Cold. We spend our lives getting out of it, away from it; our whole human history has been spent avoiding it, wrapping up against it, fighting and escaping it. Cold shoulders, cold stares; vengeance is cold, corpses are cold. Who wants to be cold? Hot is good: hot bodies, hot dinners, hot sex and holidays. Hot or cold is no sort of choice, except for some, the contrary, chilly few for whom the very, very cold has a clear and harsh allure. The cold places of the world have a siren call; they give us goose pimples, those frozen lands, the keening of the north wind. And they’re going.
By popular demand, the heat is winning. The cold retreats, melts before our eyes. We need to feel it while stocks last.
So when someone asked, did I want to go to the Arctic, I said yes, absolutely yes, before they could add — “camping”
