I would like to make an exciting announcement to my many fans and followers. Yesterday, I became the first British, late-30s, posh white woman to complete a solo, unassisted, unsupported, slipper-shod trek up and down several flights of stairs while thinking about tariffs, carrying a baby, clutching three teacups, gripping a computer under my arm and a holding a carton of 11 free range eggs with two fingers.
I will soon be giving a talk near you to promote my book, The World’s Most Tenuous Explorers, and, when I have recuperated, can be booked for executive coaching sessions. Those seeking comment should contact my PR agency, LastFirsts.
You see, I’ve found out that there is a whole industry in claiming to be the first person to have done something based on a highly specific set of circumstances. Camilla Hempleman-Adams, the British explorer who recently claimed to be the first woman to cross Baffin Island (well, a bit of it) on her own has attracted the ire of an Inuit woman, who popped up to give her a tongue-lashing for being “colonial” and, by implication, a wimp, because Inuit women do the journey while giving birth, so there.
But not only is Hempleman-Adams doubtless not the first woman to complete the route in question; she also isn’t the first “explorer” to make a dubious claim about having set some new record based on pretty narrow specifications. The Antarctic is a particularly popular place for these sorts of “records”, based on going a few miles further or doing it on half a Weetabix less than the last chap.
In 2018, trekkers got so annoyed by Colin O’Brady’s claim to have skied across the continent “unassisted”, when he was actually on a flagged supply road for much of the journey, that they set up an official body to verify such claims.
Hempleman-Adams, according to the trekking veterans writing for Explorersweb, achieved her “record” by adding a bit on to each end of an established trail across a peninsula, declining to get a lift to the trail-head as most people do, and justified the claim by pointing out that the Parks Canada service couldn’t definitively say any other woman had done it.
Still, let’s not be churlish. I’m not claiming I could ski 241km on my own through an icy wasteland and I’m all for applauding great feats in the outdoors. It just seems rather as if this whole nitpicking “explorers” industry, with its announcements and Instagram accounts and PR people, is a way to turn what would otherwise be a great adventure into a slog. It’s like giving Christopher Columbus a Fitbit. Then again, I suppose if Queen Isabella had had a Fitbit, she probably would have given him one.
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Bland metaphors
Yet another “crossroads” has been reached. This time it is Jamie Dimon telling shareholders of JP Morgan Chase that “America and the world are at a critical crossroads”. I’ve written before about “crossroads” metaphors being the hallmark of rhetorical blandness. Recent events surely deserve better. “America and the world are in a whirligig and no one can stop it!” Or, “Markets are backflipping over a presidential mudslide!” Or, “Wile E Coyote is bearing down on bond yields with unprecedented ferocity.” That at least would be worth quoting.
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Robot scores
Without being asked, Microsoft Word is giving me an “editor’s score” for my writing. In case you want to know, it rates this article as “88 per cent”. I seem to have been given ticks for various qualities, from “clarity” to “geopolitical references”. Most creepily, it seems to be checking the “inclusiveness” of my work, presumably as defined by some anxious nerd in Redmond, Washington, though I could find no way to explain why or how it had given me a tick.
Since all professionally published text is no doubt being ripped off to train some AI model, I can’t help but feel a little resentful that big tech is now deploying the same tools to offer unsolicited, politicised feedback before the text is even online. If I wanted to be judged by random strangers before I’ve even opened my mouth then I would spend more time on Twitter, thanks very much.
