Without cancer it is very unlikely that I would have gone on the expedition. So out of evil comes good. It makes life much more fun always to have a goal. You are never too old to want to achieve something else, however tiny an aim it is. All I had to do was to get on with life with an immensely heightened awareness of the world around me, from flowers, skies, clouds, mountains to friends and family.

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The next ordeal was the abseil. Something I had always wanted to do, but had never had the opportunity. It was one of the most exciting parts of the whole weekend. Imagine throwing yourself off a cliff when you cannot see the bottom. It was totally dark with a few stars twinkling. You step up to the edge of the cliff not knowing what is below you, attach the safety harness and launch yourself over the edge. The initial step is terrifying, but the thrill was wonderful. You have got to trust the person holding the rope at the top. Eventually all the teams got to the bottom, but no one knew what to do next. Part of the testing, we thought. Did we have time to eat something, or even light our stoves and cook, or should we just wait for orders?

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What a day! It started off as a normal Arctic day, a very flat light and weak sun. We had floated six miles during the night and had a four and a half mile drift east. It was rather a misty sort of day, the sun eventually just about disappeared, but because of the lack of sun the ice appears bluer with a diffused light. There were rubble pans, then some semi-frozen leads, all right to cross quickly, but the ice was soft. After about five hours we came to more and more open water, which caused a sea mist to form because the sea is warmer than the air, about –2°C. Matty crossed a frozen lead, it was softish ice, but OK to cross. A sort of solid slush, a kind of jumble of ice chunks held together by the ice floes on each side, both of which were fairly large. Very much the kind of frozen lead that we had crossed countless times before without a second thought.

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We all have a new sense of wonder now, realising the sheer power of nature. I certainly felt different, and looked down on the Arctic ice realising what we had done; not much compared to some expeditions, but we were very ordinary people, and I think that we showed others that you can have a dream – and achieve it. The strange thing was that however hostile the landscape, however frightening the events, however alien man is here, we did not feel threatened. We did not feel that the Arctic was against us, or at least more against us than anything else, considering this was not man’s natural environment.