A shelf the size of France.
Today was spent finally catching up with Sarah Airress' engrossing account, over more than a year's worth of blogging, of her trip to Antarctica, to research a graphic adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir of Scott's 1911 Terra Nova expedition, The Worst Journey In The World. I hope Sarah doesn't mind if I share some of it here.
From The One Show, April, 2020
Emotional, educational, and beautifully documented with her own
photographs, the trip to McMurdo took place two Novembers ago,
months before Covid saw the rest of us having to rethink our living
arrangements, and Airress was there for a month. But her account, begun in September of 2019, has continued to run on until at least last Saturday, which is what I powered through today, transported by every paragraph.
Most recently, she wrote about her visit to the remains of an already misshapen stone igloo that "Cherry" built in 1911, during the disastrous journey to find Emperor Penguin eggs that gave his memoir its title, and she quoted his return to the base hut:
Bread and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the hardest journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone which started us laughing until in our weak state we found it difficult to stop. ... Then into my warm blanket bag, and I managed to keep awake just long enough to think that Paradise must be something like this.We slept ten thousand years ... [301]
I looked out the George Robey, and could only find something from 1913. Still, I thought it might give me a taste, and tried to imagine men who only twenty-four hour hours earlier had been so uncomfortable that they willingly risked death, laughing themselves silly to this:
It was alright, I suppose. Not as ticklish as I'd hoped, I thought, but tastes had clearly changed. Then I re-read what Cherry wrote: "a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone"... A broken record! And immediately I could hear them, high as kites, their past no more distant than my own.
From Sarah's record of the 28-sleeping Cape Evans hut (source).
About her return towards the end of 2019, Airress writes of the "thin places" – an apparently Celtic term, and possible improvement upon the word "liminality" which I've been trying to find a replacement for for years now. You can see, and indeed buy, more of Sarah's work here. And her brilliant visualisations of John Finnemore's Cabin Pressure, which is how I first knew about her, are viewable here.
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