warm.
Svalbard is 78 degrees north; the pole is 90 degrees. After Svalbard, there are only a few hunters, some climatologists, and adventurous nutters pulling sledges. Itâs cold. Really, really murderously cold. It was too cold for the Eskimos to ever bother living here. Itâs a place that is made up only and solely of weather. Big, white, mad, bad, bullying weather. But the Norwegians have a saying; they say that white is the new black. They also say thereâs no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.
So I asked a Norwegian what I needed and he gave me a list that was longer than the one for my boarding school uniform. There was not a single thing on it that I already owned. All the stuff I thought might transfer from Scottish autumn walking holidays was damned as being suicidal.
It wasnât just the amount of kit; it was the size and the volume. It started to arrive in my office and colonised a corner and then spread across the room like a glacier of goose-down, merino-wool waffle, wickable, breathable, impenetrable waterproof gear. I regarded it with an unbelieverâs scepticism. Nothing here was constructed remotely by aesthetics. Not a single stitch or button was added to make the wearer look svelte, or handsome, or taller or sexier or better proportioned. I come from a place that would rather be wet and chilblained than ugly but chilblains arenât the price for getting stuff wrong up in Svalbard. Still disbelieving, I dragged a vast, waterproof North Face bag big enough to smuggle a gravid sow in up to the roof of the world. I stepped off the plane at Longyearbyen in my London tweed and the climate grabbed me by the lapels like a furious drunk. The scale of the weather here bore no relation to anything Iâd waded through before.
My local guide said that if I wore gloves with fingers, Iâd lose the fingers. You wear mittens. You wear boots with huge detachable inner boots of insulation that look like theyâve fallen off the space shuttle. If your feet get cold, you lose toes. You wear two balaclavas. The wind catches your nose or your cheek, itâll cut them right off. I put on everything Iâd brought with me, layer after layer. Everything you wear has an understudy: socks have other socks, pants have bigger pants, jerseys come in pairs, so do jackets and trousers. My gloves had mittens. This is not clothing for comfort. The Norwegians dress for life. Get it wrong and you could lose a finger or your sight or the whole mortal coil. What you have to do, in effect, is turn yourself into a self-regulating ecosystem. You become a purpose-built micro-climate. And as cold as it got, which was bloody cold, 30 degrees below with a 40-knot wind shoving down the temperature, so cold that our smart modern technology ran out of figures to measure it with, wherever I stuck my face out or took off a mitten, it burned like frozen venom, like all-over toothache.
And I became immensely interested in other peopleâs kit â but not in a fashionista sense, not in a âWhere did you get that bag?â way, but in a nerdy, mechanical way like boys talk about carburettors and torque. Iâd ask about wicking and wool and weight and whether your socks had been organically lanolin washed. There was a relief in all this jargon, this heavy-kit chat. It was nice to be released from the insecurity of style, of taste.
I noticed something at the airport in Spitsbergen. The Norwegians are a remarkable weather-blasted, capable and bonetough people. You never see a fat one. I expect they leave them out on the glacier. They wear their skins tight-drawn over their angular bones like battened down, faded tarpaulin. They are admirable, attractive people who speak profoundly but seldom. To open your mouth unnecessarily is to waste hot air. And I also noticed that at the airport they were the best-dressed people in the world. In a postmodern Bauhaus-Corbusian sense, where form follows
Svalbard is 78 degrees north; the pole is 90 degrees. After Svalbard, there are only a few hunters, some climatologists, and adventurous nutters pulling sledges. Itâs cold. Really, really murderously cold. It was too cold for the Eskimos to ever bother living here. Itâs a place that is made up only and solely of weather. Big, white, mad, bad, bullying weather. But the Norwegians have a saying; they say that white is the new black. They also say thereâs no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.
So I asked a Norwegian what I needed and he gave me a list that was longer than the one for my boarding school uniform. There was not a single thing on it that I already owned. All the stuff I thought might transfer from Scottish autumn walking holidays was damned as being suicidal.
It wasnât just the amount of kit; it was the size and the volume. It started to arrive in my office and colonised a corner and then spread across the room like a glacier of goose-down, merino-wool waffle, wickable, breathable, impenetrable waterproof gear. I regarded it with an unbelieverâs scepticism. Nothing here was constructed remotely by aesthetics. Not a single stitch or button was added to make the wearer look svelte, or handsome, or taller or sexier or better proportioned. I come from a place that would rather be wet and chilblained than ugly but chilblains arenât the price for getting stuff wrong up in Svalbard. Still disbelieving, I dragged a vast, waterproof North Face bag big enough to smuggle a gravid sow in up to the roof of the world. I stepped off the plane at Longyearbyen in my London tweed and the climate grabbed me by the lapels like a furious drunk. The scale of the weather here bore no relation to anything Iâd waded through before.
My local guide said that if I wore gloves with fingers, Iâd lose the fingers. You wear mittens. You wear boots with huge detachable inner boots of insulation that look like theyâve fallen off the space shuttle. If your feet get cold, you lose toes. You wear two balaclavas. The wind catches your nose or your cheek, itâll cut them right off. I put on everything Iâd brought with me, layer after layer. Everything you wear has an understudy: socks have other socks, pants have bigger pants, jerseys come in pairs, so do jackets and trousers. My gloves had mittens. This is not clothing for comfort. The Norwegians dress for life. Get it wrong and you could lose a finger or your sight or the whole mortal coil. What you have to do, in effect, is turn yourself into a self-regulating ecosystem. You become a purpose-built micro-climate. And as cold as it got, which was bloody cold, 30 degrees below with a 40-knot wind shoving down the temperature, so cold that our smart modern technology ran out of figures to measure it with, wherever I stuck my face out or took off a mitten, it burned like frozen venom, like all-over toothache.
And I became immensely interested in other peopleâs kit â but not in a fashionista sense, not in a âWhere did you get that bag?â way, but in a nerdy, mechanical way like boys talk about carburettors and torque. Iâd ask about wicking and wool and weight and whether your socks had been organically lanolin washed. There was a relief in all this jargon, this heavy-kit chat. It was nice to be released from the insecurity of style, of taste.
I noticed something at the airport in Spitsbergen. The Norwegians are a remarkable weather-blasted, capable and bonetough people. You never see a fat one. I expect they leave them out on the glacier. They wear their skins tight-drawn over their angular bones like battened down, faded tarpaulin. They are admirable, attractive people who speak profoundly but seldom. To open your mouth unnecessarily is to waste hot air. And I also noticed that at the airport they were the best-dressed people in the world. In a postmodern Bauhaus-Corbusian sense, where form follows
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