Daily Telegraph - 'Just back' article

It was like someone had cut a thousand tiny holes in a gown of midnight blue and set it with diamonds that glittered and pulsed in white and blue and gold.  The night sky I am looking at deep in Northern Finland arcs across the frozen lake on which I stand and envelops me every bit as keenly as the sleeping bag pulled close around my shoulders.

It is bitterly cold.  Daylight had creaked in mid-morning and left again before the afternoon was through.  Outside lights on the few buildings at base camp stayed permanently on and the sky remained deadlocked in a soft gentle greyness typical of the mid-months of winter up at the Arctic Circle.  The snow was deep and soft and lay in drifts like mounds of icy sugar into which our boots and then our legs sank and disappeared.  We worked hard to build the snow shelter in which we planned to sleep that night.  It was a week’s wilderness skills training over New Year, the eve of which we toasted with Tar Schnapps as we stood looking beyond the bank of pine-trees in which the camp is nestled and up into the night sky, searching for a glimpse of the Northern Lights. 

Now, though, I am standing alone outside the shelter having struggled to sleep.  It was not the cold:  inside the shelter it keeps a steady minus four or minus five degrees and it was not the comfort: but Midnight came and went and the minutes ground around to one a.m. and onto two a.m. and at three o’clock I knew that sleep that night if I stayed, wound into a ball there in the snowy womb, would pass me by. And so I slid down the tunnel quietly and gently so as not to wake my companions, intent on making at some haste my way back across the lake and up through the trees to my cabin.  It wasn’t the cold that froze me as I emerged but rather the stillness and the silence as I raised my face to a monochrome world hung with stars upon stars upon stars.  Stood Orion with his overbearing astral presence as he pulled back his bow and lifted his shield; the Seven Sisters were joined by half a dozen more and the Milky Way had become a strip of speckled beauty pinned onto the velvet darkness clear from one horizon to the next.

I felt the cold assaulting my face and begin the long creep up through my boots and into my bones and I knew I would have to move soon. I began to walk slowly back across the ice and through the snow, feeling it creak and give as it compacted beneath my feet.  Before I disappeared into the trees I turned and took one final look and caught the fleeting trail of a shooting star.