Snowdon

I'm just back from a week in North Wales to see my Mum and sister, and to explore my native country.

I began the journey at my Mum's house, staying with my sister. We visited Mum in the special nursing home the next day, the first time I had seen her there since she got transferred there from hospital last week. I thought I'd be ok with it, thought somehow that her being settled somewhere would make it easier to comprehend her situation, but it didn't. I spent the first afternoon with a dazed head that wouldn't quite attach back to my body, as I walked in and out of her bedroom, nauseous and lost.

The second visit the following day was worse somehow, my Mum has a chest infection again, which is never easy to see her in such physical distress. In the end I had to walk outside in the cold Autumn air with my sister, and rail at the whole situation. It all just felt sick, cruel that Mum is being put through all this struggle in the name of living, when it seems to me that her time has come. I have had it said to me that maybe her time hasn't quite come, maybe she is hanging on for something that we cannot comprehend. Maybe. But without two drips feeding and medicating her, she would not be here right now - it is only thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, and a philosophy that says we must have life, no matter the cost, that she hangs on.

It brings a lot up for me, seeing my Mum like this, in terms of issues such as euthanasia and a human being's free will. It seems we cannot even determine our own death anymore, we can't die with dignity or self-determination, instead we must ebb our days out in state funded nursing homes. I know it is a complex subject, but somewhere it just seems wrong, wrong to subject a person to this. I guess it is perhaps only when it happens to someone you love that you realise what an important and painful subject euthanasia is.

I guess death itself is such a complex thing. Determining at what point someone is still deemed alive or capable of life or having any quality of life is a difficult thing to assess. People don't want to be responsible for making that choice of potentially ending lives that could have maybe been lived longer or even saved. But the price is that people are forced to live on, and it seems in this culture, no one realises that that is often worse thing than dying, for the person, for their family.

As I was sitting outside the nursing home with my sister, I became aware just how kind and strong my sister was. She understood all my anger, my fear, my fear, my panic, my loss. But every day that I was unable to come and see Mum because I live so far away in Brighton, she was there, day after day, going to see her, wiping her mouth and brushing her hair, holding her hand and playing her the radio. In the face of all this seemingly impossible and boundless suffering, she told me in her own way, that there were still little acts of love she could give to our Mum, there was still dignity and humanity she could bring to the situation, and that is what she would do, to the end.

After talking with my sister outside on the front bench, I felt renewed courage, and wasn't afraid or angry anymore. No time for that, these moments are too precious. I returned to my mother's room, somewhere more at peace. It is no surprise that we resist the truth, the awful truth of sickness and dying, because it just hurts so much. The pain of having to let go, in a situation over which, ultimately, I have no control, is hard. But when I can stop resisting, stop struggling, somewhere there are moments of peace, things are just as they are, and I am back again, loving, no longer afraid.

Wednesday night, Bob arrives, on a late train, that was late. We all go to meet him at the station. Thursday is the day he and I take the train to Snowdonia to climb the biggest mountain in Wales.

Thursday

12.30pm, at Shotton Station waiting for the train to Llandudno. We have just arrived from the tiny train station at my village, Hawarden.

My mother was raised in Shotton, my grandparents lived here all their lives, as well as my Great uncles and aunties and other relatives. This tiny steelworks town, grey and rainy, is infused with memories.

I used to love coming here as a child. Only a few miles from my Hawarden home, I would come to stay with Grandma at weekends. We would walk up the high street, she and I, and I would stare at my reflection in the shiny Tesco's wall, when I was younger, holding her hand, and when I was older, trailing behind her playing with my hair, pretending I was cool. We would go to the pick n' mix section at Woolworths and I would always get strawberry creams and a small packet of After Eights for 20p. Sometimes she would pop a toffee from the pick n mix into her mouth, giving me a naughty knowing smile as we walked up and down the aisle.

If she didn't have a pan of scouse waiting for us in the pressure cooker when we got in, or braising steak with thick gravy, we would get fish and chips from the chippy at the end of Shotton high street, with Angel Delight for pudding if I was lucky. Apart from my Grandma's jam turnovers, Angel Delight had to be my favourite ever pudding, especially when it was served in her cut glass bowls and kept in the fridge overnight. I could clean my bowl in seconds, and would lick the last streaks of pink mousse off the spoon like it was precious gold dust.

When Fridays at school were still half days, my Mum would drive me and a friend to Shotton, to the 'icey'. There I would watch packets of crisps drop from metal pincers in the crisp machine, slurp my Slush Puppie that turned my lips blue, eat Monster Munch and whirl around the ice rink to the sound of echoing music. I cherished those Friday afternoons, the smell of ice and children and the way it felt when I had finally laced my ice skates up, and was padding across the black rubber flooring to the entrance of the freezing rink.

It's raining. It's been raining on and off for days now. It has gone straight from Summer to the heart of a British Winter in four days, it feels. We are on the train to Blaenau Ffestiniog now, from there, we will catch the steam train and chug our way deeper into the heart of North Wales. A young girl on the train is teasing her mother in Welsh. I don't know what she is saying.

Everything is so cheap here in Wales, so unpretentious. It makes me realise what a blag so much of Brighton is. Yesterday, in Mold, I bought a pair of boots for £3.50, and shoes for a pound! Bone china cups for two pounds each.

My sister and I ate lunch in the kind of café I used to come to a lot when I was a teenager, with my first boyfriend. The entire place was heaving with fat old ladies with chronic health problems sitting on orange plastic chairs, smoking fags at the tables. We got a proper cup of tea, and a 'milky coffee', (instant coffee and hot milk kept warm in a huge pot on top of a stove.) It tasted fantastic. The owners were collecting money for one of their washer uppers, who has recently found out they have cancer. A fat lady in a wheelchair commiserated:

"I was in hospital recently, and they cut the wrong vein. Terrible it was. They don't care, you know, you're just a number to them. But then, as I was lying there, I had to think, when I was younger I was a matron in hospital, and I'd go and see all those men who had lost their arms and legs who were in the Paraplegic Ward, all there, back from the army, and I'd think 'there's always someone worse off than you.' Yes, there's always someone worse off than you. Anyway, I'd better be going, I'm on a hunt for Shredded Wheat, reduced sugar.."

With that, her son span her out of the café in her wheelchair, a somnambulistic look across his face. Somehow I feel like there is a woman like this in every cafe or bar across the Western world, telling such a tale, with a cigarette in her hand, and glasses, dyed hair and a son with an impenetrable sadness in his soul.

Wales, I always feel so much more at home here, and always such an alien.

The land is rising up. From the coast train past Rhyl and Prestatyn and Colwyn Bay, now we are deep into country where the hills are starting to rise, fir trees pointing upwards from their peaks. The grass is verdant, almost luminous in the rain. Slate walls, slate paving, slate rooves under the cloudy slate coloured sky. The Welsh landscape. Moving, primal. It's time to get my raincoat out.

So we did a trial run of the mountain in the rain on Friday, with the intention of just ambling up the Watkin Path to take in waterfalls and woodland and general picturesque beauty. In fact we ended up climbing two thirds of the way up Snowdon, so hard it was to turn back from the ominous magic of those blackening peaks that we gradually edged up towards.

Saturday, we were out of the house by half past eight, on the bus for nine, and at the foot of Snowdon before ten. A quick coffee and a fried egg butty for me and we were on our way.

My legs aren't used to this. This becomes clear after about five minutes. This is going to be no easy climb. But the mountainside increasingly drops away beneath us, and we climb, slowly, steadily, towards the distant cloudy peak. Fellow climbers surround us at every pass, for it is Saturday, and a clear fresh morning.

We climb for a couple of hours, aiming for the point where the path splits into the one to Snowdon and the one up to Crib Gogh, with its dangerously narrow snaking ridge. As we turn the corner of the path, the mountainside gives way to reveal huge green lakes, sunlight streaming over the waters. And we are standing on a giant halo, a crystal strewn mammoth of a rock. In front and behind us our fellow climbers, in all shape and forms, the same as me, pant their way forward, increasingly red faced, exhausted.

As we get higher and higher, I realise why I am doing this. From gentle, inspiring rolling green beauty, the mountain changes to a denser, darker presence which strikes me speechless and unnerved. Immense and watchful, Snowdon is power, and we are merely crawling across its vast body like tiny insect babies. At the same time, its power fills me up, imbibes me with a determination and desire to reach its top.

The further and further up that we go I realise, tears down my face, that this place can hold all the strongest stuff of life, love, loss and suffering, it feels like it can hold the whole of existence itself. And as I walk and I watch the grey and black and brown of Snowdon approaching, I can feel my mother, she is here too, she is in the mountain, she is the mountain, and this climb I am doing is life itself, is death, is ending and beginning, endurance, hope, struggle, surrender. With every step my body comes alive, despite the strain and soreness, despite the strong desire to rest. My legs haven't felt this way since I was a child, probably since I used to go walking in Wepre Woods with Mum. For miles on end we would go, through trees and over brooks, up steep banks and over styals, through mud and ponds and endless fields. And here I am, halfway up a mountain, and I am eleven years old again.

After three and a half, maybe four hours, we finally reach the top ridge and make the final walk to the summit. We are above the clouds now, and it quickly becomes freezing. We pile on extra layers hurriedly, wish we had a flask of tea or something stronger. Below us, an endless stream of climbers makes their own journey up to this place, but I can no longer see them. I can see nothing from the top, only cloud, but it doesn't matter, I'm here, I made it, and somehow, everything makes sense.