My Farthest North: An Arctic Diary

'La Vie Boheme', as you may have noticed, has been in retirement recently, consequent upon your blogger's departure from gloomy England for 'La Dolce Vita' in sunny Italy. But that's a story for another day. We come out of retirement to let you know of the publication, in a variety of ebook formats, of a new story - 'My Farthest North: An Arctic Diary'.


During three weeks in the High Arctic our heroine reaches her ‘farthest north’ as well as her ‘coldest north’. With a wry sense of humour, this fictionalised memoir introduces us to a diverse cast of characters, including polar bears, reindeers, walrus, a Polish Arctic explorer, a Russian sea captain, a quirky expedition leader ... and the shadowy Eduardo. As she journeys on, our narrator tells Eduardo about everything she is seeing, experiencing, learning and reading. We learn gradually that Eduardo is stuck in his office and couldn’t make the trip with her. Are they lovers?

In northern Norway, night disappears along with the 3G signal. Bravely facing the rickety steps down the side of the ship to the inflatable dinghy, learning to make wet landings, and how to – and how not to – approach walrus, our narrator learns a few things about herself and the difficulty of remaining cheerful in spite of a very cold butt. In Svalbard, euphoria at a polar bear sighting gives way to a ho-hum glacier expedition. In Greenland, Heidi the Inuit Girl welcomes the expeditioners in full traditional dress and with walrus canapes, and an Inuit grandmother offers roasted polar bear. In Iceland various threatened species adorn the café menus.

In reading our heroine’s journal written for Eduardo, we are eavesdroppers on her uncensored thoughts. Her bouts of bad temper and her unreasonable expectations are all here, along with her wry assessments of her fellow Arctic travellers. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to sit in a small boat above the Arctic Circle, with nothing around you but fog, the disappearing sea ice, the chance of a bear sighting and a severe bout of unrequited love, this story is for you.

Sample the book, and obtain your very own e-copy at Smashwords.

Adventures in the ice...

An interesting cast of characters...

And they say you should never work with animals....

500 Words on Adventure

"And I mean it..."

I’m not the most nautical of people at the best of times, and I usually suffer horribly from seasickness. Then there’s the fact that I’m a weak swimmer and - just a little bit - afraid of the sea, especially when I can’t see the shore. So you can perhaps imagine my state of mind when the small inflatable Zodiac carrying me, half a dozen others and one Zodiac driver drifted into the sea fog and the mother ship (actually, a Russian scientific ship leased for the season as a cruise vessel) completely disappeared from view. We were somewhere around 80 degrees north, and if I remind you that at 90 degrees north you are at the North Pole, you’ll understand why the sea around us was creaking and groaning with the movement of sea ice. The weird, faint grinding noises and the slap of wavelets against the Zodiac were the only sounds. The fog was more or less impenetrable. It was bloody cold. The driver, our guide and only hope of salvation, asked “which way is the ship?” Ha ha. Very funny.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t scared, but I was also thoroughly exhilarated. The sea ice of the Arctic Ocean! It was through this that Fridtjof Nansen, that handsome Norwegian explorer, had sailed his egg-shaped ship ‘The Fram’, enabling him to reach his Farthest North (the title he gave to his memoir). Now I had reach my very own Farthest North, and pretty thrilling it was too.

I was to encounter much ice on this trip, around Spitsbergen in the far north of Norway where we began, and in Greenland where we spent several days cruising inside the largest fjord in the world, Scoresbysund, where huge blue-green icebergs defied every attempt to anthropomorphise them. A cathedral? A giant flower? I soon tired of that game, and merely gazed, astonished and cold, from yet another Zodiac. 

Roasted polar bear, anyone?

Yet my Farthest North and the transient beauty of the bergs were not all that this trip offered. Crouching again in a wet Zodiac (you may perhaps be sensing a theme), I spent three hours with my companions gawping in awe at polar bears feeding from the submerged rotting carcass of a whale in a Spitsbergen bay. There were walruses lolling on a pebbly beach, birds without number, arctic foxes, puffins, elusive whales, and - my personal favourite - reindeer! They bounded around amongst the hiking explorers, looking just like reindeer in Christmas story books. 

But if you asked me about the highlight of this highlight-filled trip, I would answer: Ittoqqortoormiit. In this tiny Inuit village at the mouth of Scoresbysund I was offered walrus canapes by Heidi in Greenlandic national dress, met an ancient old lady who was eating roasted polar bear, and a crazy British exile who loved nothing better than to spend several months on the winter ice huddled up with his huskies. Plus, Ittoqqortoormiit was on dry land.

Red Island, Greenland