Electricity.

Katherine Rundell on night-climbing ...

I began night climbing at Oxford, with a few friends, crawling out of windows and up drainpipes – the circular ones, never the more ornate square ones, which are likely to peel away from the wall – to see the city we were still in awe of from above. Oxford can be an uneasy place for teenagers not reared on self-belief and champagne, and it was emboldening to walk it from above; the closest you could get to conquering the city. But it was more than that; I have always loved to be up high, and I have always loved the electricity it puts in the blood.

Night climbing, when it goes well, works on the joy of quick and necessary decisions, on improvising in the two seconds in which your stomach and brain are in conflict. It is unmooring your sense of fear and self-preservation from your sense of hope and danger and adventure. There are moments that can’t be replicated anywhere else; nowhere at ground level offers the same pleasures as sitting with your back against chimney pots, or walking the apex of a rooftop, or looking down on the Tetris pattern of masters’ gardens and college quads. I discovered that All Souls has gargoyles with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.

The world is huge up high. I’m not daring in most things – I cross roads at the green man and wear my seatbelt on a plane even when the captain has switched off the light – but heights offer a brick-dust puzzle-solving shot of joy that nothing else matches. Climbing walls make good rough drafts, and smell enticingly of chalk and human palms, but they’re not like the outside. Outside, the most real danger is from yourself.