Thanks for the corrections, Noreen!

This is what MacColl said about the song in a book of poetry somewhere:

[1989:] The last time I climbed Suilven, or to be more precise, failed to climb it, was in my seventy-second year. I was with my wife and fourteen-year-old daughter Kitty. "You go ahead," I told them, "I'll meet you at the top." But 'the flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee', and I hadn't gone more than half the distance when my legs refused to carry me further. My body had given me plenty of warnings over the last seven or eight years but this was the final notice. My mountain days were over. I sat down on a rock feeling utterly desolate. The feeling lasted for several days and then my grief and feeling of loss gave way to nostalgia and I wrote The Joy of Living. In an odd kind of way it helped me to come to terms with my old age. (Ewan MacColl in Bell, Poetry 104)