Dear Thelma You know, with all the walking and looking around, endlessly looking around for something, anything, you forget how cold it is here. And where is “here” anyway? I know I sound negative but it’s hard, so hard. Cooper’s finally collapsed into a permanent low-mood; “He’s not depressed,” Scott insisted; “he’s just very terrified all the time.” “Of what?” I asked. “I dunno,” he said, “but I found him trying to insulate his head last night with a crate.” He returned to his sketchbook into which he draws portraits of his relatives from memory. Unfortunately, all his photographs were stolen. We’ve looked everywhere but not a sign so far. He used to enjoy copying them out with a burnt stick; all our pencils were used up when the kindling combusted. Still, he likes that auld stick. Scratcher and The Shifter have got old. They used to be thick as thieves, always pulling and tearing at dead stuff and eating bits of Browny. Now they just lick at each other and try to bury themselves alive in the ice. Scott wanted them shot but Cooper’s aunt wouldn’t hear of it so Scott would change the subject to Western man’s reimagining of the snow through adversity which nobody wanted to know about. Bloom’s gone again. He got up yesterday morning and told everyone, “I’m going outside; I may be gone some while. Don’t wait up,” and off he went, nude, except for a huge hat and waving at nothing. “He’ll be back,” Scott insisted. “Feck him,” Tawny Owl grunted; “let him off, mad bastard.” Tawny Owl came to my part of the tent yesterday and told me he had something to tell me. He looked about him several times and stretched and sang the first...

Dear Thelma, We’re all hungry. Cooper ate his shoes. Tawny’s been looking at me funny. He said he liked my thighs but not as much as liked my “glutes” (?) Scott suggested we improvise a rope with knots on it to measure the distance we’ve travelled. The scheme would involve throwing a stick, to which the rope is attached, in the direction we’ve come and counting out the knots. Each knot is roughly the length of Scott’s chifferobe, the one he saw in the Sears Roebuck catalogue and has been carrying around on his back. He’s invented a new unit of measurement called a “chiff” which is, I presume, short for “chifferobe.” “Won’t that mean going home before we’ve reached the Pole?” asked Browny. Scott looked at him and closed his eyes; he rubbed his temples and asked the Lord for patience. “How else are we going to know how far away the Pole is from home?” He said Browny didn’t “get it”; nobody did, except Scott and Cooper’s aunt. Palmer’s had a pet chicken hidden in his chicken-box. It was discovered when he’d forgotten to nail the top down and the creature poked its head out and sneered at Browny. The latter was discovered talking animatedly to the thing about corn when Scott demanded to know who was responsible for saturating his pin cushion with an 1878 Chateau Lafitte. “Never mind the bloody pin cushion,” I said, “who’s been keeping this bloody wine secret all this time?” “Never mind the bloody wine!” Tawny Owl yodelled, “who’s been hiding this pheasant?” “Chicken,” said Scott; “it’s a chicken.”  ...

Dear Thelma We awoke to the sounds of Scratcher and The Shifter howling at the snow. Scott was already up and about and had found time to fashion a kind of bowl for trifle or punch from the abundant supply of ice and snow all around us. Browny busied himself making a fire upon which we would later toast onions and he’d toast his digits. Cooper though, was sleeping so deep that Scott declared him dead and ordered us to leave him where he lay and decamp. Were it not for The Shifter in a moment of canine canniness sticking his tongue into Cooper’s open mouth, forcing our companion into wakefulness, he might have died of sleep. As Scott later jocundly remarked, too much of a good thing can kill you. He was of course referring to sleep. Meaning of course, that we’d have left Cooper, with no food, and he would have starved. Thus is a roundabout way of saying the sleep would have killed him. When we got the joke, we guffawed and chuckled to ourselves, inhaling deeply from our pipes, which we had previously stuffed with what little hair was left over after Palmer’s preening and some stale tobacco Tawny Owl had kept for a rainy day behind his tonsils. The going became rough at about ten to eleven that morning by our reckoning. Time is hard to gauge out here, and pocket watches have to be wound. We had all, at one time or another, forgotten to wind our watches, and now we shared a range of times, from early morning to early afternoon. We devised a system to best judge the passage of the hours through a formula of long division and adding, taking the earliest time, adding it to the latest time, and dividing the result by the number in our party. Tawny felt the dogs...

We’ve been walking today, for a change. Scott suggested it. He reckons all the sitting around not eating and firing little rolled up balls of dead skin at each other is sapping our pioneering spirit. Walking’s such a drag though. It’s such a vast tundra. There’s a whole load of nothing. Tawny Owl lost his favourite pair of ear muffs and is using Scott’s dog’s pair for the moment. Scott deigned to offer them but I could tell it was killing him. But now the dog hears his orders and is far more useful. Scott has a real way with the dog. He rubs his belly and scratches his groin and the dog watches and seems to enjoy the performance. Browny and Cooper were giving each other piggy backs because it’s such a long walk. Cooper is a lot heavier than Browny so Browny carries Cooper for as long as it takes to sing “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes,” but Cooper always sings it real slow and tenderly just to get a longer piggy-back. Scott doesn’t approve of the song choice. “Why couldn’t you sing something that we could all sing along to?” he wondered, “like ‘Little pants on a big, big girl’ or ‘You’re gonna make me lonesome when you eventually die’?” Neither Cooper nor Browny had ever heard of either of these songs. I was remembering Kerry this evening, especially an old neighbour of ours who’d call for a cup of tea and some poteen, a man named Spastic Dan. He wasn’t a spastic, not in the way people mean nowadays. He came from a long line of shoe salesmen. He said none of them had anything he wanted and there were no shoeshops that time where I...

Dear Thelma On Monday, which we now call ‘1’, Tawny Owl suddenly stood, albeit crouching, and like an Indian chief crossed his forearms over his chest and made a face that only Scott could have matched and said, “I’m going out for a while; don’t eat all the figs.” “Where’s he going?” Browny asked everyone in turn, starting with Cooper. Cooper said he didn’t know; Scott said, “I can’t possibly imagine; no where good anyway,” while Palmer just shrugged, too busy with his hewing. Cooper’s aunt has developed a strange twitch in her eye and now none of us are sure if she’s winking at us, if it’s the twitch or if she’s winking at us at the same time as having the twitch in a kind of coincidence or something. We ate the last of Horace this morning, I mean the last, if you get my meaning. Poor old Horace. He was a faithful friend. How noble, how ardent in his endeavours. He pulled Scott’s sled for the first few weeks and never really complained or asked for anything in return except for a share of the scraps and a summer vacationing home in the Lake District after we got back. Fat chance now. “Damn fine fellow,’ Scott asserted, eating the last of Horace with his molars gnashing, “tender and yet very meaty, all at the same time.” Palmer wanted to know who’d have his beard. “It’s going on the dog,” said Cooper, “just the funniest thing, honestly. Go on, have a look.” It was funny. The dog – who we’ve named Scott’s Dog – looks like Theodore Herzl when he was watching the whole Dreyfus thing, kind of shocked and yet resolved too. The combination of the cold, blue eyes and the...

Dear Thelma, Jacobs has diarrhoea; it’s pretty bad this time. I told him not to eat the whole cask of whelk ears but there’s no talking to him when he’s got the hunger on him. Scott and Palmer told me separately about their dreams. It turns out they are indentical except in Scott’s the nude dancer is a man and there are two grizzly bears instead of seventeen. I didn’t ask. Palmer looks blotchy around the knees. He asked me to take a look but I told him I’m not a doctor. He pleaded with me, saying that they’ve become quite itchy. He offered to give me a foot rub in return for a diagnosis. I told him I’d rather walk home backwards to Kerry. Cooper said I’d never make it. That’s Cooper, always the logical one. “Where’s all the fudge cake?” Bloom asked this morning. “We never had any,” Browny told him. Scott, ever the irascible one, punched Tawny Owl in the gut when the latter accused him of redecorating the tent. “Who cares if he does a bit of spring cleaning?” I wondered aloud. Scott brandished a fist and said, “You want some of this too, huh?” Then Cooper’s aunt, who’s not supposed to be here at all because her feet smell, admitted that she thought the tent could do with a bit of zest. Tawny Owl looked up from the floor and again offered to teach Bloom how to arrange flowers. Goodnight. I need some sleep and I have to finish reading my cook...

Dear Thelma Books, books and more books! Unbelievably, Tawny Owl’s secret chest (which nobody was allowed touch upon “pain of maim”) contains nothing but books on chiropody and some finely-bound tomes on French petticoats before the Revolution. You can imagine our chagrin upon learning that what we’d suspected was emergency food supplies or “literature of a distracting nature” (Scott’s words) turns out to be this awful drivel. Cooper reserved an especial derision for the publications’ proprietor, arguing that Tawny Owl should be made to clean the latrines for the remainder of our time in the frozen north. Scott was slightly more sanguine and argued that we should remould the Owl as a footstool; at least then we’d make some use of him. Bloom for his part quite enjoyed the article in one of the books about toenail jam and how to eliminate it with certain ointments derived from fermented seaweed. Palmer came to me the other night in secret and said he had begun to doubt Scott’s authority and worried that we’ll never reach the Pole. “I mean, where are we anyway? Does anybody even know?” “Hush now, baby,” I assured him, stroking his little cheek, “didn’t Scott tell your mammy he’d get you home safe even if it killed him?” “Yeah, yeah,” he said, clearly disillusioned with the whole project (but not swatting my arm away either I should say), “Scott says a lot of things. Remember when he told Bloom that marmalade can be made from any fruit and that it wasn’t an exclusively orange-derived condiment and Bloom wrote home to his mother, calling her a liar because she’d perpetuated the fallacy that reading makes you stupider. He’s writing to her again today; God only knows what.” “What’s the harm when there’s...

The Tom Crean Diary of Polar Exploration Dear Thelma Things have gone from worse to bad and then to okay, on to fine, then not too bad, back to fine and straight down to worse, skipping okay and bad on the way. It’s really really cold now. There’s never enough socks. Palmer wore all his out and tried to trade his pet hamster Arnold for a new pair but Scott said hamsters only break your heart and he’d been through enough already. Cooper hates hamsters and all kinds of small, hairy animals with the exception of Browny who got mould on his knees from not bending them enough. Scott gets more irascible by the day. Everything with him is a big deal. Yesterday, Tawny Owl used the last of the toilet paper to make a papier mache shoulder of bacon for Bloom’s birthday and from Scott’s reaction you’d swear he’d eaten all the rations. Then he ate all the rations and Scott had to be prostrated in the reserve tent for several hours until he stopped frothing at the mouth. Me, I’m struggling along, still trying to get to grips with my French linguaphone course. Cooper’s aunt says it’s a waste of time since we’re not going to meet any French speakers on the expedition. I said, “All art is useless,” because I’d heard Cooper say it and I thought it sounded intelligent. Cooper’s aunt countered with, “You’re the useless one,” so naturally I said back to her, “You’re useless!” and she said “You are,” and I said, “No, you,” and then I said back to her, “You,” and she said “It’s you,” and then…hold on. Wait. Uh-oh, Scott’s giving out again. I’d better go. I have to dig some latrines and I just...