Cold. We spend our lives getting out of it, away from it; our whole human history has been spent avoiding it, wrapping up against it, fighting and escaping it. Cold shoulders, cold stares; vengeance is cold, corpses are cold. Who wants to be cold? Hot is good: hot bodies, hot dinners, hot sex and holidays. Hot or cold is no sort of choice, except for some, the contrary, chilly few for whom the very, very cold has a clear and harsh allure. The cold places of the world have a siren call; they give us goose pimples, those frozen lands, the keening of the north wind. And they’re going.

By popular demand, the heat is winning. The cold retreats, melts before our eyes. We need to feel it while stocks last.

So when someone asked, did I want to go to the Arctic, I said yes, absolutely yes, before they could add — “camping”.

It’s all about the kit. The finding it, the losing it, the lists, the sizing, the ordering, the web hunts, the unpacking, the trying on, the taking off, the mirror work, the turning and flexing, the thumb and forefinger testing, the folding and packing, the little piles and secret stashes, the stuff in the corner of my office that grows and grows like a glacier of wool and feathers, Gore-Tex and Velcro.

People who travel to destinations without room service or flushing toilets get fixated by kit. What they talk about is not vistas or customs or ruins or trails, but socks and torches. Unwrap any explorer and you’ll discover a closeted closet obsessive. And while the rainforests and oceans, the deserts and savannas all make their demands on packing, nothing and nowhere compares to the top and tail of the world. Nowhere demands the propitiation of kit like the cold. And few places are as cold as Svalbard.

I happened to bump into Sir David Attenborough. I don’t know David well, but, like the rest of you, I think I do. “I’m going to Svalbard,” I said, and instead of glowing enthusiastically, a shadow of alarm crossed his familiar face.

“Really?” he whispered. “It’s very cold now. Very, very cold. Why are you going there?”

“To look for polar bears,” I answered, like a perky Cub Scout.

His eyebrow twitched: “Polar bears are dangerous, you know, really quite dangerous. And the thing about extreme cold is everything is fine until it’s not. You walk along and it’s okay, but lose a glove and you’ll lose your hand.”

“Thanks for the tip. Where are you off to next?”

“I’m going home — Richmond.” And he went.

Along with the clothes list — longer than the one I had for boarding school — I was told I’d need fitness level four. I had no idea there were Michelin stars for aerobic muscles, so I asked what sort of activity a four would normally expect to undertake. Someone e-mailed back, tersely: “Five would expect to climb Everest.” So I packed my gear in my new waterproof North Face bag and, with Tom the photographer, staggered to Heathrow feeling about a two-and-a-half.

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