When you’re skiing alone, without a single soul within five million square miles, and nothing but a flat white horizon ahead, you have a lot of time to think about your identity – if only to ponder, when things get really tough, what in God’s name am I doing here?
So who, or more specifically, what, does Ben Saunders think he is? To be honest, he’s not quite sure how to describe himself. ‘Adventurer’ has rather too many dodgy connotations. But ‘explorer’, especially ‘polar explorer’, seems to set his teeth on edge.
‘Returning to the city after months on the ice is like watching TV with the volume up too far’
It’s all down to Saunders’ relationship with his celebrated antecedents. He has clearly studied them closely: he knows just about everything about past polar expeditions: right down to who financed Captain Scott, or how many dogs Scott’s arch Norwegian rival, Amundsen, took when he won the race to the Pole in 1912 (for the record, he began with 52, ended with 16 and many of the casualties ended up on the dinner menu).