Malcolm Bass on Beinn a Bhuird in the Cairngorms.
Photograph: Coldhouse Collective
One morning last August leading British mountaineer Malcolm Bass woke up knowing something was wrong with him but having no idea what it was. “I remember thinking I was struggling to sequence putting my contact lenses in, getting dressed and going through to the kitchen for breakfast,” says Bass, 56. “That sequence of tasks seemed very complicated to me when it wouldn’t normally be.”
The day before, he’d been rock climbing in the Cairngorms with his close friend Simon Yearsley. Now he found himself lying on the hall floor of Yearsley’s home in Perthshire. He had no idea how he’d got there. “Simon’s wife Sarah came down and said, ‘Are you all right, Malcolm?’ I didn’t feel weird. There was no pain. I kept thinking, just leave me for a moment and I’ll be all right. The next thing I remember was being put on the stretcher and in the ambulance.”