Wednesday 31st December & Thursday 1 January, BBC Radio 4
6.00-9.00am and 4.30-5.00pm
Jarvis Cocker edited the last Today Programme of the year, 6.00-9.00am on December 31st, highlights from the show are available to listen again online.

The next day & year, voyager Quentin Cooper hosted a special The Material World Cape Farewell Show on New Year’s Day, with a programme billed as a ’science-meets-art-meets-a-fair-bit-of-music special from the cold but not quite as cold as they used to be waters off the west coast of Greenland’.

Listen again online The Material World on BBC Radio 4 ›

Listen to Shlomo’s new Podcast, recorded during the expedition. It features exclusive new material from Martha Wainwright, music from Feist, Jarvis Cocker and interviews with Marcus Brigstocke, Vanessa Carlton and Laurie Anderson.
Listen at: shlo.co.uk/podcast ›

Join us on Friday 9 January 2009
Join Arctic voyagers Shlomo, Lemn Sissay and Quentin Cooper for an evening of Arctic stories and performances at Southbank Centre, guided by local Uummannaq resident Ludvig Hammeken. Uummannaq is the most northerly settlement we visited during the expedition, home to our Inuit guide Ludvig, 1400 people and 3000 howling dogs. This unique place will inspire a day of school workshops and evening of film and performance at London’s Southbank Centre.
More about the Uummannaq Day event ›
Read blog posts from Uummannaq ›

“Two weeks ago I was sat on a boat in the Arctic eating breakfast next to Jarvis Cocker. And, no, it wasn’t a dream. Well, it might have been a dream, but if it is I haven’t woken up yet so please don’t wake me when you leave…” Read Hannah’s article on the Disko Bay expedition written for online magazine Tweakerzine.

Two weeks ago I was sat on a boat in the Arctic eating breakfast next to Jarvis Cocker. And, no, it wasn’t a dream. Well, it might have been a dream, but if it is I haven’t woken up yet so please don’t wake me when you leave…

I work at an organisation called Cape Farewell, eight years ago we were founded by artist David Buckland as a way to try and engage artists in the climate change debate. Speaking to people who knew what they were talking about at the Met Office and National Oceanography Centre, David was alarmed at the changes occurring to the ocean’s currents due to the changing climate but he was more alarmed that there didn’t seem to be much or indeed any public engagement about the issue. And so, in 2003 he took some artists on a scientific research trip to the High Arctic, Svalbard to inspire them to respond to the environment and some how ‘talk’ about climate change in a language other than graphs, science and policy.

He did the same in 2004 and 2005 and after the first three trips we created an exhibition of work (shown in London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Madrid, Tokyo and now on world tour), a film, book, CD and award-winning website. Here we are eight years on, having just returned from our fifth arts expedition from the west coast of Greenland. It was our biggest yet, a crew of amazingly talented artists, poets, comedians, theatre makers, composers, musicians, journalists alongside two science crews both completing research in the Arctic.

Why did we go? The simple answer is to inspire all who journey with us to respond to the changing climate, to witness first hand the changes to the environment occurring in the Arctic and allow our crew to partake in real scientific research with our two onboard science crews. We must all think and innovate our way out of this current climate scenario and this is our aim, by bringing together this eclectic group of creative individuals, we are taking the best of our creative minds right into the heart of the debate.

So that is how I ended up in a dream, eating breakfast next to Jarvis Cocker… and KT Tunstall… and Feist, Robyn Hitchcock, Martha Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Vanessa Carlton and Ryuichi Sakamoto and on and on, our destination Disko Bay (for where else would you take musicians), west coast of Greenland on a boat; the Grigoriy Mikheev.

Our first walk on land at Ilulissat Kanglia and I had an overwhelming feeling that I’d entered the unpublished 6th book in the Hitchhiker’s trilogy. It was surreal, I’d been picked up in London and dumped in this landscape, a landscape I should have expected; I’d seen it in images, film and read people’s descriptions – but I’m still not convinced what I saw was real, somehow the more logical explanation is that it’s some figment of Slartibartfast’s imagination. Something about all us humans clambering over rocks and ice older than the oldest of human existence, alive and existing way back then, when we were nothing more than a mere twinkle in the eyes of the gods was all too much in the realm of fiction. I kept expecting to turn the corner and see the restaurant at the end of the universe (complete with recycling bins, obviously), but I guess it was just around the next corner, that one there, over the edge of the iceberg-scattered horizon.

Day three and we awoke with a message over the tannoy that we were sailing past icebergs the size of carparks, the size of buildings, your local cinema, Big Ben, topshop, Euston station, the pub at the end of my road, the power stations at the side of the M1, Ikea, Wembley stadium, the thunder-looper at alton towers, the size of small towns with people living in them all just waiting for us to look outside our port windows and collectively sigh at their presence. We had entered a world heritage site – sailing up the Fjord to the front of the Jakobshavn Glacier (now for the science part – one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, losing 20 millions tons of ice every day – moving at a rate of 1 meter per hour and so far not slowing down as much as it should for the winter freeze). It’s moving pretty quickly and I couldn’t help but think about what would happen if no-one was there to see the last ever iceberg melt, or even worse everyone was there to see it, the flash of the bulbs speeding up the melt of the lone survivor of man’s gluttony? I guess that’s a question for my unborn kids, or their kids, or theirs, so fuck it, I don’t need to worry about it.

Day six and we visit some kids in Uummannaq that might have to worry about it, after all their lifestyles are being effected by the changing climate. We’re told that new phrases that are starting to enter everyday vocabulary include “just a few years ago”, “i’ve never seen that before” and “well usually, but now i don’t know anymore”. The local choir sung us a song which celebrates the changing seasons, as the sun disappears for the long dark winter they thank it for its presence and look forward to its return. We are told that local hunting traditions are changing, people can no longer use the dogs to travel across the ice from Uummannaq to Disko Bay, it’s not thick enough to stop them falling through and the arctic sea ice isn’t one that you want to fall into in the dead of winter with only a team of howling dogs to pull you out (no help from the polar bears, they’ve all disappeared, trying to find somewhere that bit colder). These communities rely on the seasons like we rely on google. Climate change isn’t just a slight inconvenience – daffodils in February not April – one less ryanair flight per year – if the ice doesn’t freeze in Uummannaq, it could mean life or death. Thankfully they can just turn up the air conditioning a bit more and get that water to freeze just right, god bless the wonders of modern technology.

We walked, we saw the northern lights, shooting stars, photo-plankton, we disko-ed to Jarvis Cocker’s disko in Disko Bay, we were inspired, overwhelmed, shrunk to the size of peas in a landscape of giants, dumbstruck, angry, sad, tired, we rock climbed, argued, were tempted by a chinese takeaway restaurant in Ilulissat, shocked by the human existence in the harshest of harsh environments, some of the crew wrote songs, recorded the sound of glaciers breaking – glaciers never been dirtied by human activity except in the most profound, fundamental way of being broken by it, we listened to stories, artists completed art projects – lighting up the icebergs red for photographs, a full-length reading of Milton’s (abridged) Paradise Lost, we talked, we listened, KT Tunstall & Luke Bullen played with their new backing singers The Icebergs (scientists Carol Cotterill & Emily Venables) at their most northernly gig in Ilulissat (most northernly until two nights later at Uummannaq), we all took photographs, many many photographs, Shlomo taught me to beatbox at the mouth of a terminated glacier that could only have been part of the Hoth set, we saw icebergs breaking, ice that has lived side by side, compacted over decades, centuries, millennia separated for the last time by the unforgiving black arctic waters and these pesky humans looking on, we listened to Marcus Brigstocke explain how to ‘remain positive in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary’, we listened to Ryuichi Sakamoto play Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence on the boat, we listened to Karen & Ludvig our Innuit guides telling us how the lives of their communities were changing, we listened to the seabeds when the scientists surveyed them, we listened, we listened, we listened. Our lives will never be the same again, how could they be.

But what now we’ve back? What we do now is work with the artists who joined the expedition, helping them to weave the experience into their creative practice. It could take days, weeks, months or years – Ian McEwan who joined our expedition in 2005 has just announced his next novel is about climate change. So ask me again in a few months, but for now I’m out of words, thoughts, memories and experiences.

Read Hannah’s full article (pics and all) in online magazine Tweakerzine.
www.tweakerzine.com/#arcticdisko ›

Subscribe to the podcast for more clips.

Look out for “Jarvis in the Arctic – Ten musicians, one vanishing ice cap” a feature on the Disko Bay expedition written by Michèle Noach, and The Word magazine’s cover feature for December 2008 (Issue 70).

Sunday 26 October 2008, 5.30-7.30pm, BBC Radio 6
Jarvis Cocker keeps Stephen Merchant’s seat warm on BBC Radio 6 as he plays a shed load of great ‘mood swing’ tracks, plus Martha Wainwright performs live and David Buckland talks about Cape Farewell and the 2008 Disko Bay Expedition. The archive of this show is available on the BBC iPlayer until 2 November 2008.

Intellectual climate input was achieved with a series of daily talks: two given by the onboard scientists, three by the two Inuit guides and Dr Ko de Korte, Sunand Prasad tackled contraction and convergence, Quentin Cooper gave a great talk on ‘Cape Farewell’, Joe Smith on Carbon Trading and market response, Ryuichi Sakamoto, KT Tunstall, Chris Wainwright and Francesca Galeazzi led a lively discussion on the artists response/creativity and a final talk led by Marcus Brigstocke and Joe Smith addressed just how important it is to feel ‘up’ and empowered by things climate rather than crawl into a hole of despair. These were focussed discussions but all this input led to an endless dialogue in small breakout sessions where we all talked one on one over dinner and wine (and vodka). Lively!

The route for the voyage constantly changed in response to weather, scientific programs and artist’s intentions – the Russian Captain was fantastic, with no challenge too difficult. He entered into our spirit of adventure and art achievement, and I am sure this was all very much a first for him. Our furthermost north was Nuugaatsraq 71.50 degrees north and in all we covered over 1000 nautical miles. The foot of the glacier Sermeg Avangnardieq was our wildest environment and my personal favourite.

The 10 days we spent onboard were so densely packed it is going to take time for the full impact to register and be manifest in arts works and science. The list;
• Geological survey in five different locations, each tract between 2 and 12 miles long.
• CTD measurements and sea ice sampling.
• New songs written by Robyn Hitchcock, KT Tunstall, Martha Wainwright, Vanessa Carlton and Feist. Shlomo collaborated on two of the songs and Feist and Shlomo collaborated to create a Cape Farewell choir.
• Recording by Ryuichi Sakamoto and he is working with the geologists on a greater sound work based on their electronic data. Jonathan Dove is inspired, as was Jarvis – hold that page.
• Francesca ‘performed’ her CO2 work and the bench project.
• Tracy constructed three series of ‘automated’ physical drawings and worked on a new book project.
• Michèle Noach found the Papaver Radicatum, Arctic poppies for her artwork with the Eden Project
• Sophie Calle completed an artwork in the Arctic
• Chris Wainwright completed a planned project and evolved and completed a totally new work.
• Luke set up a recording studio and made a great recording of Martha and friends. Also there is rumoured to be a sound-scape which he crafted!
• Sunand Prasad completed his Weather balloon project – no small feat!
• I projected video onto a glacier wall and re-filmed it. I also began a new work of 46 portraits, each to be accompanied by a chosen piece of text. I also ‘performed’ a very experimental work, which maybe has worked and added to my archive of imagery.
• Vicky Long recorded all for her radio program.
• Laurie Anderson read so beautifully her stories both live and to camera.
• Lemn Sissay performed a full-on work.
• Sam Collins filmed endlessly for proposed new artworks and collaborations.
• Rachel Holmes from Southbank provided the Artistic Director, Jude Kelly, with a new script of ‘Paradise Lost’, abridged by Greg Mosse. Jude directed onboard the 32 ‘scenes’ with our crew of players and Peter Gilbert managed to capture the whole work in a very dense Sunday morning of filming. It is Milton’s 400th anniversary this year and the whole work is to be performed later this year.
• All the writers, poets, musicians and creative artists and science teams wrote both for blogs and for their own private diaries.

The media teams worked tirelessly and with great sensitivity, leaving a place where privacy was needed. That said, Peter Gilbert, Adam and Zack collected over 70 hours of videoed material. This will, over the coming months, be added to and will form the movie/film. Matt Wainwright filmed on HDV and edited all the material for the web and also as a support to the artists. Again 30 hours of footage. Nathan photographed everything and is now editing his archive. Quentin Cooper recorded everything that moved and was dead for his ‘Material World BBC 4 program.

Kathy Barber and Hannah were awesome in editing all the blogs, collecting photographs and edited film and got all this material back to UK base via satellite. Over 4 hours of very cold broadcasting each day.
The notion of what is Cape Farewell has had to be expanded to accommodate the constant shifting speed of climate engagement, the call from the scientists, the sheer size of our group and the attack needed to achieve a cultural shift. 46 people have now returned to their complicated lives, the energy contained in the feverous on-board activity will form a powerful voice of climate challenge Not a bad rate of exchange to our relatively small carbon footprint which has already been accounted for in the Cape Farewell policy of buying photovoltaics.

This rigorous discussion and activity has firmed up my thoughts that two major shifts are needed if we are going to mediate the threat of climate change. Political will – about 2 trillion dollars have been spent on the Iraq war, it is not hard to imagine the results of committing this amount of money over the same time period to getting to grips with climate issues. We are already in a mess that should have begun to be addressed but requires sustained political will power. Cultural shift – it is the way we have evolved our lives that has caused this unsustainable activity. We each have accepted a whole raft of values and activities that are not written in stone. The way we have chosen to live is not a fact and there must be an alternative way to find an exciting way to live that does not leave this trail of atmospheric waste and potential cultural destruction. This demands a cultural shift that I do believe is the most effective way to reduce 80% of our carbon footprint and it has to be implemented and acted upon. It also offers the spectre that the next twenty years could ferment the greatest change yet seen to a global society. Climate will force this and it is how we react that will write the future text.

At any point of cultural shift you will always find artists working, it’s sort of our job description. It feels totally appropriate that artistic curiosity is thrown into the cauldron and this expedition has been an awesome response. All the artists are struggling to find a voice that doesn’t preach, doesn’t illustrate and we don’t do social engineering. As artists, if we take on climate as a frontal charge, it never works. There always has to be some footwork that shifts the process to a parallel path, a deviant tangent that clears the territory, the terrain that makes the process personal. Finding this place, whether it be in song, painting or prose is always challenging and awkward. Every one on board is a writer in some way, the songwriters that then take embryonic ideas to their bands, writers and poets who are direct and architects who write buildings and as with all writing processes, they are not time dependent. An idea spurned here could take weeks or years to come into being, and that cannot be prescribed – maybe because I am also an artist floundering around, this then breeds trust in the others.

Friday, September 26th
Plane landing at Kangerlussuaq
We could see the east coast of Greenland, indifferent, majestic, and there they were – icebergs from above!! Aaaarrr!! We were suddenly all toddlers, looking down on the little minty sailboats being shoved out of the nest of the shore, forced to take off on voyages from which they would never return. Ever diminishing, ever more alone. Gliding off into the vastness.

5 hours sailing down the gargantuan straight of Sondre Stromfjord, the light starts to get soaked up by the time. Like a waking dream. Milky green sea that looks alive. A beautifully perfected valley scraped out of the landscape as our guide, singing us out of its mouth. The weirdness. The spook. That half-light that makes you feel like the whites of your eyes are glowing. A low-lying cloud that turns a scottish landscape into a science fiction set. The boat is full and buzzing like a hive. The Belgian-Danish bar and restaurant manager Jan (Yan? Xian?!) has the best and weirdest burr on his r’s I’ve ever heard. Want to teach him the Ragged Rascal Ran tongue twister.

Saturday, September 27th
The sea has hills. Late
Murky half light. It felt like a kid was playing with our boat using his whole arm, up and down, up and down, over the hills of the sea. I imagined we were in the downy neck of a huge eagle (to avoid associations with sea-related hurling, which worked thankfully); UP – the wings flap down, DOWN – the wings flap up. Valleys and lakes.

I dreamt of walking a path up to an old house where a family party was taking place, but there was a strange quiet and calm residing over it all. I read in a Jack White interview that he hates it when people use the word ’strange’ when talking about their dreams. Yeah?! Well no luck Jackie baby, it was a well strange quiet!! That milky green scene last night was something else.

I feel like I’m starting to stop.

Sunday, September 28th
Qeqertassuak. Gurr-kurr-tiss-wack
Bleak, sleet, cold; howling packs of half wolf hounds that have had their barks bred out of them. Black sand, with blue white icebergs as big as multi-storey car-parks, road bridges, office blocks. Their little relatives pecking at sand, littering the beach. Each of these unliftable baby ‘bergs look like something. A chicken. A swan. A turtle.
The dogs are everywhere, chained, wet, wild. I see a mother with two unchained puppies strangling herself to try and reach a huge hole another dog has dug himself, all the other dogs wailing and straining towards it. The dog in the centre has caught one of her puppies. I walk away feeling ill and deeply domesticated.

This is an exceptionally hard place to live, for people and for dogs. Thank god they have access to mad coloured paint; this little town looks like Tobermory/Balamory after Bungle and Zippy decided to buy time-shares. Clumps of multi-coloured houses perched on the permafrost. Trying to imagine how the hell you survive winters of gruelling minus temperatures when the sun totally disappears for two and a half months. Christmas, as you can imagine, is a really big deal here.

Wednesday, October 1st
Uummannaq
Finally I saw the ribbons in the sky, the northern lights. Slow and suggested, swaying velvet curtains in a drafty cosmos. We all played a gig in a bar tonight, I don’t know what happened but the great boot from outwith crushed my mojo…Floored by quiet endings, the rip of other roars, it’s not good when you reject yourself in a Greenlandic bar faced with the brilliance of Hitchcock, Cocker, Wainwright, Sakamoto, Carlton and Feist. Not my night. My heart is twisted up like kid’s balloon and I imagine looks like a poodle.

But the amazement of this day ultimately overshadows self-indulgent confidence crashes. The snow, the mountain emerging into the whip-crack of the light, howl howl. Yellow on my face. The viking Rene who arrived 15 years ago and decided to stay and raise lost kids in a much needed children’s home. The music they played, that choir that bloody wrung me out singing their goodbye ode to the sun. The beautiful old woman in the red jacket. I am not what I think I am, I am not yet what I hope I am. I am a pond, a car-park. I feel like a car-park.

I feel like I could live in Uummannaq, it feels like a good town with good people in it. Song coming…

Thursday, October 2nd
Perdlerfiup Sermia Glacier
Woke up with a belly-full of metaphorical tequila. Still feel the shape of the balloon-dog heart in there, but feel altogether better about that. I know it’s good to feel this.

Snap, snap, walking in a Baltic alien landscape and still the grass grows through the snow, all that life that waits patiently beneath for endless sun. Dark red berries fresh under foot stain the powder like blood and trigger thoughts of the hunting that goes on here.

Blood on snow is a disturbing picture, and one that says much about our situation as humans on a planet straining to meet our needs and greeds. But the Greenlandic skill of using every last scrap of animal and knowing what to use it for is undoubtedly impressive.

Friday, October 3rd
Sermeq Avangnardleq Glacier
It’s cold, cold, cold. Tired eyes in a warm, grateful way. I saw different things today, alternative layers, other people’s stories. I love it here and I don’t want to leave. I’ve said it already, but it is so dreamlike. Definite tones of Wes Anderson’s ‘The Life Aquatic’; if only we had 40 blue boiler suits and red woollen bobble hats. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Jarvis Cocker playing ambient mood music in the bar, icebergs peering in through the port-holes. Friendly scientists dropping large flashing contraptions into the water in the dark to map the mountains below the surface. Ko, David (Steve Zissou)’s wonderful right hand man making heart-meltingly sincere announcements in his lovely Dutch accent about getting into the Zodiac boats to go and ‘explorrr the shorrr’ and ending every time “……That Ish All”.

Marcus made me weep laughing this evening by re-enacting his presentation at an arts and crafts awards ceremony, the ‘Best Porcelain Hedgehog’ category making me nearly wee.

Sunday, October 5th
Our last day
You know that Apple Mac screen saver with the cosmic tracer thing swirling around? About 10 of us were stood on deck late night and looked up at the same time that it escaped out of someone’s laptop, gained gargantuan proportions and launched itself out of the sky above our heads in neon green; spinning, speeding, an incredible Catherine Wheel firework that made us all scream. I stayed out there for an hour and a half in minus ten, making myself laugh as my frozen face was about 5 seconds behind any words I tried to say. The best light show in the world.

Stayed up in the bar pretending we didn’t have to leave at 5am, gabbing away to my rad new sister Vanessa Carlton and dancing to Bill Withers.

Grabbed a couple of hours sleep and woke up to my last bowl of porridge and rumours that Graham Treehugger was going to enjoy a morning dip in the sea/liquid nitrogen. We all ran out reminiscent of a fight at school, and there he was in his swimmers, barefoot and perched on the railings 15 feet above the water. We thought he was going to die. He didn’t die, he splashed around delighted, whooped, climbed up to the 4th level at 30 feet and jumped in again. The thermometer was reading -15 outside.

Now, I remember going in the ladies pond on Hampstead Heath one scorching weekend in late April and was instantly paralysed and unable to remember my name. Who was this man?! Impressive.

My lasting memory was the tide line back on land. In the virgin dawn light I saw that the only flotsam left by the sea on the beach was a thin line of ice; pure white, in the shape of a wave.

Ryuichi had told us when he played his recording of an underground glacial stream that it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. The sound of water that was frozen solid before human beings even existed, heard for the first time, unspoilt, no particles of plastic. Baby water. Old as the earth.

As we waited to board our plane, a Greenlandic choir sat at a table in the golden morning sun, absent-mindedly eating sandwiches and practising one of the same songs we had heard at the children’s home.

Beautiful, mournful, comforting, ancient, innocent.

EDITORS NOTE
Sorry for the repetition, but we liked KT’s blog so much we kept it whole here, and also split it up into individual postings. We’re sure you’ll understand…

Subscribe to the podcast for more clips.

The good news is that we’ve solved that whole pesky climate change fiasco. It turns out it was the sun. It’s heat from the sun that is causing global warming. The sunshine did it. It’s not surprising, I mean when you look at the sun you have admit it does look hot doesn’t it. In scientific terms what’s happened is that the sun has sent a lot of heat energy down to earth for many hundreds of thousands of years making what scientists refer to as ‘sunny days’ (forgive the jargon but it’s important to be accurate I think). Now plants and little creatures have absorbed these ‘sunny days’ and then, sadly but with some degree of inevitability, died with the ‘sunny day’, literally trapped within them, then they have sunk down into the earth in the form of ‘sunny day’ rich fossil fuels. These ‘sunny days’ have later been released as people have needed the ‘sunny day’ energy in the fuel in order to power all the stuff we like – hair dryers, Toyota Land Cruisers, Nintendo Wii’s, fridges, life support machines, jet boats, angle poise lamps, vibrators, DVD players, aeroplanes and whirlybirds, air-conditioning units to cool the effects of a ‘sunny day’, mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, motorised carving knifes, remote controlled cars, actual cars, car museums, Top Gear, cars and machines which can exactly replicate the browning effect of a ‘sunny day’.

I like a ‘sunny day’ as much as the next man, but it strikes me that if we force several ‘sunny days’ into one 24-hour period things are going to get… well warmer. We can’t control the actual sun – bad news, but we can easily and without too much discomfort control the amount of stored ‘sunny day’ energy we choose to release, good news. Obviously there are some people for whom it will be agony, but they are mostly old and stubborn and ridiculous and in any case they’ve had their turn, wrecked it, whinged, bellowed and accused, so now it’s up to us. Step aside you flat earth twats.

This morning we re-enacted a revised version of Milton’s Paradise Lost (he’d have been 400 this year had he lived… tragic). I was Satan. Make of that what you will. It’s a fun part and I greatly enjoyed doing it, especially tempting Eve (KT Tunstall) into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. She’s a pushover – no wonder all humanity is bound to suffer for all eternity, banished from paradise forever if the likes Tunstall are left in charge. “Here Mrs, d’you fancy a bite of forbidden fruit?” “Yeah go on then, what’s the worst that could happen…”
Her Adam (Robyn Hitchcock) was inspired and I realised that in so many ways Adam and Eve were the Tom and Barbara (The Good Life) of the Old Testament. This observation was greatly aided by KT’s impression of Felicity Kendall.

Tonight, our last night on board, Shlomo will host a beatbox competition in which most of the passengers seem to be taking part in teams of 2. I’m with Hannah Bird, who will be making actual bird noises as I beatbox over the top. I hope we win. I like winning.

As supper wound down last night Laurie Anderson read some stories she has written. They seemed all to be based on her own meandering experiences, though I don’t care if they weren’t. You could have heard a pin drop as she was variously hilarious, sad, insightful, bright, acute, sincere, flippant and above all of these beautiful. She radiates a calm happiness and with eyes twinkling and full of amused wickedness she held us all, just for half an hour in the palm of her hand and it felt good.

Similarly Ryuichi Sakamoto played one of his compositions on the piano and the hush that gripped the room as everyone realised how much gentle, passionate control he has of his craft was incredibly uplifting. I’ve learned a fair bit about climate change since I’ve been here and exchanged some fascinating and empowering ideas and inevitably talked in alarming terms about how far we have to come but I’d be lying if I said we have not been truly spoilt by many of the people aboard who have given freely of their talent with grace and generosity. Put bluntly I like hanging out with my musical heroes.

A spontaneous and raucous disco (DJ’d by Shlomo and myself) erupted on Friday night and made the ships lounge throb and pulsate with many a floor filler until 2.30 in the morning when new visions of the Northern Lights streaking their mysterious way from the stars to somewhere just beyond the horizon meant the play list had to give way to Nick Drake singing ‘Northern Sky’ as we slid, shuffled and shivered on to the deck for one last look at what is obviously nothing less than the gateway to a parallel universe. I thought I saw Lyra and Pan at one point, but I was quite tired. The bioluminescent plankton had obviously heard the massive party classics Shlomo and I had been spinning as they were dancing with full vigour in wet psychedelic explosions of light behind the boat. The disco was excellent; I ached the next day from dancing and was floppy and useless all day, like I had no bones. Throwing shapes to various funk, soul and hip hop classics on a boat which is constantly lunging to one side or the other is as much fun as I’ve had in a while. In the right light of course it looks as if all the dancers have somehow come together in an organic act of spontaneous choreographed revelry. It’s only the fact that fewer than half are left standing that gives the game away to be honest.

In a moment I am hosting a session, which I have called ‘How to stay positive despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary’. I’m quite nervous, there are some clever people on this boat and I don’t wish to insult anyone. On top of which anyone who is familiar with my work or has shared accommodation with me for any length of time will know that of all adjectives to describe me – positive would not make the list. Hairy, grumpy, troubled, funny, cantankerous, pompous, opinionated, mouthy, malodorous, speccy and sarcastic would all be there but positive would rank down at the bottom end alongside perky and shy (and you should hear what people who don’t like me have to say about me!).

Positivity has become increasingly important for me since Cape Farewell last year. From when I finally stopped the three-week carnival of vomit and disembarked the Noorderlicht – October 2007 until well into the beginning of 2008 I was deeply, worryingly depressed. I had an itch that I was trying to scratch and no matter how loud I shouted, or how many shows I performed, interviews I did, things I wrote, people I spoke to, or personal changes I enacted I could not satisfy the itch. I had accidentally let the threat posed by climate change become something I was trying to solve alone and unrealistically fast. I cannot do it alone. No one of us is capable of saving or destroying the planet and thoughts that lead us to believe we can are as accurate as Fox News and as much use as a chocolate teapot. They are worthless delusions of grandeur on a scale with the ones that so trouble the annoying gitwizard David Blaine. That is not to say that we are not responsible or that we should not care, but letting yourself get depressed is worthless. It doesn’t help the cause either, how can you convince anyone of the pleasures the greener life can afford us if you sound like Morrissey having just stubbed his toe on his way back from burying a favourite pet in the rain, near Hull on a Tuesday in February? You can’t, and so positivity is the theme.

Now I must track down and then pack my things and head back to reality. For anyone who has followed this blog or any others on the Cape Farewell web site – thank you. The Arctic’s still really cold, warmer than before but still really bloody cold. Oh and we saw some Wales this afternoon – life’s good and every positive action is worthwhile.

You know that Apple Mac screen saver with the cosmic tracer thing swirling around? About 10 of us were stood on deck late night and looked up at the same time that it escaped out of someone’s laptop, gained gargantuan proportions and launched itself out of the sky above our heads in neon green; spinning, speeding, an incredible Catherine Wheel firework that made us all scream. I stayed out there for an hour and a half in minus ten, making myself laugh as my frozen face was about 5 seconds behind any words I tried to say. The best light show in the world.

Stayed up in the bar pretending we didn’t have to leave at 5am, gabbing away to my rad new sister Vanessa Carlton and dancing to Bill Withers.

Grabbed a couple of hours sleep and woke up to my last bowl of porridge and rumours that Graham Treehugger was going to enjoy a morning dip in the sea/liquid nitrogen. We all ran out reminiscent of a fight at school, and there he was in his swimmers, barefoot and perched on the railings 15 feet above the water. We thought he was going to die. He didn’t die, he splashed around delighted, whooped, climbed up to the 4th level at 30 feet and jumped in again. The thermometer was reading -15 outside.

Now, I remember going in the ladies pond on Hampstead Heath one scorching weekend in late April and was instantly paralysed and unable to remember my name. Who was this man?! Impressive.

My lasting memory was the tide line back on land. In the virgin dawn light I saw that the only flotsam left by the sea on the beach was a thin line of ice; pure white, in the shape of a wave.

Ryuichi had told us when he played his recording of an underground glacial stream that it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. The sound of water that was frozen solid before human beings even existed, heard for the first time, unspoilt, no particles of plastic. Baby water. Old as the earth.

As we waited to board our plane, a Greenlandic choir sat at a table in the golden morning sun, absent-mindedly eating sandwiches and practising one of the same songs we had heard at the children’s home.

Beautiful, mournful, comforting, ancient, innocent.

In each town there are wooden houses painted Bahamas hot pink, primary blue, creamsicle orange, cherry red, canary yellow, fluorescent green… scattered across rock hills climbing up from the black sea. A local boy who, seeing all the cameras (there are people taking pictures of people taking pictures of people taking pictures of the ice, all being filmed by people taking film of the people taking pictures of people) took off his shoes on the beach and ran into a long thin creek reaching out the sea, breaking the thin film of ice with his bare feet. All of a sudden pretending not to see the cameras, kicking up water at his little brother, they ambled off down the beach. A little speaker around his neck playing tin-y distorted rap, staccato syllables whipped away by the wind coming off the meringue topped icebergs standing silent just off the shore. Black meat hanging on nails outside wooden shacks. Dogs are chained up on the rocky hills between the houses howling together from every edge of town like the call to prayer, and outnumber the people behind the coloured doors. We walk around like time travelers in our winter space suits while the locals skid by in runners and t-shirts.

At night on the boat a small glow from our search lights illuminate the edges of the black mountains rolling under us. Clinging to the white railing, waist high, we skid along the skating rink decks. Too easy to imagine being swallowed up in the immeasurable darknesses all piled on top of each other. The icebergs sail past us silently and then crack like 200,000 year old cannons. Today is day 2 of straight plowing southward with Greenland far off to our left. My porthole looks west and Ludvig told me on very cold days from certain points Greenlanders can see Canada. Nicole saw a map and said she saw that Canada is 80 miles away tonight. I’ve been daydreaming of finding my way to the coast of Baffin island and connecting the dots home… dot dot dot.

Today Jarvis went around interviewing the Russian crew, having put together a list of about 30 questions. I came along to get a chance to see the netherworld in the galley and the Russians on their turf. Some had been on the boat 16 years and had gone pole to pole dozens of times. He asked all sorts of stuff, like, “What do you think all these passengers are doing on this boat?” to which they shrugged and said “Maybe they just like to be on the boat?”, “Maybe they want to look at the ice?” and “I think there are some scientists checking out the ice and some singers who are supposed to sing for them?”

He asked “Do you get sick of spending so much time with the same people?” and they all pretty much said no.

Could be the sauna.

A stereo duct taped to the wall with shoe boxes of Russian cassettes, overflowing ashtrays, plates of candles. We’ve also stumbled upon their “Russian whiskey” in a windshield washer bottle stashed under the cedar benches, with a little drawing of a person falling off the side of a boat with crosses in it’s eyes.

Shlomo, Jarvis and I jammed with 2 mics in a mini amp the size of a deck of cards and a kid’s plastic turntable on which Jarvis had that Mexican dancing song where everyone yells “tequila!”. I guess shreds of that shredding will end up on Shlo’s podcast called, I think, babelbox. From there I had the idea to try and get the whole boatload of people to sing Sea Lion Woman with me. Shlomo beatboxing and the gang of 40+ singing the backups and clapping, which we’ll try to do tomorrow afternoon. Maybe to try and summon something sealion-ish to appear? Or anything from the deeps with fur or a tail??

Having seen nothing alive on this trip besides one smudge of black on a beach through binoculars (which I think was the great wild miniature schnauzer of the Arctic) and a whale-looking wave, we were wide eyed at the tally on the galley kitchen wall. Labeled “Bears 08” there are stripes counting to 85. 85 polar bears that the cook Beverly alone has notched in her bedpost so far this year, though she said usually her tally is in the mid 100s.

After dinner, Laurie read 4 or 5 stories she’d written. Much like the Greenlandic choir we heard in Uummannaq, though in completely different ways into completely different doors of my mind, something really entered from both of these performances. Both were so honestly casual and so uncluttered by pretense, and so potently good to listen to.

• Sunand offered to draw me a building if I’d sing him a song.
• Suzan-Lori had us on hands and knees on a glacier crawling like lemmings.
• Vanessa marinated apples in vodka for a week.
• Simon and I did a call with CBC on a satellite phone the size of a brick in 10 layers of wool and gortex.
• Sophie gets us wine for every meal an outlasts me every night.
• Everyone wants to know how the debates have been going and if the terrifying novelty of Palin has worn off.
• Jarvis and I tracked the schnauzer tracks to a small ice cave on a frozen river.
• Every day or 2 the website notes from family and friends are posted on the bar door and people hover around to collect shreds of affection or news from the outside world.
• Martha is just plain heavy.
• Michelle lost her mitten.
• Today the argo float was dropped in the sea and will still be there pondering salinity and currents four years from now.
• Jude let us wrap our mouths around poetry.
• Quentin needs to turn this trip into prose.
• The British outnumber the rest of us and I keep finding myself adopting a lame cockney accent.
• Peter is looking for the story.
• Sunand is the president of a society numbering almost the population of Greenland.
• I read a letter on yellow stationary under the northern lights.
• Shlomo gave Laurie a beatboxing lesson.
• The boy in the children’s home played a casio keyboard with preset drum rolls and they said it was traditional Greenlandic music.
• Graham’s name is Harold.
• Someone was describing in detail how to make ice cream.
• I dropped some of the tiny beads from my broken necklace into the cold waves and felt cruel for one second.

One more day left in this miniature microcosm.
I’ve been hiding out in the open over here. Trying to look Out but being looked At by the unblinking eyes of the cameras has been only string attached to this gift of a trip. Distracting the clean horizon like the flash of a ghost in the corner of your eye… the phantom presence making you slightly uneasy but expanding the scope of imagination to include the invisible.
Which I suppose, in this case, is you.
xo
LF
ox

Matt, Chris and Martha Wainwright – by strange coincidence over 15% of the crew were Wainwright’s (and weren’t related).

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Jude Kelly directs Paradise Lost in the ship’s mess.

We’ve spent the morning popping in and out of the restaurant for a read through of Paradise Lost – everyone read a few lines. Not looked at the text for more than a decade but feels the natural thing to do here and now as we sail south back to port. A couple of my posts have referred to people’s anxieties about the Baffin Boot sized carbon footprint that coming on this trip entails. Sin and redemption are so woven into western culture that we shouldn’t be surprised that we frame these questions about individual responsibility in terms of sin and the pursuit of redemption. A few years ago Patriarch Bartholemew (leader of the orthodox church) announced that environmental harm was a sin (the Pope followed suit soon after). Of course they have a natural advantage over science and policy people when it comes to finding a language that seems to have the right kind of scale: they’ve been phrasemaking on the big questions for centuries.

But we might yet work towards a secular language, a set of references, that help us make sense of the moment we’re in. This expedition is an experiment, a model society, a mad throw together of very different personalities and talents. And we’ve been busy, creative and above all happy. This afternoon a session on positivity in response to climate change. Marcus Brigstocke ran the session & asked me to talk about the book I edited with Andrew Simms from new economics foundation ‘Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth’. My vanity satisfied by finding that the essays have made a big impact on his work and he’s been pushing it on friends. I’m hoping that some of the people here on the boat will contribute to another product of the Interdependence Day project – the Encyclopedia of Interdependence that I’ll be working on over the next couple of years with my wife Renata Tyszczuk.

To sign off I’m going to borrow a quote from Ian McEwan’s brilliant essay written in the wake of an earlier Cape Farewell voyage A Boot Room in The Frozen North. The piece plays off the gradual collapse of civilised behaviour in the wet, cold, cramped boot room of the ship. He concludes thus:

‘We must not be too hard on ourselves. If you were banished to another galaxy tomorrow, you would soon be fatally homesick for your brothers and sisters and all their flaws: somewhat co-operative, somewhat selfish, and very funny. But we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures. All boot rooms need good systems so that flawed creatures can use them well. Good science will serve us well, but only good rules will save the boot room. Leave nothing to idealism or outrage, or even good art. (We know in our hearts that the very best art is entirely and splendidly useless). On our last morning, when all the packing has been done and the last reluctant skidoo had been started up, and as the pure northern air is rent by the howls and stink of our machines, our tirelessly tolerant hosts (as forgiving as God has not yet learned to be ) come down the gang plank and set down on the ice a vast plastic sack with all the recovered gear found in every corner of the ship. A few of us gather around this treasure, and poke about in it, not ashamed or even faintly embarrassed, but innocently amazed. Here’s our stuff! Where’s it been hiding all this time? We barely know ourselves, and our collective nature is still a source of wonder – why else write fiction? We haven’t stopped surprising ourselves yet, and the fate of all our boot rooms hangs in the balance.”

Read more of Joe’s posts, and his colleagues’ responses, on the Science, Technology and Nature Blog.

BBC Radio 4 The Material World journalist Quentin Cooper photographed at midnight as he watches phytoplankton dancing in the wash of the Grigory Mikheev, against a backdrop of Northern Lights.

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning we walked to the ice fjord, guided by Karen through her home town, while we waited for the flight carrying Jude, Shlomo, Graham… and the software… to arrive. That afternoon we headed off to start another survey line whilst Simon and I tried to fix the CTD. Alas, deep temperature and salinity measurement on the CF Disko Bay voyage were not to be. I can’t actually put the frustration into words, but there is nothing we can do about it out here and instead I shall be doing my best to answer questions from the crew, explain my everyday work as a scientist and help Carol and Dave with their surveys. Fortunately, The Argo float, as I have already described will go on collecting far more data than we could ever imagine getting by hand in a voyage. Tuesday night was spent traveling northwards, past Disko Bay and towards Ludvig’s home town of Uummannaq.

Wednesday

In Uummannaq we had the most fantastic day. Blizzards to begin with, followed by clear blue sky and sunshine and finished off with Northern Lights! It was a feast of culture in the town. We visited the museum and the church and a traditional turf hut. On our way to the children’s home we were accosted by two young lads armed with snowballs. It did not take long for this to digress into a full on snow battle – we couldn’t understand a word of each others language but there was much laughter, which Karen has explained is an incredibly important part of Greenlandic culture. A more elderly Greenlander hobbled past with his sticks as we were playing so we stopped to let him through… but there was no stopping – we got a snowball manufacturing lesson from the master – again, no words exchanged but many laughs! We watched the huskies being fed (this involves a sledge full of fish being pushed round, with a bucket of fish on it which are hurled one by one at the howling dogs). It’s been made incredibly clear to us that these dogs are not pets, human connections should not be made and resisting the urge to pat is not easy… Any hint of restraint went right out of the window, however, when a tiny 3 week old ball of fluff was placed in my hand!

The work of the children’s home was very impressive. We were treated to music by the youngsters and then local food, coffee and cake. Local food included raw seal, seal liver, dried whale and dried halibut. I cannot deny that seal liver was particularly tasty. Finally, a local choir sang some Greenlandic songs for us. During this time the sun came out and so later we took a walk around the town. It was incredible to see the scenery that we had been oblivious to having arrived in a blizzard! That evening was another musical treat, all our musicians got together and played, introduced by Marcus and it was fantastic. We are all completely in awe of Shlomo’s beatboxing talents and are fighting for lessons in advance of Sunday night’s beatbox championship! To top the evening off, the northern lights were out for us as we headed back to the ship on the Zodiacs.

Thursday

Clear skies and snowy mountains greeted us on Thursday morning as we headed up a fjord to a glacier face. Zodiacs took people up to get a close (ish) view of the glacier front whilst Simon and I took the hand-held temperature and salinity probe (mini CTD that Jude had brought over just in case the software failed to work) in a separate boat and looked at the surface (0-8m) water properties near the glacial outflow. Later we went ashore to see a glacier that was retreating up towards the ice cap, leaving behind it a fantastic glaciology/geology lesson. We anchored in the same bay overnight, though the katabatic winds (Forgive me if it’s not spelt with a ‘k’) were very strong. In the same way that the ocean water sinks when it gets cold, so does the air. These winds are a result of air being cooled over the ice cap and getting so dense that it plummets over the edge at the coastline resulting extremely cold and very strong local winds.

It’s Friday, not too late!

After a run ashore for some more art, we were on the move again and preparing to run a survey line along the length of the fjord. At the end of a transect we looked for an iceberg suitable for Francesca’s project, but really the idea of getting people onto icebergs is not the safest thing to do even in calm conditions, so given the wind we eventually had to call it off. The afternoon was spent braving the elements to soak up the scenery, but it was cold. Carol announced at one point that her nose was so cold her fingers were going to drop off! Later in the day we reached the northernmost part of the voyage and turned out to sea for an overnight steam to a suitable place to deploy the Argo float. After dinner there was a spectacular northern lights display and a disco in the water from the phosphorescence – bright green flashes caused by the ship’s propeller disturbing plankton in the water.

Saturday… wait! Working oceanographic kit!

This morning we set the parameters for the Argo float, and selected the name, chosen by Quentin, of ‘Diskovery Bob!’ She has been programmed to go with the flow at 200m depth in order to hitch a ride on the West Greenland Current, but every five days she will sink down to 500m, record a profile to the surface of temperature and salinity and beam it back to the satellite network. Now, having hidden in my cabin for long enough to write this, I’d better head back downstairs for some more interviews. All of a sudden everything seems to be coming to a close but we do still have a lot to fit in! Thank you so much for your messages, see you soon ).

Read more about the previous days.

Climate change is just one of the reasons why there is more oceanography and geology going on in the region. Sovereign states in the region are investing a good deal in trying to establish the best evidence to support resource claims. There has been a flurry of news stories over the last year or so about a scramble for Arctic resources by the countries of the region. The planting of a Russian flag by a mini-sub on the seabed at the North Pole was interpreted in reports around the world as a form of land grab. In practical terms it was meaningless and there are due legal processes for working out sovereign rights over the seabed. The reporting was a little shrill (that was the point for Putin I guess, above all domestically). But there will be jockeying for position for the mineral resources that will become more easily accessible as higher temperatures melt the sea ice.

Read on and more of Joe’s posts, and his colleagues’ responses, on the Science, Technology and Nature Blog.