Wild Wanderings by Phil Gribbon sampler

Introduction
having climbed, wandered about, argued and drunk with Phil Gribbon
for some 50 years, I suppose I’m in some sort of position to write an introduction
to his book. To comment in a critical way on Phil’s writing is
simply beyond the scope of what I can attempt here: I’ll leave that to other
critics.
I’ve sometimes tried to write about my experiences with Phil and some of
these articles and stories have been published, usually in the Scottish Mountaineering
Club Journal. I say ‘stories’ as well as articles because sometimes
when I write about mountaineering I cast what I have to say in the form
of fiction. This allows me to preserve the essence of the experience while
departing a little from what actually happened. Adopting different names
and backgrounds for the characters also lets one stand back from the facts
and perhaps understand them a little better – it can even work for oneself.
When Phil was in his late 30s and early 40s he had the sharpest, most
sarcastic tongue of anyone I’ve known. Not even the late Archie Hendry
could match him. Woe betide the undergraduate who made some pretentious
or pompous remark, he (less so she) would be sliced in half by a very
sharp phrase. In those days Phil was a man of few words, most of them
sardonic. By this means he taught us, and by ‘us’ I mean the large company
of students he climbed with, to grow up a bit and not be quite so foolish. I
don’t know where the acid came from but it was part of his makeup and we
were very much in awe of him.
Myths about Phil abounded in the student community: he had been in
the Foreign Legion, he had been in prison, there were dark secrets in his
past. My wife once made the ghastly error of asking if one of these myths
was true. She was met by a silence so deafening that ‘neither durst any man
from that day forth ask him any more questions’. This acerbity and a certain
personal aura made him the perfect person to lead student expeditions to
Greenland.
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