So here is the man who has circumnavigated the world on its polar axis, run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, and rediscovered the lost city of Ubar. Viewed from the side, from where I'm sitting, Sir Ranulph Fiennes (or 'Ran' as Adrian Hayes, who introduced the session, insisted on calling him) bears an uncanny resemblance to the Duke of Edinburgh.
His talk this evening is entitled 'Living Dangerously - Lessons Learned from a Lifetime of Adventure', but Sir Ranulph isn't a bore and leaves the didactic life coaching to another occasion. Instead, he chooses to take us on a highly entertaining romp through an extremely eventful and colourful life. Some gems:
On the motivation for his expeditions:
Mostly 'to pay the gas bills - I didn't have the A-levels to find a job in London', but also to 'get there first and plant your flag before anyone else does, particularly the French'.
On old Etonians:
Most of them 'end up as wine merchants in the West Country'.
On chameleons:
'You all know, of course, that if you put one against a green leaf it turns green, and if you put it against a red flower it turns red. People say that if you place one on a Tartan blanket, it will explode.'
On learning Arabic:
'The Ministry believed that, in order to lead a group of Arabs into battle with the communists at night, you had to learn Arabic, and the best place to learn Arabic was Beaconsfield, near London. [...] When I got there [to Dhofar in southern Oman], I found that most of the men were Baluchi and spoke Urdu, some were from Zanzibar and spoke Swahili, and the few who spoke Arabic hadn't been to Beaconsfield.'
On the hovercraft expedition along the White Nile in 1968/69:
The hovercrafts 'held the record for running eight hours without breaking down in a gravel pond in Peterborough'. They could lift themselves three inches off the surface, but 'there are a lot of obstacles about four inches in height down the length of the Nile'.
On avoiding hidden crevasses during his Antarctic crossings:
'I developed a very careful policy of watching [what happened to] the chap in front of me.'
On being cast adrift on an ice floe during an Arctic summer:
'Charlie [Burton] had a small radio which caught the BBC world service for about two minutes each day. One day we heard that Britain was at war. We thought that it had to be with France, and were disappointed to learn afterwards that it was with Argentina.'
On Scott versus Shackleton:
'Scott was the greatest polar explorer of all time. He wasn't very good at racing [...] but he learnt a lot from Antarctica. It was Scott who taught Shackleton everything he [Shackleton] knew, and who carried Shackleton back from the South Pole when he fell ill.'
No comments:
Post a Comment