The totem 7

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Ewbank became a musician in the late '70s. A vision of an angel, inspired by a climb, seems recurrent in his thoughts, according to a couple of lines on his website: his biography says "a voice from inside a cliff told him to 'start writing songs!' " and the caption under a photo of a 1967 climb is: "John looking for an angel somewhere".

Is anybody thinking of Ewbank as a Syd fan... or vice versa?
Ewbank was a Leonard Cohen fan, but Syd Barrett being a fan of climbing... It might not be too audacious a speculation, according to one report in the usual "the crazy Syd in Formentera" style:

It was not a success: Syd showed no signs of improvement, but did display odd bouts of violence. On one night, when a powerful electric storm was raging, the turbulence reflected Syd's inner torment – Juliette's memory is of Syd literally trying to climb the walls.

— Nick Mason  

Juliette was Rick Wright's girlfriend. Rick had little more to say about Syd's experience in Formentera than that anecdote about his climbing, as we can see in the introductory chapter.

In July 1967, 15 million people watched one of the first examples of "reality TV": the ambitious BBC outside broadcast of the climbing of the Old Man of Hoy, a 137 metre sea-stack on the Scottish island of Hoy. Academic Paul Gilchrist described the so-called "ground-breaking event":

It connected an armchair audience with the elite of a sport subculture intent on conquering one of Britain's most spectacular geological treasures.

— Paul Gilchrist  

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Immersion into foreign totems


sources →
Mason, Nick. Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. 40. Print. http://books.google.com/books?id=S86vyiU-nwwC&pg=PT40
Gilchrist, Paul. "Reality TV on the Rock Face: Climbing the Old Man of Hoy." Sport in History 27.1 (2007): 44-63. Print. http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/greatclimb/sec3_pg3.shtml