I spent this afternoon bitterly cold and very, very scared; pressed against frozen rock, inching my way across the desolate north face of the Eiger, and scrambling for meagre toe-holds. Battered by tireless, ever strengthening storm winds.

Furious snowflakes driving into my face. Eyes stinging. Panting and wheezing in the high thin air pummelling this impregnable crag.

A featureless, vertiginous slab of rock ahead, waiting for the inevitable stumble of a weary, exhausted climber. Me.

Obviously I did no such thing directly - I can't climb anything more than the emergency stairs at Holland Park station, and there's the issue of getting to and from the Eiger in an afternoon from London too.

It was the power and the drama of sitting through North Face that fired up these intense emotions so strongly that I actually felt I was there, struggling alongside those two German climbers, desperately wanting to be the first to successfully ascend the Eiger. The last great Alpine problem in the eyes of so many of their contemporaries.

Terry and I fell out of the cinema, shattered by the drama, and dizzied and light-headed by the precipituous, eye-popping camera work. How great does a film have to be if it can wring this out of a film-goer?

I saw something else, even deeper than the ultimate tragedy of the film, and that was the utter implacability of the mountain, of every mountain: their absolute inscrutability, they reveal nothing, they offer nothing. Totally dispassionate.