News from Nowhere

If things were otherwise, I might suggest an excursion to the British Museum, to see their exhibition about the Arctic: as it is, there's still much there to enjoy online.

Hope you are having as good a day as Tier 4 permits; and hoping for future in-person socialising!

No surprise that at this time of year the Guardian Travel supplement hasn't had much of interest to say. But it's been making up for it with some very pretty pictures.

Last week they published three Instagram pictures from Max Avdeev taken in Yakutia. If there's a way to link to Instagram to show only photographs tagged 'Yakutia' by a single photographer, I have yet to find it, but the tag 'cold assignment' seems to be all his own. More photos on his website, especially these of Kotelny Island.

Thuis week, the Big Picture featured this amazing image from Chase Guttman (website), who has won Young Travel Photographer of the Year (same link leads to some fine photographs of Iceland in a younger age group). What amazingly well-travelled young people these are...

Poking around the internet I found this BBC article about another set of prizewinning photographs. My travel envy was alleviated by the realisation that my favourite set had been taken on Spittal beach in Northumberland (you have to scroll right down the page to see them).

These are all stunning photos, and I wish mine were half as good. But every now and then I'm quite pleased with one. This is my favourite from our pre-Christmas visit to London:

Flickr's AuroraWatch UK group has an amazing collection of photos of Thursday night's display: the colours in the sky are dazzling, and the photographers have worked in some beautiful (and not always easily accessible) settings. I love this shot of Sycamore Gap, less dramatic than this one of Brimham Rocks; here's Dunstanburgh and nearer to home it was also visible in Whitley Bay.

We saw nothing, although we were out at night, driving home from the Sage. Perhaps we were looking the wrong way, heading south, not north or out to sea. Or perhaps the light-burn from the motorway hid anything there might have been to see. Or, well, who knows?

We had been listening to Scottish fiddler Duncan Chisholm playing music from his Strathglass trilogy, the three-CD suite of music inspired by the three glens that make up the Clan Chisholm lands. The music was lovely, rich and mellow fiddle, supported by Matheu Watson' guitar and Jarlath Henderson's uilleann pipes and whistle (my, those uilleann pipes are a strange beast, he cradled them in his lap throughout the performance, gleaming like a steampunk octopus, even when he was playing the whistle with the other hand). I enjoyed it immensely, but I didn't feel pulled into it emotionally - I seem to be immune to the lure of the highlands.

I owe to Librarything the information that Barbara Wilson, whose lively and entertaining crime novels I so enjoyed (if you haven't met them, try Gaudi Afternoon, is now Barbara Sjoholm, author of various travel books, including The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland. There's nothing that consoles me for winter weather, and treacherous snow on the streets, so much as reading about real winter, serious cold, unmelting ice, so this sounded like just the book I needed right now, and to celebrate my new scanner, here's a taster. Returning to the Ice Hotel, a couple of years after her first visit, and this time as a guest rather than to observe its construction, Sjoholm finds adjacent to the hotel an ice theatre, an Ice Globe:( Long quotation under the cut ) She lays out all the cards: straightforward journalistic interview, enchantment at the beauty of the scene, a sly delight at the preposterousness of the entire enterprise = and then gathers them up with a conjuror's sleight of hand and throws them down in a different configuration. The performance is in the Sami language, the actors are Sami, the enterprise offers something unique to the wealthy and cultured tourists, but also gives Sami culture a new visibility, and Sjoholm is alive to all the ambivalence of the buying and selling game that is the tourist industry.

She is also the first person I have ever read who manages to convey, under all the interest and the beauty of what she sees, how cold it is all the time.

The latest foodie travel destination, according to Saturday's Travel supplement, is Greenland. Writer Tim Moore makes the food sound good, and the landscape even better:

Ilulissat means 'the icebergs' in Greenlandic, and what a sight they were through the treble-glazing: sometimes a fleet of Tolkienesque dreadnoughts, sometimes a Henry Moore retrospective on the run, lined up on a massive iced horizon thickly buttered with sunset, or picked out by a full moon and the free-form green swooshes of the northern lights.

But I am not even remotely tempted to visit, as he did, during the winter months, when a little superficial frostbite is an only-to-be-expected souvenir of your trip.

A Wee Home from Home is at Northern Stage, which is celebrating its 40th birthday with a season of meditations on northernness. The theatre has actually been known as Northern Stage since it reopened in 2006: for most of those forty years it was either the University Theatre or the Playhouse. Ambivalent, moi? You bet. I don't think my feelings about northernness will fit into their interactive questionnaire.

For a start, how often do I think of myself as northern? Not often, and mostly when I'm visiting family and friends in London. I admit I had a twinge the other morning, lying in bed listening to someone on the radio how the French region of Nord-Pas de Calais were promoting themselves as the south of the south of England, and would love to involve themselves in the 2012 Olympics. "They're welcome," I thought. "Anyway, they're closer to London than we are." Yet when I'm in the north of France, I'm more likely to think how northern it feels than how southern: the red-brick terraces, the post-industrial, post-mining communities, the beer...

Mostly, though, when I'm in Durham, I don't think of myself as being from the north, I'm from here, the centre of the compass. I'm more likely to tell people I'm an Essex girl (another partial truth) than claim to be northern. By inclination, I'm as likely to holiday further north as further south: but I'd hardly tell a Shetlander or an Icelander that I'm northern, would I? (Not that Iceland is as far north as I thought. In Norway I have been within the Arctic Circle, but to cross that line in Iceland I would have had to take the ferry to one small island; the country as a whole is further south and further west than I thought).

At the post-play discussion, the host asked Frank McConnell whether he regarded himself as northern. He replied that he came originally from Glasgow, but now lived much of the time on - Uist, I think it was; one of the Western Isles, anyway. He was, in other words, tactful about not choosing the word 'northern' to describe himself to someone who did lay claim to the term, despite being based well to the south of him. On the other hand, looked at from within Scotland, Glasgow is part of the great southern conurbation.

It's all relative, in other words. Newcastle, at 55° north, is in the north of England, which lies to the south of Scotland, but further north than anywhere in the US except Alaska (that's hard to take in: in my mind if we fly due west across the Atlantic, we land in New York, or maybe Boston. I know this isn't so, but I have to keep reminding myself). But we want to be northern, because there's a virtue in it - and that's a whole other can of worms.