Monday, October 1st 2018

It’s been a while since I enjoyed the full-on delights of a big book tour. There was Brazil in 2011, and a big post-Python At The O2 tour for my diaries in 2014, but since then I’ve been acting and writing rather than selling. This is the crunch time for any venture, the time when you leave the cosy comforts of pre-publication expectations behind and face the verdict from the public.

So far, so good. Erebus was officially available in the bookstores from Thursday September 20th. I was in the car crossing the border into Scotland on Tuesday 25th when I heard the news that we had sold enough to make the top ten in the Sunday Times Best-Seller list. I had a feeling from the reception in Harrogate and Newcastle that a lot of people were interested, and most of them were enthusiastic. The talk at St Boswells in the Scottish Borders went well and the terrific response from sell-out audiences in Falmouth, Dartmouth and at the Appledore Festival in North Devon, justified our Erebus-like course from the north to the far south in a single week.

A bat joined me on stage in Dartmouth. I was looking down and didn’t see it. The audience saw it and laughed. I looked up thinking I’d done something funny, but I hadn’t. At Falmouth I addressed the congregation from a pulpit and remembered that for a few months between wanting to be a test pilot and an explorer, I’d toyed with being a vicar. Captive audience, that sort of thing.

All in all, it couldn’t have been a better first week. Great oysters at Rick Stein’s in Falmouth, discovering one of the great pubs of Britain- The Rat Inn near Corbridge, playing the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle which was opened only twenty years after Erebus disappeared into the ice.

I was working so hard I missed seeing both episodes of my North Korea journey, but heck, I didn’t expect to be still standing unaided at 75!

And there’s another week to go in the UK and Ireland, and then off to the USA and Canada. The North Korea documentary will have gone out in America on September 30th. Will I be allowed into the country? Watch this space.

London, September 14th, 2017

As you can see, we’ve rechristened this box from “The Latest” to “Palin’s Posts”, to reflect the fact that these are my own, personal updates. If you want to know the very latest then “News” is the box to go to.

I write this as the summer seems to be disappearing fast. I hope you’ve all caught up with it, somewhere, in some shape or form. Rather perversely, I found myself, at the height of August, in one of the coldest corners of the globe, way above the Arctic Circle, on a journey through the North-West Passage.

I set out from Resolute Bay in Nunavut, Canada on a chunky Russian vessel whose name, Akademik Sergey Vavilov, tripped off the tongue. It was a very happy ship, chartered by One Ocean Expeditions to take myself and 95 other Polar pilgrims into the remote area where Sir John Franklin’s expedition disappeared 170 years ago. Despite temperatures hovering around zero most of the passengers had booked way in advance to have the privilege of seeing the high Arctic before the waters freeze over again. They managed to squeeze me in – in the Pilot’s cabin!

The network of islands in the Canadian Arctic looks small and intricate on a map, but once on the ground the size and scale of the sea channels and the frozen desert land-masses is immense. We had 25 sightings of polar bear, none of them quite close enough for my iPhone to do them justice ! They’re big beasts and move with Fred Astaire-like ease and elegance, conserving energy for the chase.

In my ten days on the Sergey Vavilov I made some good friends and learnt a lot more of what it must have been like for HMS Erebus as she sailed, ever more slowly, into the advancing ice, all those years ago.

August was a month of hot and cold treatment, as I flew back from frozen north to the sweating south, for a week with the family in Majorca.

Now I’ve completed the major research trips, I must disregard my itchy feet and stay home and get some writing done.