AFTER bridging the credibility gap of imagining Robert Swan spending any time at all on a desert island, Spectator thoroughly enjoyed last week's Radio 4 programme in which the castaway was the Teesdale explorer who is the only man to have made an unaided journey to both North and South poles.

With a clear memory of the powerful talk given by Mr Swan at Darlington lecture association after the first journey, one snippet of information was particularly fascinating.

As a youngster, Mr Swan's imagination was fired by John Mills' playing of Shackleton and in his own early days as an explorer, he was driven to write to Sir John expressing admiration and pointing out: "It's all your fault!"

In that frame of mind, broke and needing to raise cash for the next expedition, he visited Sir John. Although they had never met a rapid rapport was established and Sir John's response to the cash problem was - talk your way out of it. Impossible, I do owe the money, said Mr Swan.

No, no, talk, give talks - and Mr Swan was marched off to the bathroom and, staring at himself in the mirror, had a one to one tutorial on public speaking from the great actor. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mr Swan travels the Atlantic to give talks for a few thousand pounds, and Spectator now knows something of why the memory of that talk a decade or so ago is so strong. Mr Swan was to return to give another talk in Darlington next month, but the lecture association had to make new arrangements when Mr Swan's world-travel schedule suddenly changed.

Another explorer will now open the season on September 11, Sue Riches, who at 51 and with a recent mastectomy was the oldest of the first all-women relay expedition to the North Pole.

How quaint

Slowing down for tractors or harvesters on the country roads around Thirsk and Ripon on Friday, Spectator had a comforting thought.

When a few more successive governments have totally reduced the countryside to a theme park, all these agricultural vehicles will only be allowed out on Sunday evenings, or perhaps parked in fields for the curious to gaze upon.

Any nominations for the yokel to describe how these mighty machines once safely gathered in the food which fed a nation?