40

with a frozen banana. 40˚ Below Fairbanks has many satisfied customers on TripAdvisor: ‘For $8 a person, I would say it is a must-see,’ wrote one. ‘Throw some hot water into the air and see it evaporate immediately.’ Others mentioned the banana trick, and one remembered, ‘we were
going to take photos while inside, but we were too cold.’
    Minus 40, the only point on the scale where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet, is the temperature at which mercury freezes, as does skin. But fans of famous farewells know the temperature for another reason: it was 40 that froze Scott coming back from the Pole. The explorer wrote eight letters in his final holed-up days at the end of March 1912, among them a very English thank-you note to Sir Francis Bridgeman, his former commanding officer in the Royal Navy. ‘I fear we have shipped up – a close shave,’ Scott began. He reassured Bridgeman that he was not too old for the job (‘It was the younger men that went under first’), and requested that his wife and children be cared for in his absence. And there was a P.S.: ‘Excuse writing – it is minus 40, and has been for nigh a month.’ They found him eight months later;
the condition of his frozen banana is anyone’s guess.
    Simon Garfield, author of To the Letter

Australia Was a Funny Place
    Australia was a funny place. The rules of this establishment were no kissing on the mouth, condoms for everything and ‘one shot and that’s your lot’. But no time limit, that was a plus.
    ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her. She was the only Anglo: the others were Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and so on. Nothing against those people, but he was homesick enough as it was.
    ‘Jordan,’ she said.
    ‘Like the model? Katie Price?’
    She smiled quizzically. Jordan’s famous boobs had evidently failed to cross the oceans and reach the Land of Oz.
    ‘Have you heard of U2?’ she asked in return.
    Heard of U2? Was she taking the piss? Her face seemed sincere. Maybe it was just that she was twenty-something and everyone she hung out with – outside of work, that is – had only the vaguest awareness of last century’s rockers. U2 were young punks when they started out, then they’d become kings of the world, now they were irrelevant old farts.
    ‘My favourite band,’ he admitted.
    ‘My dad’s too,’ she said. ‘Him and mum went to their concert at the Entertainment Centre in Brisbane, in 1989. The final song was called “40”. And the singer, Bono, brought out his baby daughter onstage. Her name was Jordan. And my mum thought, That’s what I’m gonna call my own kid, if it’s a girl.’
    He lay back on the pillow, his head echoing with a chorus he’d sung many times himself, one hoarse little voice in a
massive choir of fans, all high on changing the world. Today,
by strange coincidence, was his fortieth birthday. The brothel visit was his present to himself.
    ‘It was a girl, obviously,’ she added.
    ‘I can see that,’ he said. But he wasn’t actually looking.
    ‘OK,’ she announced, friendly but businesslike. ‘Onward
and upward.’

    Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal and the White



The Forty-Hour Work Week
    The forty-hour work week doesn’t mean much any more; smartphones and email and job insecurity have seen to that. But even back in 1910, when it did, the novelist Arnold Bennett noticed a problem. The modern office-worker, Bennett wrote, ‘persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as “the day”, to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.’ Those forty hours take centre stage, implicitly defining the other 128 as the margins – and ‘this general attitude is utterly illogical and unhealthy . . . [it] gives the central prominence to a patch of time and a bunch of activities which the man’s one idea is to “get through” and have “done with”.’ The title of the splendid little self-help book in which those words appear is How To Live On 24 Hours A Day , and Bennett’s point is that there are many hours, in those margins, that the ‘typical man’ could put to better use. Resist the ‘tired feeling’ that casts a shadow over every weekday evening, he urges; if you expect to feel tired, you will. ‘Employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.’ He’s a little too insistent, for my tastes, that the best thing to do with the time