Email sent Saturday at 04:41 suggesting I should review the proofs of my article within 48 hours. Ah, academia.
Nevertheless, the MOST doomed Everest explorer remains Maurice Wilson, whose 1933 plan to crash-land a small aircraft near the top of the mountain and stroll up to the top from there did not quite work out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice...
Anyway, I had forgotten the extent to which the opening chapters are like 'The men took great heart from the amusing antics of the funny little penguins. We shot fifteen and they made a fine dinner.' Things have certainly changed....
(People who know me will not be surprised to know that this is a re-read. I once had a summer job at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, where everyone went for a 'smoko' instead of a coffee break and I met someone whose job it was to turn penguins upside down to make them vomit).
Entirely separately to it being in the news now, back on my trip to the Isle of Wight haunted book-labyrinth in September I picked up a copy of Ernest Shackleton's South and am reading it.
I propose that Mildenhall is to The Amazing Digital Circus as Crouch End is to Stephen King.
When you run out of poem, you can either repeat it or write more poem (it would be fascinating to have a poem which was extended a word at a time by each generation, but it looks like in practice it's done in larger units...).
Another interesting 'how about we fit a poem in here' thing - I once knew someone whose husband's name included a character from a generational poem - i.e., the family has a poem and each generation in a family uses the next character from the poem in their name. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generat...