Robyn Hitchcock on the deck of the Grigory Mikheev as we return South towards Kangerlussuaq.
The deeper we sail into the Arctic, the more incongruous humanity becomes. Snow and ice cover everything solid. Yesterday on the small island of Uummannaq – which means ‘heart-shaped’ in Greenlandic – we visited a children’s home in a 1400-person port. This is the northernmost habitation on this voyage, and the last place we will visit on this trip that has an ATM.
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Robyn Hitchcock on the top deck of the Grigory Mikheev as we leave Ilulissat. Photo: Nathan Gallagher
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Robyn Hitchcock opens Cape Farewell’s contribution to a night at Murphy’s Bar, Ilulissat with a modified version of ‘Cocaine’ – including some relevant lyrics ‘If the ice doesn’t melt and the water doesn’t freeze, it’s okay’, (well it’s not really…).
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Two standard responses to the problem of global warming are that either it’s not really happening or, if it is, there’s nothing we can do about it now so why not leave all the lights on? Well, it is happening, and the sooner we tame our energy emissions, the sooner the earth can return to being habitable for the citizens and other creatures of the 22nd century. Time is unlikely to stop when we die, it just seems that way sometimes. It’s true that we on this Cape Farewell expedition used aviation fuel and diesel to get here, but we will take the story back with us and spread it like butter on the toast of our item-rich society. As the scientists aboard research the effects of ice-melt on the ocean bed, and trace the possible mutation of the Gulf-stream through salination tests, we artists are being exposed to a landscape that cannot fail to affect our work.
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I cannot begin to start or stop describing this place. To say something is grey means little, it is green also. And white. What we imply by ‘god’ is a being with no perspective, no point of view, but eyes that peer from everywhere. This ship is full of eyes. It docked today in Qeqertarsuaq, a fishing town at the southern tip of Disko Island.
This morning my spectacles fell off my head into the sea as I clambered aboard a zodiac (a low-in-the-water black rubber boat that seats 12 and one helmsman). The boat rolls on the rolling sea. Lemn wonders if we are going somewhere or is it only the sea that is moving? We are going one way and the sea is going another, I assume – and we have to make that work, to get to our destination.
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