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Stark Talk: Joe Simpson

Joe Simpson

BBC Radio Scotland - Stark Talk, Joe Simpson

Edi talks to the writer about his life changing fall off the face of Siula Grande.

In this riveting programme which, in 2003, won the Sony Radio Academy Gold award for best speech programme in the UK, Edi Stark interviews mountaineer and writer Joe Simpson. Born in Malaya in 1960, the youngest of five to an Irish mother and  Scottish father who was in the army, he and his family lived in many places until he went to boarding school at the age of eight. He tells Edi: ‘’My motto for life is ‘Do something every day that scares you’ , but in 1985 when I found myself left for dead in the bottom of a crevasse, I reckoned I’d overstepped the mark somewhat.’’ In 1988, he unsparingly described his near-fatal fall in Siula Grande, Peru in his best selling first book, Touching the Void which was later made into an award-winning  documentary and more recently a critically acclaimed stage play. And yet he feels that it’s frustrating too feel he hasn’t got near to articulating how bad it was to be ’stripped down to nothing, with no personality any more, wasn’t Joe any more but a broken, maudlin thing.’ He reflects on the paradox of ‘doing something you passionately love that is killing your friends and trying to kill you’ and the  guilt he felt about the selfishness of risking  getting killed when his mother would be left to grieve. She had Masses said for him and claimed it was God who kept him from death. A firm atheist, he replied that it was her genes because she was a very tough lady. He bristles when confronted about the emotional territory of his life but finally reveals ‘I don’t think I love easily’ and that he often feels lonely and unhappy. The experience in Siula Grande has defined him, with both loss and gain, in a life which  early on was determined by his passion to climb the world.

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