Well, 2024 on the blog started well! In everything else that was going on, I forgot to finish today’s post and I let Thursday’s sneak out early (and when it was still only a paragraph long too!). Idiot. That’s because I’ve not been properly at my desk recently. I’m back now! Going to get everything in order now!
Anyway, welcome to my blog! I thought I’d start a new year with resolutions to maybe push myself forward a bit and so I thought I’d start by introducing myself. I’m Juliet, a polar bear in human form – by which I mean that I wilt in the heat and thrive in the cold – and this is I Am A Polar Bear. I write a new post every Monday and Thursday at 4pm and 99% of the time I actually finish it before I let it out into the world.
By day, I’m a spreadsheet-dwelling data gremlin. By night, I’m a Girlguiding volunteer currently with six hats. In between, I’m a traveller, adventurer, writer and – dare I say it? – fledgling content creator. The word I’d actually use is “blogger”. This is my main thing, my blog. It’s existed under various names in various places but I think it’s been here under this name since about May 2015. At least, that’s when I have my earliest viewing statistics. I blog twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, on various topics relating to travel, adventure and the outdoors. Travel tends towards the Icelandic end of the scale. I’m a huge Iceland fan. I love the geothermal hot water, I love the volcanoes, I love driving around the country with a tiny tent and plans to simply be spontaneous. I’m also working slowly towards being a paddlesport instructor so you’ll see plenty of kayaking content around here. Plenty of camping, I try to read a travel/adventure book every month, I go for weekends away around the south-west of England and there are various other outdoorsy bits in there too.
I have fingers in other pies. I’ve been dabbling half-heartedly in YouTube for a while but last September, I set off on a mission to post a video every week and so far, I’ve kept that up. Mostly it’s been short daily vlogs around Iceland but longer videos that for various reasons didn’t work as daily ones seemed to be doing well, right up until I attempted to deliberately harness that by sticking together a series of daily vlogs. No, YouTube was not fooled by that. I’m currently making a series that examines all the geothermal pools, hot springs, lagoons, spas and generally hot water aimed at tourists. That’s a ten-part series and I think part 2 is out tomorrow. I cross-post those here but I’d really like it if you’d subscribe – I’m only 970 subscribers away from being able to monetise the videos and I do like the idea of collecting a few pennies.
I’m deciding whether or not to have a go at Substack. At the moment, I’ve just copied over as many posts as it would allow because why reinvent the wheel when you can bring the same content to a new audience? But it looks like I’m going to have to manually copy them over twice a week and I might decide to either make that something entirely new or decide that a blog and a YouTube channel is quite enough for one person who’s also got plenty of other stuff on her plate.
Last, I’ve just finished my second book. The first, A Polar Night’s Tale, follows my adventures around the north of Europe, from Helsinki to Finnish Lapland via a train wash, a snowshoe adventure in northern Sweden, a fjord cruise up to Tromsø, the Venice of the North and then a flight up into the High Arctic for a visit to polar bear land, Svalbard. To finish off, I hop across to Iceland. The running theme is that I keep looking for the Northern Lights with varying degrees of success, travelling by various forms of transport and otherwise enjoying the cold and the snow and the beauty. My second book, Lava Land, takes me back to Iceland in summer, travelling around the Ring Road with a tent, exploring various volcanic features. I literally got my proof copy two days ago so I haven’t had a proper read-through to make sure it’s not egregious and then I’ve got to make the decision whether to bother a real publisher with it or whether to self-publish (or whether to give copies to the two or three people who’ll actually read it, and then put it on my shelf – which, let’s be realistic, is the place I’m going to be proudest and happiest to have it anyway). Book three will follow… when I’ve decided what it’s going to be about.
I think that’s everything for what I make and where it is. A quick run-through of me, myself and I.
Work is, of course, the least interesting thing about me but in short, I’m paid to find things on the internet and I’m pretty good at it although I could do with making at least three copies of me to keep up with a particularly epic project we’re in the middle of (we’re at 6/51, technically!).
Girlguiding: I’m a Ranger and Brownie leader, I’m a paddlesport assistant at the division boathouse, I’m a county leadership mentor, archery instructor and fencing coach and on Wednesday I’m going to confirm to the county commissioner that I would like to have a go at being joint Division Commissioner. I’ve been a leader for nearly sixteen and a half years, I was a Young Leader before that, I’m a member of the Trefoil Guild and I’m a self-described “badge freak”. I can tie Girlguiding to my travel/outdoor/adventure blog in that there’s plenty of outdoors and adventure involved in Guiding, especially at the boathouse and especially in the opportunities I can offer my Rangers – for example, I took them to winter survival camp in November and having failed to get on the zipline, we’re going to go and do that in the spring. I’m also going to camp in March to run either archery or fencing sessions – it’s not 100% planned yet but it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me which one I do or whether I do both.
Paddlesport: I’ve been building up my paddling skills for a couple of years now but it’s gained a certain edge through the division boathouse. I’m mostly a kayaker and generally on the sea. I live on the south coast of the UK. The sea is a far more obvious destination for a kayak than rivers. That said, I have a paddleboard and on nice summer evenings, I take it out for a paddle up a local river. I’m not an entirely incompetent canoe handler either and I’m used to doing it solo. Not mastered the j-stroke but as long as I don’t mind getting splashed, I can paddle both sides pretty happily. As a student, I came to realise that I should make more use of the water on my doorstep.
So that’s me. Blogger, baby YouTuber, data gremlin, Girlguiding enthusiast, paddler, adventurer. Welcome to this blog. Coming up in January: the annual Christmas adventure, ARFID & school trips, a lot of catching up on my Finland trip and a book on adventure, to say nothing of five videos about Iceland’s best geothermal pools. If you want to subscribe to my blog or my YouTube channel or both, that would be amazing. Thanks and I’ll see you around.