THE POLAR EXPLORER

I'm on another coach. The evening sunlight floods through the dusty windows and gently warms my face. Outside, the rush hour traffic shuffles past in long shadows on its way to the M4, and home. And so we go.

There's some tiredness around at this end of the day. Hard not to defend such weariness though, after a day of long, rambling presentations.

I thought a lot about presentation style today. One person spoke for an hour like a steadily unwinding cassette tape; his voice trailed and slowed at the end of every sentence and then, as though invigorated by the mere suggestion of a full stop, he launched back at full speed for the next one.

Another used slides with tiny diagrams, and the kind of font that would have had an optician scoffing from the back.

My favourite speaker though, was the polar explorer, Mark Wood. For an hour he had the room captured with interest as he told us about his adventures in the Arctic, the Antarctic and the Himalayas.

"I'm not religious," he said, talking about the South Pole, "Maybe spiritual at a push, so you can take it or leave what I'm about to say but there were times when I just couldn't keep going. I'd be in tears, leaning into the freezing wind on my skis, and like I say, you can ignore it if you want, but I definitely felt an arm around my back in those moments, and once a voice, saying, 'Keep going.'"

He went on to describe the extraordinary solitude, grandeur and poignancy of the wild. It sounded amazing, not least leaping over melting ice-floes or standing alone on the geomagnetic North Pole and thinking of the 6.9 billion other people on the planet.

Apparently, your sweat can freeze to your face and give you frostbite in the eye. I guessed that that would be a lot less splendid.

This, I thought, is the best presentation style - the one where you tell a story, paint a picture and take everyone in the room with you.

It's raining now. The coach windscreen is spattered with droplets and the sky broods over the East as we race along this grey old motorway. Colleagues chatter about things I most definitely don't want to talk about... or even know about, actually. It's hardly the solitude of Antarctica but it is at least the way home, if a little grimy.

How bad actually is frostbite of the eye I wonder?