ALAN MATHESON 1959 - 2002

This week's Summit Talks is dedicated to the creator of Scottish Outdoors Alan Matheson who died this week. Dave Hewitt says it is time for us all to take his legacy forward.

Those who feel the breath of sadness
Sit down next to me
Those who find they're touched by madness
Sit down next to me
Those who find themselves ridiculous
Sit down next to me...
James

This, as readers will already be aware, has been a desperate week for Scotland Online, with the death of its online editor and primary energy source, Alan Matheson. He was only 42.

For all that we must have swapped a hundred emails in the 20 months since he offered me a job, I wouldn't claim to have known Alan well in person. One of the most appealing aspects of his character however - one of his abilities - was to create the feeling that you had known him for half your life. Writing in The Courier three days after Alan's death, Richard Callison, the head of Scotland Online, said, "I knew (Alan) personally and professionally and did not regard him as a colleague at work but as a friend." I can echo that.

One of the oddities of column writing is that the writer never needs to visit the office where the words are transferred to page or screen. Modern technology, particularly email, has accentuated this, with everything done remotely, shoved down wires and into modems. My own situation is typical - I've yet to set foot in any Scotland Online premises.

But Alan wasn't one to leave his writers festering in lonely electronic garrets. Right from the start we were swapping mail about matters that were - ostensibly - peripheral to hills and hill writing. Football featured a fair bit and music particularly. We shared an enthusiasm for Indie bands, tipping each other off about the merits of the latest James or Lambchop CD or issuing dodgy-quality warnings about a recent Teenage Fanclub effort. We had, it's reasonable to say, similar tastes in such matters - and when Alan said he was chuffed (one of his words) that his brother was playing with the Pearl Fishers, I guessed that I would like them and did.

I use the phrase "ostensibly peripheral" with a reason, as our discussions about football and music were not unconnected with the actual work of writing about hills. One of the primary reasons why I quickly came to like Alan and to trust his editorial judgement was that he recognised something which many a hill-related journalist seems incapable of understanding no matter how hard it might be drummed into their head with an ice hammer.

It is this - that all manner of dismal, humourless, pontificatory guff has been - and continues to be - written by those who like to pretend that hills are the Preserve of Higher Things, when in reality the vast majority of walkers and climbers never go about in a mystical daze declaiming paeans of praise to the Beauty of Nature and the Majesty of the Sanctuary. Maybe one in a hundred hillgoers talks and thinks like this and they're perfectly entitled to do so; the rest of us happily and uncomplicatedly wander our ridges and plateaux, heads filled with everyday worries about work and health and mortgage repayment and whether the timer on the video has been set properly.

Hillgoing helps to settle and clarify such thoughts but it rarely if ever transcends them. It's not meant to - hills have to share our lifespace with a million other things and it's unhelpful to regard them as something other, something aloof. This might be an OK attitude in the Greater Ranges, but this is Scotland, land of the day-trip and the camping weekend. Land of pottering about. Here people go to the hill to think, to relax, to switch off, to have a laugh. And then - to quote Alan's fellow Dundonian Michael Marra - they come home for their tea.

Very little hill writing - and even less Scottish hill writing - truly conveys this. Hence one of the challenges of the medium is to avoid the cliches of hackneyed German Romanticism (cliches that looked tired in 1902, let alone 2002) and to connect instead with the mass of ordinary readers. Alan knew this, both intuitively (because he was never one to take himself too seriously) and also in level headed commercial terms. Work your way not just into the minds of the people but also into a gap in the market and the readers - the traffic, in web-speak - will come.

There was a second aspect in which Alan's intuition about how to manage a site was, to use another of his phrases, spot on. He had been around the journalistic world long enough to know the key axiom of column writing - that the writer must be given space to be opinionated, and that every reader ought to either love or hate a columnist. What you don't want - and what riddles so much of the hill-journalism world - is for readers to be indifferent about what they're reading. A good maxim for the columnist is to be bold, not bumbling, to go through the final copy and remove any needless perhaps or maybe that might have crept in.

Alan already knew this in the autumn of 2000 when the site swung into action, and it was put to the test within a few months with the onset of foot and mouth and all that came with it in terms of access restriction, rural-economy trashing, weak government and single-issue zealots trying to bully everyone into submission. From the start I was raging about this, and I wasn't alone, but every other outlet seemed content to toe an ultra-cautious, dangerously deferential line that, quite aside from being (to me at least) wrong, also failed to address the outraged/frustrated mood of an outdoor community suddenly faced with a blanket prohibition on so much as stepping out of the door. And quite aside from being plain stupid, it didn't take much to see that this was illegal for everywhere north of Dumfries and Galloway - "advisory" signs were being passed off as compulsory, and backwater intimidation was rife.

Almost no one in a position of editorial responsibility seemed willing to challenge this, but not so Alan. Within days of the start of the crisis I filed a piece questioning the received wisdoms and assumptions, and Alan ran with it. Shortly afterwards, sensing the opportunity for Scotland Online to be an island of sanity for freethinkers within the hill community, he suggested that we should run daily "situation" bulletins in addition to the regular opinion pieces. Thus for six months this site covered foot and mouth with a vigour and a boldness seen nowhere else. And while not everyone agreed with the arguments being made (which was fine - as with column writing, it's better to have readers disagree than to stay shtum), the whole period brought this site to an ever-wider public. Every few weeks I would ask Alan - rather nervously, since I was chief provocateur - how things were going, and each time he would reply, "Traffic's up". He had a good war.

For all the modern - and modem - technology, Alan was an editor in the old-fashioned sense of balancing pushiness with praise and so drawing the best out of his contributors. Editing is a dying art - far too many "editors" now do little more than arm's-length layout, unable or unwilling to intervene and work directly with writers for the greater good of the overall product. Alan was very much hands-on, and it showed. As the site developed he was able to drag the work of a diverse bunch of creative and opinionated people into some kind of viable and coherent shape. He made this site the place to be.

Ultimately, for all the grief at the loss of a friend and a kindly employer, it is this "professional" aspect that makes me angry at the random futility of Alan's death, makes me shake a fist at the heavens. It's the needless loss, the sudden pointless removal of that rare thing: a man with ideas, drive, vision and an utterly realistic and pragmatic perception of how to get things done. I felt something of the same anger two years ago with the collapse of a previous bold attempt to cover the hills: the Saturday Outdoors section of the Scotsman newspaper. Again this had been kickstarted and maintained by a hill-loving journalist with no time for clutter and cliches, Robert Dawson Scott. But at least the failure of that attempt (after 18 very happy months) was "only" due to its being trashed by market forces and the dumbing-down of the paper. And at least Robert Dawson Scott is still around to try again elsewhere. Alan's not.

He was well aware of the history. Indeed his first email to me, three months after the Scotsman meltdown, included this, "I was one of the disappointed masses that missed their Saturday fix of hill-related stuff. But perhaps the Scotsman's loss is our gain..." As so often, he was spot on. He took the residual momentum and energy from the Scotsman Outdoors, added his own ideas and inspiration, and formed it into ScottishOutdoors.com. It's no coincidence that there was a big crossover of readership; I was not alone in being hugely appreciative of his efforts.

The last time we met - in late February - was for the type of unconventional hill jaunt that seemed to embody why we got on. I've long been in the habit of wandering the Ochils on moonlit nights, and whereas many experienced hillgoers shy away from this (too risky, too much time spent away from Changing Rooms, haven't eaten sufficient carrots for night vision), Alan was without hesitation up for such antics. The absence of the alleged full moon and the arrival instead of cloud and snow didn't deter him in the slightest; rather, he seemed amused, even encouraged, by the deterioration in conditions. As we stumbled around up top, jokes were made about writing this up in terms of the Majestic Stygian Gloom and so on.

Had we both lived to 80 we would have done a lot more of this than the pathetic half-dozen days we actually managed. But that, as it turned out, was that. We had pencilled in Beinn a'Ghlo for the day before he died but deadlinitis saw it drift out of our diaries. A mid-May attempt on the seven Crianlarich Munros would definitely have happened - it was to have been a training effort for something really big around midsummer. Alan was keen to have a go at a massive Munro day, "double-figures at least" - and while this raised comic visions of an impossibly superhuman, supercharged 100-plus Munro-bag, I knew what he meant. As so often I was won over by the boyishness of his enthusiasm and was prepared to give it a go.

So what I have done since hearing of his death? Not a lot - or, rather, not a lot in terms of the overt weeping-grieving thing. I've felt empty-headed and numb. I have however played the last James CD - the one we both really really liked - really really loud. He'd have appreciated that. Then (and he'd have laughed at the bizarre off-message incongruity of this) I cut short last week's faffing over what lawnmower to buy for my garden and just went out and bought the biggest no-messing revved-up mower in the whole damn range. A tribute lawnmower, no less.

And what next? Well, in a couple of weeks, those seven Crianlarich Munros need attended to. I suspect that will be hard and not just physically. But most of all there's the need to get back to work and to take this site forward, to maintain its boldness and its commitment to good writing. This has always been Alan's site, and the best of all memorials to the man will be if we - writers, illustrators, designers and above all readers - strive to maintain it as a modern, progressive location for strident, funny and - above all - high-quality outdoor writing. I'll miss him terribly but there's work to be done.

Dave Hewitt
1/5/2002