During a ludicrous week-long round trip to Australia to give a single 45-minute talk I watched more TV on the plane than I would watch in a couple of months back home. During the weird but wonderful Antarctica documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, I grew more eager than ever to experience the cathedral-like aura and majesty of Antarctica. This film, about “the professional dreamers” who call Antarctica ‘home’, reminded me of the staggering size of the place, and of its unique allure. Of all the wonderful places I want to experience, Antarctica remains number one on my list. Next I watched a fascinating film about Mike Tyson. “I can’t lose: I refuse to lose,” said the former heavyweight champion of the world in this really honest, intelligent documentary. I was struck by Tyson’s early understanding of how discipline, character and hard work were going to be the key to his escaping from a horrific childhood. Constantine ‘Cus’ D’Amato, who discovered and nurtured Tyson’s talent said,
“A boy comes to me with a spark of interest. I feed the spark and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire and it becomes a roaring blaze.”
It is a great pity that D’Amato died too early to prevent Tyson coming off the rails later in his career. I watched the daft Yes Man with its gentle message of “saying Yes where one would normally have said No”, to make life more interesting and positive. Then the next film, The Wrestler, surprised me by being superb. It’s a film about failure, loneliness, and knowing that the best years of your life have passed. The flights were an adventurer’s candy shop window, showing me half the globe and reminding me of the delicious emptiness of so much of our planet. Even Mark Beaumont couldn’t see 25,000 miles of the planet in a week! My attempts to get on with some book writing between TV watching failed dismally. I preferred to spend the hours staring, captivated, down at the Outback and the Siberian steppe. The scale, the emptiness, the harshness of those landscapes left me itching to get out there for some testing adventure again. But my final view from the air, dropping down into England at 5am on a fresh summer’s morning, with a cool veil of mist draped across the green fields reminded me that England is as good a place as any for me to call home. For now.
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