True Left

You can’t dance. I know this because I’ve been to enough wedding receptions, socials and bars with dance floors to notice that North Americans don’t know how to dance. They hold their partners and shuffle across the floor, but neither party would know a dance step if it bit them on the ankle.

This is actually quite a change because eighty years ago every Tom, Dick and Harry could do the Fox Trot, the Waltz and the Jitterbug, and plenty more knew the Rumba, the Tango and the Conga, among others.

You can’t ride a horse. Oh, you can get up on one with some help, but as soon as your Kentucky thoroughbred starts to trot, you’re in real trouble. To manage this mid-speed step you need to know how to post. Posting involves rising and falling in the saddle in time with the horse’s step. It’s easier on the horse, and much easier on you. Or it would be if you knew how to post, which you don’t.

Finally, you can’t dress yourself. When I say “dress,” I mean dress like a gentleman. Here goes. First you put on your socks, then your sock garters. What? Sock garters; you have a pair, yes? Then boxer shorts. A T-shirt or vest. A shirt with eyelets for cufflinks. Your trousers with pleats. Your suspenders. Your cufflinks. This is business dress, not fancy dress. Your highly polished Oxfords.

Your tie, tied with a Windsor knot. Your suit vest. You can put your gold pocket watch in the left lower pocket of the vest, and the watch fob through an eyelet with one of the buttons. Now the jacket. Keep one fresh handkerchief for the ladies in a lower pocket and put another in your breast pocket, two points up, or three. This only leaves your wallet, keys, fountain pen, tie-clip (optional), coat, gloves and revolver (optional). Done.

Except how many people have a pocket watch these days? Not many. Cufflinks? Oxfords?

wristwatches were almost exclusively worn by women - men used pocket watches up until the early-20th century.[23]

A team of nine black climbers is attempting to scale Mount Everest to tackle the mountain's 'intentional lack of access for black people' and mountaineering's 'colonial history'.

Climbing Everest is not sport or “living your best life”; it’s become the epitome of heartless, self-serving arrogance.
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Sacks of garbage collected from Mount Everest.
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it has become a grotesque theme park for cashed-up, kitted-up corporates and thrillseekers who see it as a notch on their belt and a post on their Instagram.

The mountain is making monsters out of all of us: the middle-class adventure seekers who clearly think it requires little more training than a Saturday fun run; the companies responsible for this ugly commercialisation of risk; the voyeurs who click on the ever more disturbing photographs and video that pop up each May as the perilously short climbing season gets underway.

Honestly, if we’re trying to rid our oceans of plastic then we’re equally responsible for clearing our tallest peaks of both human detritus and the grievous lack of integrity and care that causes it.

As in so much of life, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
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Where we should step in is when innocent people or the planet are harmed. When ambition exceeds competency to such an extent that others’ lives are put in jeopardy and the wilderness loses its mystique. Everest is strewn with disused oxygen tanks, broken ladders, frayed ropes and frozen bodies, some of whom belong to the Sherpas who are collateral casualties in Western egotism.

In 1757 Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure made the first of several unsuccessful attempts on Mont Blanc in France. He then offered a reward to anyone who could climb the mountain, which was claimed in 1786 by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard. The climb is usually considered an epochal event in the history of mountaineering, a symbolic mark of the birth of the sport.[11][13]

By the early 19th century, many of the alpine peaks were reached, including the Grossglockner in 1800, the Ortler in 1804, the Jungfrau in 1811, the Finsteraarhorn in 1812, and the Breithorn in 1813.[11] In 1808, Marie Paradis became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc, followed in 1838 by Henriette d'Angeville.[15]

The beginning of mountaineering as a sport in the UK is generally dated to the ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 by English mountaineer Sir Alfred Wills, who made mountaineering fashionable in Britain. This inaugurated what became known as the Golden Age of Alpinism, with the first mountaineering club – the Alpine Club – being founded in 1857.[16][17]

One of the most dramatic events was the spectacular first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 by a party led by English illustrator Edward Whymper, in which four of the party members fell to their deaths. By this point the sport of mountaineering had largely reached its modern form, with a large body of professional guides, equipment, and methodologies.[13]

In the early years of the "golden age", scientific pursuits were intermixed with the sport, such as by the physicist John Tyndall. In the later years, it shifted to a more competitive orientation as pure sportsmen came to dominate the London-based Alpine Club and alpine mountaineering overall.[18] The first president of the Alpine Club, John Ball, is considered to be the discoverer of the Dolomites, which for decades were the focus of climbers like Paul Grohmann and Angelo Dibona.[19] At that time, the edelweiss also established itself as a symbol of alpinists and mountaineers.[20][21]

Expansion around the world

In the 19th century, the focus of mountaineering turned towards mountains beyond the Alps, and by the turn of the 20th century, mountaineering had acquired a more international flavour.[22]

In 1897 Mount Saint Elias (18,008 ft (5,489 m)) on the Alaska-Yukon border was summitted by the Duke of the Abruzzi and party.[23] In 1879–1880 the exploration of the highest Andes in South America began when English mountaineer Edward Whymper climbed Chimborazo (20,549 ft (6,263 m)) and explored the mountains of Ecuador.[24] It took until the late 19th century for European explorers to penetrate Africa. Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa was climbed in 1889 by Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller and German geologist Hans Meyer, Mount Kenya in 1899 by Halford Mackinder.[25]

The last frontier: The Himalayas

The last and greatest mountain range was the Himalayas in South Asia. They had initially been surveyed by the British Empire for military and strategic reasons. In 1892 Sir William Martin Conway explored the Karakoram Himalayas, and climbed a peak of 23,000 ft (7,000 m). In 1895 Albert F. Mummery died while attempting Nanga Parbat, while in 1899 Douglas Freshfield took an expedition to the snowy regions of Sikkim.[26]

In 1899, 1903, 1906, and 1908 American mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman (one of the first professional female mountaineers) made ascents in the Himalayas, including one of the Nun Kun peaks (23,300 ft (7,100 m)). A number of Gurkha sepoys were trained as expert mountaineers by Charles Granville Bruce, and a good deal of exploration was accomplished by them.[26]

In 1902 the Eckenstein-Crowley Expedition, led by English mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein and English occultist Aleister Crowley was the first to attempt to scale K2. They reached 22,000 feet (6,700 m) before turning back due to weather and other mishaps. Undaunted, in 1905 Crowley led the first expedition to Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, in an attempt described as "misguided" and "lamentable".[26][why?]

Eckenstein was also a pioneer in developing new equipment and climbing methods. He started using shorter ice axes which could be used single-handed, designed the modern crampons and improved on the nail patterns used for the climbing boots.[27]

By the 1950s, all the eight-thousanders but two had been climbed starting with Annapurna in 1950 by Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal on the 1950 French Annapurna expedition. The highest of these peaks Mount Everest was climbed in 1953 after the British had made several attempts in the 1920s; the 1922 expedition reached 8,320 metres (27,300 ft) before being aborted on the third summit attempt after an avalanche killed seven porters. The 1924 expedition saw another height record achieved but still failed to reach the summit with confirmation when George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared on the final attempt. The summit was finally reached on 29 May 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay from the south side in Nepal.[26]

Just a few months later, Hermann Buhl made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat (8,125 m), on the 1953 German–Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition, a siege-style expedition culminating in a last 1,300 meters walking alone, being under the influence of drugs: pervitin (based on the stimulant methamphetamine used by soldiers during World War II), padutin and tea from coca leaves. K2 (8,611 m), the second-highest peak in the world, was first scaled in 1954 by Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni. In 1964, the final eight-thousander to be climbed was Shishapangma (8,013 m), the lowest of all the 8,000-metre peaks.[26] Reinhold Messner from the Dolomites was then the first to climb all eight-thousanders up to 1986.[28]

aren't arranged marriages unromantic, since the person in question isn't being given the freedom to potentially find and marry the person that they instinctively know they love enough to pledge life-long loyalty to?