Today was one of the most momentous days of my life. I spent two hours on a train this morning, Philip Glass' Solo Piano on the iPod, watching England's rolling countryside being flung past my window and waiting for a phone call.
It was a call, I tried not to remind myself as the butterflies in my stomach beat and quivered, that had the power to transform the next three years of my life. And travelling to a conference where I was expected to tell the waiting audience that anything is possible, it felt strange that so much of my future was see-sawing on the crux of one person's yes or no.
As we passed power station, Halfords warehouse, drab goods wagon with a blaze of graffiti down its flank; as my hope ebbed and flowed with the flickering bars of the mobile signal, I thought about the conversation with my mother this morning, when I learnt that my grandmother, gravely ill, was on her deathbed. A grandmother that I never knew, and that I will probably never know. Another small part of me somewhere, another flickering signal.
When the call I was waiting for came, I felt oddly dispassionate. It was good news. Perhaps the best news I've ever been handed, but expeditions have taught me to face down fear, to see through emotion's flap and facade, to be objective not excitable. Nothing's ever as good, or as bad as it first seems, right?
From train to taxi to another hotel, another stage. People ask if I ever tire of telling the same story, but I think of bellringers: pulling the rope is always the same, but the beauty is in never knowing who might catch the echoes on the wind. Staring into the bright lights in front of five hundred today, I feel oddly detached. One step removed. Handshakes. A taxi. A seat cover with wooden beads. Local radio. The girl next to me on the station bench eats chips in gravy with a wooden fork. Her striped carrier bag blows open in the breeze; two cans of lager.
My grandmother died earlier today, so she won't hear the story you're reading now, that I typed with two thumbs on a phone, on the train back to London. I'll tell you the news as soon as it's official, but it involves a big company, a big sum of money and the biggest plans I've ever made. Finally, finally. Five bars.
Your about to be published autobiography stops in 1982. What have the readers missed?
Nothing! People who reach their goals are very uninteresting. What could I have written about the last 20 years? I met a lot of awfully boring Hollywood bimbos. I earned a lot of money. I fly only first class.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 Fawcett joined the Polish army but had been in barracks for only a week before escaping from the advancing Nazis and hitchhiking back to Paris. In Paris Fawcett took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners-of-war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans. By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the PoWs out into the yard. "Gentlemen," he announced as he drove them away, "consider yourself liberated."
"You're a Yank," said a British voice.
"Never," came Fawcett's lilting southern burr, "confuse a Virginian with a Yankee."
In 1942 he joined the RAF and trained as a Hurricane pilot. For six months in 1945 he fought with the French Foreign Legion in the forests of Alsace, and took part in the liberation of Colmar. In three months at the end of the war, Fawcett married six Jewish women who had been trapped in concentration camps, a procedure that entitled them to leave France with an automatic American visa.
By 1948 Fawcett was back in action, this time against the Communists in the Greek civil war, fighting in a lounge suit in the guise of a journalist, since no foreigners were supposed to be involved. The following year, he returned to Paris and began his career as an actor, working in the theatre, radio and films. During the next 25 years he appeared in two films with Sophia Loren, knew Orson Welles and William Holden, and in Rome - between two of her six husbands - became the lover of Hedy Lamarr.
In 1956 he spent three months helping to rescue refugees from the Hungarian uprising and, following riots in the Belgian Congo in 1959, joined a friend with a private plane in missions to rescue people who had become trapped and unable to escape the fighting.
A composite animation of the Arctic Ocean's seasonal sea ice retreat in 2007 (from the Cryosphere Today - the original 200mb file is here). To my layman's eye, the rate of melting between July and September is staggering.
Ben Saunders is the youngest person to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton.
