There is a particularly lovely feeling associated with being snug and dry inside whilst it is violently pouring with rain just on the other side of the window. I have just enjoyed watching a powerful downpour accompanied by lightning and loud thunder.
My dryness and safeness is made all drier and safer by knowing how awful it would be to be - in my case six feet to the left - outside.
I am claiming the same principle is at work when I am Reading and thoroughly enjoying my current book. It's a biography of Antarctic explorer Sir Earnest Shackleton. He is sort of a hero to me, and many others. Mainly because of his incompetence. I can really relate to him.
The book recounts his life and expeditions to conquer The Antarctic for Great Britain. He failed heroically, and his attitude and achievements are spectacularly British. At the time, and some would say even now, the British Way scorned preparation. Any kind of adequate training or equipping for such a massive and dangerous venture was frowned on for not quite doing things the British Way.
Adequate preparation was pretty much seen as cheating in a way, and surely being British was all the preparation any true hero needed?
As a result the likes of Scott of the Antarctic died being popped to the pole by the vastly superior Norwegians who thought nothing of breaking the rules of fair play by using ski and dogs to cross vast areas of inhospitable barren snowscape, rather than the pointless trudging on foot or with horses favoured by us Brits.
But Shackletin will be a truer hero to most than Scott because, although he too failed to reach the pole first, he did at least have an amazing instinct for leadership, and a reliance on the belief that confidence and a positive spin was sometimes enough to get you out of any tight spot. And luck. And Shackleton had luck like no other.
Those of you interested in his Endurance expedition of 1914 - 1916 will find it to be a story that, if it were fiction, would be impossible to believe. I have really enjoyed learning of the unimaginable trials and pitfalls that beset this poor group of long-suffering men. It's an incredible story and the film starring Kenneth Brannagh is entertaining, but doesn't begin to hint at the true hardship and misery encountered by the group.
So as I watch the rain, not only am I glad to be inside, but glad that I live on a time when us cowards can cheat by being prepared and still fail anyway. Here's to the New British Way.
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