Doing It Scared: Paul Pritchard Film & Lecture at the Foundry Climbing Centre

When he won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 1997, with his book Deep Play, he spent the prize money on a world climbing tour that found him in Tasmania, climbing a slender sea stack known as The Totem Pole, a route that was to change his life forever…

Abseiling into the route, a TV-sized boulder fell from thirty meters and struck Paul’s head, inflicting such catastrophic head injuries that doctors thought he might never walk or even speak again. During a year in hospital Paul learned how to walk, feed and dress himself again while the doctors struggled to get his post-traumatic seizures under control. The aftermath of the accident left him with hemiplegia, which means he has little feeling or movement in the right side of this body. Yet, despite this disability, Paul has continued to live a life filled with adventure.

During the show Paul will lecture alongside showing his recent film Doing it Scared. You will join Paul on adventures that took him from Wales to the Himalaya, the Karakoram to Patagonia, Baffin Island to the Pamirs. You will also be swept along with him as he describes how his life of adventure was brought to a screaming end at the bottom of the world, and through the course of the show you will come to understand how Paul sees this, the most catastrophic of injuries, as a precious gift. And finally, you will hear about how he returned eighteen years later in 2016 to attempt The Totem Pole with a brain injury, paralysis and epilepsy.

Unmissable.