One

Infinite love is the only truth.

Everything else is illusion.[1]

It was Christmas. Although, you’d hardly have known it. I was at home pinging my friends in front of the telly. The telly wasn’t actually working, of course. Nothing was. The only entertainment that morning was the snow. Since 5 a.m., the whole of North Wales had been issued with a severe weather alert.

You need to know what a severe weather alert means when you’re me, Arabella (Ellie) Morgan, living in a remote farmhouse on the slopes of Mount Snowdon with only your mum. It means life comes to a standstill.

Totally.

Yes, that’s right. Nothing. Actually. Happens.

There is no electricity. No fairy lights. No heating. No way to charge your phone. No hot water. No COMPUTER. No hope of watching Dr Who. No hope of a Christmas dinner. In fact, There is No Hope.

What kind of sad Christmas is that?

Sorry. Correction: There was one hope – the generator might fire up.

The generator had not fired up.

Mum and I had spent two hours in the barn trying to coax it into life, and failed, miserably. Plus that Christmas morning, it wasn’t only the snow and the electricity. An hour or so after the severe weather alert had pinged up on our phone apps, the emergency services rang, closely followed by a call from the Llanberis Mountain Search and Rescue coordinator. That meant there was somestoopid hiker, who’d planned on spending Christmas morning on the summit of Snowdon (like you do).

And hadn’t made it.

It also meant my mum (support member for the rescue team) was going to have to get out on to the mountain and do a sweep of all our top pastures and the slopes behind our farmhouse, as soon as it was daylight, to see if she could eliminate those areas from the main search.

And of course, she couldn’t go alone (LMRT Handbook. Section 32: ‘Emergency rescue searches in Severe Weather Alerts must be manned by a minimum of eight.’)

Great.

I wonder who the seven others were going to be.

Ha ha.

Since the farm failed, (for obvious reasons, like, um, yes, would that be snow? Not to mention being halfway up the highest peak in Wales, plus all those new restrictions on where your sheep can graze/can’t graze/might not be able to graze in future … ), being a mountain guide, and servicing campers, is how Mum keeps us going. I don’t know why we can’t just leave, and go back and live in that nice little flat in central London (we were so happy there). But I guess that’s another story, and probably something to do with Dad and the accident, and how he loved Snowdon, and how Mum has to help rescue everyone, because nobody rescued him.

Anyway there I was, 25th December, crouched with Mum in front of a log fire, sipping tea, feeling sorry for myself.

‘You’ll come with me,