Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro: a promise 15 years in the making

Also this week: hosting an esteemed guest in Paris and a self-imposed news ban.

Earlier this month, thanks to a weird fascination with being outside my comfort zone, I find myself swathed in winter gear (including my husband’s Arsenal bobble hat and four pairs of trousers), navigating the path to the summit of Kilimanjaro in the snow and the dark. I had promised my youngest son that we would climb Africa’s highest peak when he was about four. Woe betide the parent who breaks an indulgent promise. When he turned 19, the time had come. It took us five days to make it this far: the final push is an eight-hour climb, typically done with a midnight start, so you put on your headtorch, scramble up in the dark and reach the summit to see dawn break over Tanzania and Kenya.

This is exactly what happened. Our group of guides held our hands and sang. They were particularly fond of singing “Oggy Oggy Oggy”, a chant that originates from Cornwall and is apparently about pasties. This was extremely fitting, since we had been sustained by Cornwall’s great export, plus Snickers bars, for much of the hike. Climbing Kilimanjaro is a great excuse to indulge in unhealthy food, such as chips, at every meal, but in other ways offers an extremely virtuous ten days, since no booze is allowed. When we reached the top, Uhuru Peak, at 5,895m, there was, of course, only one song to sing: “Top of the World” by the Carpenters. So, as I am a child of the Seventies, I sang it – much to the horror of my son.

From Paris with love

I have a tiny flat in Paris, so my husband and I went to watch the opening of the Olympics. Fourteen days of rain fell on us in one night while “La Marseillaise” was sung from the top of the Grand Palais during a display of wonder and high emotion. We didn’t stay more than a couple of days. Our dear friend Jonathan Dean was staying in the flat while he went to the Olympic Aquatics Centre in order to cheer on his magnificent son Tom, who came away with a gold medal in the freestyle relay for Team GB. It’s tough being a swim dad; as Jonathan put it, you trade five hours at a gala for a 1.53-minute moment of activity. Still, worth it. My children begged me to ask Jonathan if his son could briefly bring the medal to the flat, rather like one might a holy relic, to grace it with glory. That didn’t happen.

I did learn however that Paris takes its romantic branding very seriously, even providing contraceptives in the goodie bags, in case athletes get too carried away with being in the city of love and opt for making it instead.

All roads lead to Rome

After Paris, it’s off to Rome, dispatched by the Radio Times, who sent me to walk around the legendary Cinecittà Studios and chat to the actor Tom Hollander, who is starring in Iris, a thriller written by Neil Cross and being shot for Sky. Cross, who previously wrote Luther, is almost as excited to be in Rome as I am, possibly because he lives in New Zealand’s Wellington in what amounts to a self-imposed news blackout.

“I gave up excessive indulgence in news for the same reason I gave up smoking,” Cross told me. “It’s addictive and it’s damaging to your health. In the run-up to the US midterms, my wife and I listened to endless, endless hours of news. And I subscribed to all the British newspapers, and she subscribes to all the American newspapers, and we listen to podcasts. And we would lie on the bed and have a coffee together and listen to analysis of the midterms that had not yet taken place. And then the midterms happened, and everything which everybody had told us was going to happen manifestly did not. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been reading all these newspapers and watching all this news and I’m not more informed.’ I was just doing it as a form of entertainment. So I decided that what I’m going to do is engage with actual entertainment.”

Sufficiently schooled

Inspired by this, I retire to my hotel room, dismiss my usual habit of clicking on a news feed, listening to a news podcast or reading a paper online, and log on to Airbnb to see what experiences are on offer instead. Two hours later, I am sitting on a bright-red Vespa being driven by Elphin, who is from Azerbaijan and zooms tourists around Rome every day, unless it’s raining, which it only ever does in February, apparently.

Elphin knows the whole history of Rome. As we speed past the Forum, I realise he’s also extremely up on the English Premier League, even down to its tribal differences. “Your husband’s an Arsenal fan, huh? So he hates Tottenham, doesn’t he?” Indeed. I ought to have worn the bobble hat, not a red helmet.

The Arts Stack by Rosie Millard is on Substack