily but quietly – watching. We had no luck with Boadicea, and towards evening rain began to rustle down between the leaves and drip into our little colourful heaps of equipment.
    To get to the quarry you go over a railway line, then walk up a marshy slot. On the way back through the wet fields, Normal pointed gravely at everything as he named it: grass, fences, walls, all belonged to the Earl of Hoghton. A grey mist came up out of the distant woods. When we got to the place where you cross the railway he made us stop while he studied the signals intently, then he flopped down and put his ear to one of the rails.
    ‘Nothing coming,’ he said.
    In the village where we had parked the car he told us, ‘This is the
village
of an Earl. How do you like it? These are an Earl’s flowers, this is his chapel – Wesleyan – and this is the
telephone box of an Earl
.’ He spread his arms wide. Rain drummed on the roof of the car. We were soaked. ‘Above is the fucking leaky sky of an Earl!’
    On the way home he pointed out barns and hedgerows that he said belonged to the Earl.
    ‘Are those the cows of the Earl?’ I asked.
    ‘No.’
    ‘But that’s his chemical factory?’
    ‘No it isn’t.’
    There was scaffolding under all the motorway bridges in the north that year. The signs were being changed. That night, lost among the contraflow systems around Bolton, we watched the heavy vehicles nose past with water smoking away from under their mudguards and their loads wrapped in blue and orange tarpaulin.
    ‘Is this the A666?’
    ‘It says “Back Lorne Street”.’
    Finally, as we went through Salford, Normal swerved the car in towards the pavement and pointed his finger at a dark furry mess in the gutter.
    ‘
That
,’ he said, ‘was the cat of an Earl.’
    This was the year after I had left London, and I had a cat of my own.
    I had just met Normal, who was still working at High Adventure, in Manchester, lounging yellow in the face with boredom every day