"Wanting to be famous is surely the most ubiquitous ambition of our age. So why do people look at me when I say it as if I’ve just confessed to being a Nazi sympathiser? There’s something cheap and tawdry about wanting to be a celebrity, as though no one setting out to achieve something so vulgar could possibly produce anything worthwhile. Such snobbery is based on a ludicrously high-minded notion of what inspires people to greatness. According to Freud, all artists are motivated by the desire for ‘honour, power, riches, fame and the love of women’. Even Arthur Miller, the patron saint of liberals, confessed to finding his notoriety a bit of a thrill. ‘Something in me groaned at their approach,’ he wrote of being recognised by members of the public, ‘even if, against my will, I couldn’t deny the animal fun of being noticed.’
Whenever I make this point at dinner parties, the standard response is to accuse me of mixing up fame and celebrity, as if the two are completely unrelated. Thus, it is all very well for Martin Amis to announce that he wants to write books that will still be read in 100 years’ time, but God forbid he should set out to write a bestseller. In other words, everlasting fame is good, but the short-lived variety — the kind that lasts 15 minutes — is bad.
But why should one be so admirable, and the other so contemptible? Why should duration make such a difference? Surely, if the yearning to be noticed is sad and pathetic, then the desire to be noticed by successive generations to come, stretching to the end of time, is even more sad and pathetic? If we’re being logical about this, we should rank Martin Amis even lower on the respectability scale than Jade Goody. She only wants to be famous in her lifetime. He wants to be famous for ever."
"If we’re going to have an Individual Revolution — ie, if we accept that we can be successful without the help of powerful companies — how are we going to find out about each other?
The answer is self-promotion. Who can explain what makes me great with more enthusiasm and authenticity than myself? If I’m not paying my label to plaster my face on a billboard, can I be blamed for speaking boastfully on my little website? Is it so narcissistic to post the best photos of myself when I have the largest private collection of them in existence?
Many of us are afraid to talk about our achievements, even when neglecting to do so is dishonest. If you are special; i.e. if you have personally done something great, by all means, bring it to my attention. You can rather safely assume that if you don’t, nobody will. And if they do, you won’t feel they did it justice. I’ve gotten quite a bit of press and never felt like it conveyed me properly."
There's a truly hardcore Russian polar expedition going on at the moment; Matvey Shparo and Boris Smolin are trying to get to the Geographic North Pole in the polar night (i.e. before the sun comes up in the spring). They started skiing from the coast of Siberia on Christmas Eve, and they hope to reach the Pole by late February, a time when most expeditions are still getting ready to start (and nearly a month before I'll set off for the Pole from the coast of Canada). You can read their updates here, and the patchy quality of the translation makes it almost poetic. It's gripping stuff:
"We are living from one stay for the night to the other… After we pack our tent in the morning, we can not have a rest any more… Ice is thin, pressure ridges are low, it is absolutely impossible to hide from the wind behind them, and the wind is everywhere. We turn our backs upon the wind, drink hot tea… and continue our route. It seems that never before in the universe such cold and such constant wind had ever been blowing anywhere… Our ice-floe is shaken. There are shocks again and again. It is impossible to sleep, so we decided to get up and to go. It is disgusting that all things in the tent seem to be moist. The main problem is that we can not completely recover our strength and to have a rest.
Strong wind from SEE, snow, blizzard. A new challenge: in blizzard our lanterns can break only three meters in the darkness. D.S. asked us: "Is it beautiful?" But we can not think about any beauty at the moment, as we can not see anything. You keep thinking only how not to lose the main direction of our route… A sudden danger is threatening us. We took a new ration from the sleds – our today's supper, a morning breakfast (for tomorrow) and daily snacks – all these products were soaked with petrol. It appeared that the polar bear, who attacked us on the fourth day of the expedition and tore in pieces out bottle with petrol, had also poured the petrol on our food provisions.
This is some kind of exotic bad luck. You can not eat the food, saturated with petrol, as petrol does not blow away. How many our rations have been lost?"
A quick (but heartfelt) thank you to the chap in the London Phoenix shorts who helped me out and gave me his spare inner tube after my double puncture while training in Richmond Park this morning. We rode together long enough to talk about mountain bike racing, my brother's transition from rowing to cycling and, er, carpentry, but I didn't actually get your name. So thank you, and the next time you see me in the park, the coffee's on me (and I'll have two tubes with me this time…)
2007 was a huge year of challenge, and of growth for me. Perhaps rather tellingly, it was also the first year since 2003 that I haven't been on an Arctic expedition, and all that time in London (and in executive lounges, business class flights and swanky hotels) seems to have skewed my thinking a bit; my first stab at a list of goals for this year looked more like a to-buy list than a to-do list.
Luckily a brief New Year's blast of fresh air and suffering from a training trip spent hammering over the Brecon Beacons in Wales seems to have fixed things, along with a pertinent quotation from one of my favourite books of 2007, Feet in the Clouds by Richard Askwith (Amazon UK, Amazon US) that reminded me of one the joys of expedition life:
"We are richer now, but more overworked, more deeply in thrall to the addictions of getting and spending. We have more possessions, and they tyrannise us. Each new mod con must be shopped for, maintained, insured, upgraded; each new thing must be stored, kept track of, kept secure, tidied; and the whole package is paid for in overwork, time-poverty, round-the-clock availability and round-the-clock insecurity.
We have more, and we have less. In such a world, freedom is both more precious and more elusive than ever. And one of the few surefire ways of liberating ourselves from the tyranny of the consumer society is to put ourselves beyond its reach."
