Many of you will have already deduced that my dwindling post rate on this blog can be attributed, in the large part, to Twitter, the fast-creepng ivy that is wrapping itself around the seasoned bark of so many online diaries.
It's a wonderful medium in a heap of ways, but I occasionally wonder if it isn't all just utterly inane, and I was gobsmacked to read (in David Crane's brilliant biography of Captain Scott, Scott of the Antarctic) that Shackleton thought the same about his first Antarctic diary, 107 years ago:
I turned in about 1am. What a ridiculous thing it must seem to other people to read a diary where such a statement as 'I turned in at 1am' appears as if they were interested in the time another fellow mortal at the other end of the world went to bed… Those sort of items are the penalties that one's friends must pay when struggling to gain a little real information in these reams of paper.
- E.H. Shackleton, diary, 14 July 1902
It's rather short notice, but if you're planning an expedition at some point and you can get to London this weekend, you ought to come to Explore at the Royal Geographical Society. It kicks off on Friday evening with a talk by Paul Rose and there are workshops and presentations all weekend.
I'm running the polar panel on Saturday afternoon, and Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop and I are giving a talk about expedition comms on Sunday morning (hopefully involving a live Skype video call via BGAN satellite phone with Ed Stafford in the Peruvian rainforest!)
Thanks to everyone that emailed to point out that my RSS feed was kaput. It's taken me a bit of head-scratching to fix it, but the solution (in case anyone else is having problems persuading Wordpress 2.5+ to play nicely with Feedburner) lay in pointing Feedburner to /feed rather than /wp-rss2.php. And using Steve Smith's excellent FeedSmith plugin, of course.
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.
"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 guilt-fuelled (and rather rushed) late night post – a few things that make me happy:
An active glacier has been found on Mars. "On the glacial ridges we can see white tips, which can only be freshly exposed ice." I don't need much ice to pitch my tent, no sirree.
The Whale Hunt. I heard the wonderful Jonathan Harris talking about this at the PopTech! conference this year; it sounded cool then, but the actual website is a masterpiece. Harris calls it "a new interface for human storytelling" and I think he's on to something.
The NASA Earth Observatory's Blue Marble photos of the earth – 1, 2 (thanks Anthony).
Tailwind Sports (aka the now defunct Discovery Channel Cycling Team) are selling off their old bikes and kit on eBay. I'm a size 54 if anyone's wondering what to get me for Christmas.
A thought for the day, from Roz Savage (and found at Al's blog – I told you it was good): "Be mindful of the link between present action and desired future outcome. Ask yourself: if I repeat today's actions 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?"
I'm off to my mum's for the Christmas holidays soon, for dog walking, sitting by the fire, home cooking and some long training sessions in the Lincolnshire lanes. I'll write a proper blog post then – a wrap-up of all that's happened this year, and a taste of what's to come in 2008…
A dear friend of mine, the inimitable Paul Deegan, is showing the premiere of his new film, Special Delivery, at the London Apple Store on the evening of Thursday 11 October. The film, some seven months in the making, promises a fifteen-minute slice of high definition Himalayan heaven. I'll be there, and you're invited too.
Food for thought from Richard Bode's Beachcombing at Miramar (via Al's blog):
"I have a choice, the same choice that faces every man. I can live a frivolous life, trying to impress others with the house I live in, the clothes I wear, the car I drive. I can strive to be a success in the way of the world, seeking the admiration of others, reveling in their jealousy. I can seek domination over my family and fellow workers in a vain attempt to hide my own deficiencies. I can seek fame, which is the most elusive pursuit of all, for it has no substance and soon vanishes in the air.
I can indulge in endless prattle about my friends and neighbours, dissipating my life's energy a little at a time. I can wallow in self-pity, refusing to accept responsibility for my own circumstances. I can manipulate others into taking care of me, which is the way of all petty tyrants. I can complain about boredom, as if it were up to those around me to inject excitement into my day.
These are the patterns of the living dead, people who have forsaken life, who are willing to squander their most precious gift, because they refuse to face up to the reality of death. If they wanted to live, truly wanted to live, they would rise up in a resurrection of their own making and commit themselves to the life they have."
Mind you, speaking of impressing others with the clothes you wear, I'm utterly smitten with the Polar Gardening t-shirt from Threadless. Shame they're out of mediums.
First up, a bit of shameless self-promotion: yes, that's me being a poseur in the September issue of FHM, no, I didn't get to keep the jacket, and no, I have no shame.
Secondly, a few people have asked me what I thought of the Top Gear 'North Pole special' (for those of you outside the UK, Top Gear is a popular TV show about cars, mostly – you can watch this particular episode on YouTube). Yes, it was fun to watch. No, it wasn't the North Pole. (They drove to the 1996 position of the Magnetic North Pole, a couple of hundred miles south of its current position, and several hundred miles south of the geographic North Pole). Interestingly, some Russians airlifted a modified Lada on to the pack ice and tried to drive the last degree of latitude to the geographic Pole a few years ago. I've no idea how they got on, but I spotted the crazy vehicle parked up in a garage in Khatanga back in 2001.
Anyway, enough pedantry. Two links for your perusal and delectation: Maciek Duczynski's glorious photos of Norway, and secondly, Hugh McLeod's outstanding essay on how to be creative (now two years old, but it deserves to be revisited, and it's about much more than creativity)…
"The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it's going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, it's worth it. Even if you don't end up pulling it off, you'll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It's NOT doing it when you know you full well you HAD the opportunity- that hurts FAR more than any failure."
