Beyond Possible
Nimsdai Purja Hodder & Stoughton £20
We all know that Everest is the highest mountain in the world, but few outside the climbing community appreciate that it is just one of 14 daunting Himalayan peaks that rise to at least 8,000 metres, the height above which the scarcity of oxygen has frequently proved fatal.
Scaling all 14 of these mountains in the so-called ‘Death Zone’ is a feat achieved by only the most intrepid climbers, and until last year the record for doing so in the fastest time stood at seven years, ten months and six days.
It’s a record that now lies in tatters, thanks to Nimsdai Purja.
Scaling all 14 of the Himalayan peaks in the so-called ‘Death Zone’ is a feat achieved by only the most intrepid climbers (above, a long queue of climbers heading up Everest in May 2019)
Purja is a former Gurkha, a veteran soldier who was the first member of his regiment ever to be accepted into the elite Special Boat Squadron.
As you’d expect, he’s as hard as nails and brave as a bull but, astonishingly, he began serious mountaineering only eight years ago. Never one to do things by halves, he hatched a plan to conquer all 14 Death Zone eight-thousanders in only seven months, smashing the existing record by more than seven years.
Not surprisingly, most people thought he was crazy.
The story of his epic high- altitude quest is full of nail-biting tension and narrow escapes.
Nims, as he’s known to his friends (and you wouldn’t want to be his enemy), survived avalanches and ferocious storms, and was fortunate not to die when he lost his footing and slid uncontrollably down an icy slope.
Other climbers he encountered were not so lucky.
The man’s sheer grit is astonishing. Time and again he forces himself through ever-escalating pain barriers, driving himself and his loyal team on through willpower alone.
As he says, quitting is not in his blood, and his book is both an inspirational study in leadership and a powerful testament to the human spirit at its very best.
Scoff: A History Of Food And Class In Britain
Pen Vogler Atlantic Books £20
Rating: 
This is an encyclopaedia, sometimes a bit random but always entertaining, of the thousands of ways the British have used food and the rituals around it to declare who we are and to distance ourselves from those we consider our social inferiors.
We no longer have finger-bowl anxiety or fear we’ll use cutlery in the wrong order (work from the outside in, my mum instructed when I first went out into the big eating world; now you’ll rarely come across mixed ranks of forks, knives and spoons), but the way we set our tables, or don’t, how we serve and eat our food and what the food actually is still allows us to read each other’s place in the pecking order of life.
In 1959, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced that ‘the class war is obsolete’. How wrong he was.
Pen Vogler documents centuries of condescension from the upper classes urging the poor to eat more nourishing foods – be more ‘rational’ in what they grew, bought, cooked and ate, when the issue then, as now, was inequality of opportunity and lack of money.
The result in 2020, when our eating habits are shaped by the multi-billion-pound advertising budgets of global food companies and poverty is reaching levels not seen since Victorian times, is a widespread hostility to the idea that what we eat is making us very sick.
And, at this moment, peculiarly vulnerable to Covid-19. If you’re obese or have type 2 diabetes (the disease that, at a cost of £5.5 billion a year, threatened to bankrupt the NHS before Covid-19 took over) you’re more likely to get Covid, and once you’ve got it, more likely to die.
Same with cancer.
Scoff shows how British people developed a very convoluted relationship to food. France has haute cuisine and is as riddled with snobbery as Britain, but, in spite of the inroads of fast food, the food French people value is much the same.
Good bread, cheese, charcuterie, seasonal vegetables. Ditto Italy, Spain and Greece.
Another peculiarity Vogler documents is our indifference to what she calls our own ‘peasant’ cuisine. We love a cassoulet or panzanella but the dishes we developed to eke out expensive meat in tasty ways, such as pease pudding, pottage and hotpots, have fallen out of the mainstream.
There’s a chef-driven move to bring those dishes back into daily life, but right now you’re more likely to find a Lancashire butter pie in an expensive restaurant than on your neighbour’s dinner table.
I work on a radio programme that was launched in 1979 on the basis that good food is for everyone. That was a radical idea 41 years ago. Sadly, as Vogler shows, it’s even more radical now.
Sheila Dillon