Lucky Man

As I write, it's 1902 UTC (Tuesday) and I'm on the BA269 jumbo, half way from Heathrow to LAX, 10,363 metres above the Greenland icecap. After chicken curry and The Island with Ewan McGregor, I stood up to go to the loo. As I sidestepped and shimmied past sprawled, eyemasked sleepers to the back of the plane, I noticed a few people peering under their window blinds at a familiar orangey-blue glow. The sun was setting over Greenland.

Someone before me had splashed water (or worse) on the floor of the loo and I wrestled with a moral dilemma: do I perform the selfless deed of mopping it up, or do I pretend it's not there and hope that those next in line don't assume it was my lousy aim that splattered the floor.

Before sitting down again (aisle seat, no view) I stood by the emergency exit at the back. With my face jammed into the tiny porthole I could make out distant mountain peaks, the telltale creases and folds of hidden crevasses and plumes of spindrift racing towards the coast. It looked like a blustery day for skiing. A guy in his thirties joined me at the window and struck up conversation.

'Stunning isn't it?'

'It's an amazing place. I was here for a month last year.'

'A month? What were you up to?'

'I lead expeditions. We were here training for Antarctica. We're going to be back here again in May and then we're heading south in October for four months.'

I traced the horizon to the distant coast, blurred by patchy sea ice. 'It all seems very real now.'

And it did seem real. For a moment, I imagined myself down there, manhauling on a bearing, with all the superficiality of civilisation, all the marketing and PR, stripped away by the Arctic wind.

'You're a lucky man' he said, smiling.

— Filed under Greenland