Do you buy a book on the strength of the cover? As a child the book cover that caught and held my attention was of a canoe, with six men in it, sailing down a jungle river. Longer than the canoe, a giant snake rose up out of the water, towering over the tiny canoe, where one man was caught by the artist, in the act of taking a seemingly futile pot-shot with his rifle at the anaconda python. The book was titled “Exploration Fawcett” by Colonel P.H.Fawcett. The book, published in 1953, was passed to me by my grandfather and inside there was a cutting from the Daily Telegraph from 21st February 1966 reporting “Site of Last Col. Fawcett Camp Known.” It was the first book of its genre that I read and I read it avidly.

More recently I was given a copy of “The Worst Journey in the World” by Apsley Cherry-Gerrard. This first-hand account, originally published in 1922, of Captain Scott’s ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole is, as Condé Nast Traveller says, “A masterpiece”. I love reading such books and no sooner had I finished Cherry-Gerrard’s work, was I embarked upon “Libyan Sands” by R.A.Bagnold, suitably subtitled “Travel in a Dead World”. This was first published in 1935 and I felt it fair to assume that the era of exploration, first attempts and daring-do, had surely come to a close by the middle of the last century. After Everest, the north and south Poles, the darkest jungles of Brazil and the vast emptiness of the Libyan desert, where was left?

I first met Mike Laird a couple of years ago and we fell into conversation. I found out that he’d been to the Himalayas – without doubt the most memorable place I’ve ever been to. That said; I’ve not done much travel, unlike Mike who has been to, roughly, eighty countries. Mike has not just travelled, but he has undertaken numerous gruelling and hazardous journeys in places that sensible people would do well to steer clear of. He was in Afghanistan in 2007 and he has walked to the North Pole. This year he is undertaking another journey; crossing The Bering Strait - a shifting mass of freezing water and shifting ice that covers roughly fifty miles at the narrowest point between Siberia and Alaska.

It was crossed in 1913 by dog-sled, by kayak once in 1989, by skis in 1998 and in 2012 on foot. That though is about it. In comparison, the North and South Pole are busy places and Everest is over-crowded. Basically, no-one goes there and as journeys go, you can’t really imagine anything worse. Mike is going to attempt a two-way crossing. There and back again; which I have just realised is the sub-title for The Hobbit. No danger of meeting a dragon but a good chance of meeting a polar bear for sure. 900 lbs in weight, 42 very large teeth and capable of charging at 25mph, definitely not something you want to meet on an ice flow with nowhere to hide.