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Last Wednesday I sat down for lunch with Rosie Stancer, a veteran of several South Pole expeditions and the ’97 North Pole relay. We had been on an expedition to Svalbard in 2002 and spent one particularly glorious night in a storm that snapped our tent poles as the temperature plummeted to –40. One newspaper described her as a cross between Tinkerbell and the Terminator. They’re not far off.
Rosie has persuaded Mars (the confectioner rather than the planet) to sponsor an attempt to become the first woman to reach the North Pole solo. It’s a tough journey. In 2004, I was one of the last people to see Dominick Arduin alive when she set out from Siberia to attempt the same journey. Others such as Ann Daniels have been hamstrung by logistics failures, while Bettina Aller was stalked by polar bears for days in 2001 getting frostbite from the revolver she had to brandish at all times.
Rosie asked me to manage the expedition for her and I’ve leapt at the chance to bring some of my old team back together again and do my best to make this an expedition to be proud of. This means I’ll be back and forth between New York, London and the Canadian High Arctic over the next few months and will do my best to up the blogging rate round here so that I can give a flavour of what it’s like preparing and running an expedition where the penalties for poor decisions can be severe. There is also lots of exciting news happening around SOUTH, so watch this space. . . .
With the possible exception of a blog post during our 2005 expedition to Greenland where Ben managed to make me look like Sid James, this youtube screencap from a video made for Ice Edge ranks as the worst picture of me on the net.
I realise that now I am opening the floodgates for someone to prove me wrong.
A nice lady was wandering through a shop in the south coast, found these biscuits for sale, and gave them to me. They are apparently exact replicas of the biscuits that Scott took with him on his 1911-12 South Pole expedition. The packaging claims that the biscuits are perfect for trekking adventures, and at 470 cals per 100g they certainly pack a wallop. I just wonder whether basing your biscuit on the famously insufficient and ultimately deadly nutrition strategy that Scott employed is the best advertising to go with. Taste good though.
Frances at 76 Degrees South has been taking a break from her work at Halley station in Antarctica to visit the local penguins. She has some beautiful photographs on her site and you can find more at her flickr page where incredible Antarctic vistas, wildlife and life on an Antarctic base compete with the occasional vodka luge for attention.
Mr Hudson and the Library played the seminal Later. . . with Jools Holland last week, in the company of Tony Bennett, Damon Albarn’s new band and Eric Bibb. Have a listen.
Today I sat on an orange sofa and explained an idea I’d had after my front tyre exploded on the marylebone flyover and I’d had to walk the six miles to Ben’s dragging my bike and cursing my absent-minded shortage of inner tubes. I sat there in the offices of the mighty IDEO and explained an idea for massively improving our performance for SOUTH, while some of Britain’s best design minds listened carefully. They listened, and then they demolished it. Maybe that’s the wrong word, they didn’t criticise it, they didn’t tell me why it couldn’t be done (quite the opposite), they just simply took it apart piece by piece and examined it in a way I had never thought to before. They showed me that I had been asking a question in a way that presupposed a certain solution, and that the question didn’t nearly go deep enough into the problem. In a flurry of brightly coloured post-it notes they anatomised our problems, staking out each segment, each component like a medical exam and kindly but firmly drew me back every time I began to gallop down a particular path towards a single solution.
Ben had been caught by a delayed delivery man and was unable to make it over so we skyped him in on my laptop and occasionally he would pipe up with ideas as they came to him or useful nuggets of information that I had overlooked. It was a little surreal, as though HAL from 2001 or KITT from Knightrider were suddenly spouting away on the table. I don’t know if he got the full impact of the meeting, but to me it was like seeing something so innately familiar for the first time, jamais vu maybe. It was also deeply humbling to see the company that designed the first laptop, the first mouse dedicating manhours to SOUTH for no other reason than they believed in our dream.
Walking through the city tonight, my ipod choosing pitch-perfect tracks for me, it felt like seeing London for the first time too. I got to the station but just carried on walking; I felt like a tourist, and I realised that London doesn’t really start until one floor up. If you walk along Regent street you can see dingy woolen goods shops mixing with over-priced suitmakers, but one floor up and it’s an infinitely long palace of french balconies, stone-wrought urns and architectural intricacies that seem to be the last true vestige of empire. Up Portland Place, past the conical All Souls Church standing guard over the BBC and the windows are interspersed with wreaths and ornate overhangs, through Park crescent with its gleaming porticoes that really show you what old money means until Regents Park interjects a vista of darkness among the lights and London has never seemed so much a part of me. On expeditions I often imagine streets in London in the most vivid of detail, today I was reminded why that’s no bad thing.
Ben and I are big believers in pushing your boundaries, and like to think that on occasion we walk the walk. However, I doff my cap and tug my forelock to the Burmese python that swallowed an alligator whole. The act of eating the Alligator did cause the python to explode, but definitely an A-star for ambition and follow through.
Strong contender for world’s most inspirational person Sunny Bates has launched her latest project: Pheeder. This is web 2.0 for phones, call up leave a message and all your friends (or whoever you want) will automatically receive a voice mail with your message. This is a fantastic way to keep up with your extended social group, especially if, like me, you find times and venues change at the drop of a hat.
However, Pheeder’s phone tree capabilities also has a few other handy uses. It is an excellent way for organisations to get information out to a large body of people fast. Say you are a school principal and your school has a snow day, Pheeder could instantly inform the student body it has a day off. It could act as an emergency service for your business and even has applications in organising peaceful protests, where people currently use a more neolithic approach to phonetrees, allowing a faster more flexible response to the fight against ‘the man’ .
I think this is really why Pheeder can really be classed as a telephonic version of web 2.0; Pheeder may be providing a specific service but what it eventually becomes will not be down to a marketing department or company strategy, its development will largely be driven by users shaping it to their needs. It’s currently only available in the US, but I think this is a nifty and useful service that I’m looking forward to giving a decent go when I hit New York later this year.
The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker is one of those books that you should never read before heading out to meet friends. Quite pleasant conversations about gardening or sports will be interrupted by a diatribe as you attempt to explain the mind-blowing chapter you have just read. This will inevitably lead to an argument as Pinker aims both barrels at the post-modern politically-correct world, ignites the data-driven gunpowder and unleashes some scientific buckshot.
Pinker’s principal beef is with the concept that man is born a blank slate and it is largely his environment that shapes and defines him. He argues that it is all very nice for us all to believe this and it means we can wax lyrical about our equality and ability to perfect man, but it just isn’t backed up by the evidence. Pinker argues that the vast weight of scientific research into the nature/nurture debate comes down heavily on the side of nature, and reports on the other side are often guilty of scientifically-biased wish fulfilment.
Pinker spends a large part of the first half of his book outlining and explaining this evidence, using examples from one scientist’s study of universal human behaviours, responses and mental characteristics (as widespread in Mongolia as in Manhattan) to the classic experiments with twins who have been separated at birth. Apparently, twins in this case often meet in later life to find themselves both owning the same tie, whistling the same song and having married similar women at roughly the same age. Their personalities, while not set in stone, were largely formed before they had even left the womb.
Moreover, people who have suffered damage in specific parts of their brain often have completely changed personalities as a result. The experience of Phineas Gage is a classic example of this. Pinker’s evidence is largely boiled down to a set of ‘laws’ of the mind. The principal one of which is that your genes are responsible for at least 50% of your personality and play a far more weighty role than your environment. This is not to say that we have no control over our personality, nor that our environment plays no part. Merely that they play a far lesser role than previously realised.
So far, so interesting. But Pinker really gets going in the second half of the book when he applies this learning to various fields from crime to politics to the arts. Are children who grow up in a violent household more likely to be violent because of the environment they were raised in or because they have inherited the genes for violence from their parents? Or to put it another way, all those parenting books that say that parents who smother their children with affection will raise affectionate children might just be talking rubbish if affectionate people are genetically predisposed to have affectionate kids and more distant parents are genetically predisposed to have distant kids. In this case, how parents act with their kids has far less impact than many parents believe.
The argument holds true across a range of subjects as Pinker takes on our political beliefs, feminism, racism and our thoughts on art. Some may think Pinker oversteps his mark, and I am certainly not doing his argument justice here, but to me this was a powerful explanation of why we are the way we are and it sets out an optimistic view of the future for all that it is set in hard realities.
Having lived in the beating heart of London for so long, I thought I was pretty much unshockable when it comes to the arts. I didn’t raise an eyebrow when Puppetry of the Penis came to town, I didn’t raise my head from my paper to acknowledge Damien Hirst’s rotting livestock, my headphones remained resolutely embedded during some of the more descriptive Peaches songs. However, something I saw last Friday shocked me to my core and made me finally realise that our culture has been utterly corrupted. Last Friday I was taken to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Royal Theatre in Haymarket.
They call it a musical, a family one apparently. But what kind of sick individual would take his family to see this? My father apparently. As a family treat in honour of my mother’s 20th 40th birthday, he decided this clarion call for moral iniquity would make a fun night out.
This descent into the heart of darkness starts out deceptively enough with the story of a bunch of brothers who seem to have left ballet school to make their way in the wild west and I settled down to watch what I only imagined was going to be some kind of high-camp cowboy romp. Then it all went dark.
Midway through the performance, the brothers are rebuffed at ‘a social’. Instead of using this as a learning experience about the importance of personal hygiene, they decide to re-enact the most famous, vicious gang-rape in history: the rape of the Sabine women. They then promptly kidnap the local women and hold them against their will in a remote mountain cabin, echoing for me the recent harrowing Austrian kidnap case where Natascha Kampusch was kept in a basement for years by Wolfgang Priklopil. Then, in a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome, the women begin to fall in love with their captors and there are weddings galore.
That a musical can come out with the essential moral lesson that if you can’t get a girl to talk to you when she’s out one night, you should kidnap her and wait for her to fall in love with you, is quite simply sick. That my father, who apparently knew the plot before we even got there, would think this appropriate for a family celebration suggests our long history of family insanity has struck again. I fear for the future.
“War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is created, and it is the executive will to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emolulments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war finally that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and the most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast – ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame – are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”
Nothing more needs to be said.
The polar world is lucky to have many of its greatest exponents given the kind of accolades they deserve, Borge Ousland, Robert Swan and Sir Ranulph Fiennes to name but a few. However, there are also some who have achieved incredible things and yet go largely unsung.
Geoff Somers was a great mentor to me and a whole generation of polar expeditioners and was a key member of the longest Antarctic traverse in history and yet is largely unknown. Even more of a travesty however is the relative anonymity of Sir Wally Herbert, possibly the greatest true explorer that Britain produced in the post-Scott and Shackleton era.
In 1968/69 Sir Wally Herbert made the first ever surface crossing of the frozen Arctic Ocean. En route he and his team became the first expedition to successfully reach the North Pole by surface travel, without the assistance of airlifts. Upon arrival at the Pole, Wally and his team continued on their journey across the Arctic Ocean, finally reaching Spitsbergen 15 months after leaving Alaska. To this day, his accomplishment has never successfully been repeated.
Furthermore, nobody alive today has made a greater contribution to the surveying and mapping of the Antarctic continent. The man, quite simply, is a legend. This October a group of the expedition world’s great and good will be joining together to attempt to redress the balance. A testimonial evening will be taking place at the Royal Geographical Society on 18 October to honour this great man.
The evening should be a fantastic one and you can buy tickets online from www.voyageconcepts.co.uk. If you are in town, I would strongly recommend going. It would be a chance to mix with the who’s who of the world of exploration and to let a real trailblazer know just how important his life’s work has been.
Winston Churchill once said that success is merely the ability to hold on one minute longer than anyone else. I feel that recently Ben and I have been testing that out.
We’ve met some incredible people over the last six months from some of the most powerful media players in the world to ultra-connected corporate operators. We’ve met kit manufacturers who have come up with fantastic new ways to create equipment that will keep going for as long as we need it to, no matter what the conditions. We’ve met and been inspired by teachers and educators who saw in SOUTH something of the dream and passion that they wanted to instill in the children in their care. However, we also heard a consistent refrain: ‘Do you know what we could do with this, do you know what we could do if we had a little more time?’
A huge part of us both, the part that only truly feels alive when standing at the precipice of our abilities, is in anguish right now. But we know we have made the right decision: we are postponing SOUTH until October 2007. From the kernel of an idea that I had when being thrown around by waves far south of Cape Horn, SOUTH has grown into something far bigger than I ever imagined. It has become about more than two men seeking to understand and extend the limits of their own potential, it has, for us, become a chance to inspire people to seek out the edges of themselves, to approach their own limits. Maybe this wider vision is too ambitious to be a reality, but it is not too ambitious to be a goal. We get one chance at this and we will do it right.
We won’t be spending this year sitting on our butts, waiting for October to come around. We have a lot of work to do to make sure that we don’t limit the potential of SOUTH itself. Ben is heading down to South Africa in the next few weeks to build on relations wth local schools there, and I am making preparations to move to New York in the new year, where I will be able to work more closely with the people who have put their hearts and souls into SOUTH. I would like to thank you all for all the support you have shown us thus far, and I hope that next year our legs will do the talking.
