Special Guest Blogger: Ernest Shackleton

The early half of the 20th century was the heyday of people insanely giving up their comfortable lives in order to beat their heads against the wall of death that is Antarctica and in 1914, i decided that as the race to the South Pole was over once the Norwegians had planted their damn flag there, i turned my attention to the crossing of Antarctica from sea to sea, via the pole so i said to my bunch of fellow explorers, we have nothing better to do, let's take a ship to Antarctica, land on the north side and then simply stroll across to the other side although that's not quite how it happened.
Antarctica is dangerous, especially if you're British it seems, i was part of Robert Scott's earlier expeditions to find the Pole ten years previous so i knew how dangerous it was and as we drew close to Antarctica, our ship got stuck in the solidifying ocean.
We had to wait for warmer weather for the ship to free itself and as this was the start of the Antarctic winter, we had to wait 10 months but we didn't remain put exactly, the ice sheet we were on moved, taking us over 600 miles farther from where we had planned to land.
When it did become free, the pressure of the ice had punctured the ship so it sank so we grabbed what we could, dogs, food, tents and bizarrely one guy insisted on going back for his banjo and we camped out on the ice while we walked it all back the 600 miles to the shore where we could sail safely.
The dogs got eaten and the banjo mysteriously got smashed to firewood after the second day but we loaded up the lifeboat and headed back the towards the sane part of the world which was less sane than when we set off because while we was freezing our buns off waiting for the ice to melt, World War I had started which meant looking off for sharks, icebergs and Germans trying very hard to kill us.
We made it to the inhabited Elephant Island in South Georgia and it's delicious penguins and was picked up months later by a ship and taken back to Blighty three years after we set off.
I did a bit of lecturing in colleges but the call of the Antarctic never left me and i set off again with plans to sail around the whole ice sheet but i died of a heart attack before we got there so as an explorer i wasn't great but it is good to hear that the spirit of exploring is still with us, i just hope Dora has better luck than i did.