Dibs

And you think you have “challenges”! Blind one-legged mountaineer Syd Scroggie, whose death at age 86 was reported yesterday by the BBC, was a poet and author and World War II vet, serving in a ski/mountain regiment called Lord Lovat’s Scouts. “Just weeks before the war ended he was injured by an anti-personnel mine in Northern Italy, losing his right leg and the sight of both eyes,” reports the BBC. Allegedly the last thing he remembers seeing were the Italian hills and vivid blue skies. “However, once back in Scotland Mr Scroggie achieved fame by resuming mountaineering,” outfitted with a metal prosthetic leg. His books include Give Me the Hills and The Cairngorms Scene and Unseen. Much else about him can be found here, on a site that lovingly recaptures Scroggie’s comments: “I can do without my eyes … but I can’t do without my mountains … whatever we call the hills, it has nothing to do with sight. It is an inner experience and can be as poignantly savoured with your eyes shut as open…. So long as there’s breath in my body, and the Ministry of Pensions keep mending my leg, I’ll get up Macdhui, pass down Loch A’an-side, and toast the knees of my breeks at a good fire of logs in Faindouran.” He liked cigarettes and lager and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Dundee. He kept climbing right up through his eighties. Now I feel guilty for complaining when someone obstructs my view of the TV.