This was going to be the first blog post about Georgia & Traverse but it’s going to be a reintroduction instead. I don’t know how many people went off with my Instagram and my blog but in case there are any new people coming this way, I thought I’d start by telling you who I am and what I do. Georgia content starts Monday.
Online, I go by Juliet. If you’ve met me in person in the last ten days, you might know me by a slightly different name. I like to keep a division between my real life and my digital life and I know, that’s one of my big obstacles. I’m quite happy with my little blog and my baby YouTube channel but I’m still right at the beginning of telling people it exists. I’m the one with the pigtails who may have told you about Iceland or Brownies or my third sulphur bath of the week or finding supermarkets on a large continent. Hi!
For my day job, I’m a researcher, a spreadsheet & database gremlin and I work for a tiny company that probably wouldn’t describe itself as a London-based startup but kind of is, give or take that two out of the seven of us live out in the sticks. We all work remotely and I should add my usual line here – “I’ve been at this company since 2017 so I’ve been working remotely since before it was cool”. There are definitely aspects of work which have crept into my digital life – inspired by work, like the Iceland supermarkets map, or the tagged and categorised content calendar that uses the same tool as our giant 29,000-record strong niche database. I’m a born administrator, I’m afraid.
I’m also a Girlguiding volunteer – I work as a leader with Brownies (age 7-10) and Rangers (age 14-18) and I’m qualified with Guides (age 10-14), I’m an archery instructor and fencing coach, a paddlesport assistant at the not-so-local division boathouse, a county leadership mentor and I’m about to become Division Commissioner. As a former shy person, being a leader can make such a difference. I can now quite happily run campfire singing for a large-scale event and although I’m squeamish as hell, I’m still inclined to run towards a car crash, although my bare-minimum first aid certificate doesn’t actually give me the skills to be useful. Lots of soft skills in Guiding. So that’s my days and evenings.
And now we get to my digital life. I write a blog that covers anything I can squeeze under the categories of travel, outdoors and adventures – that’s the one you’re reading right now, for the avoidance of doubt. I have a compulsion to write, so I have another travel blog that I write mostly for my mum, which serves as a longform digital postcard so she knows I’m alive but is also an invaluable resource for writing this blog, all the details that I wrote down at the time but have completely forgotten by the time I get to the real blog posts. If I refer to “my diary at the time”, it’s probably that blog. I also have half a dozen others that I start for various purposes and then abandon. I really like the title 21st Century Spinster for a lifestyle blog so every January I resolve to get that up and running and somewhere around the middle of January every year, I realise yet again that I have no idea what to write in a lifestyle blog. One that I have been reasonably consistent about is The Internet’s Brown Owl, which is meant to answer questions from newer Girlguiding volunteers, like “Why am I called Brown Owl?” and “Can Rainbows go to Remembrance Parade?” and “how do I evidence my leadership qualification?”.
This blog is called I Am A Polar Bear because of a chance remark I made at work while I was trying to come up with a new name, not that I didn’t like the names Rhinestones & Rhyolite or Limestone & Lava. I wilt in hot weather and thrive in the cold – I’m not quite Elsa, the cold does bother me anyway, but after many years of trips to Iceland and Lapland, I’ve acquired a half-decent cold-weather wardrobe. I like the snow, I like the Northern Lights and I really like sitting in outdoor hot pools on cold evenings. I’ve blogged twice a week since at least 2017, probably earlier, and for the last five or so years, it’s been 4pm on Mondays and Thursdays. I’ve mastered the art of the content calendar, although I call it “the IAAPB schedule on Airtable” so almost everything is scheduled at least five days in advance and when I’m away, I’m very strict about making sure I’ve got posts finished and ready to go. Not missed an upload in years, although a few have been finished in haste after work and published at 6pm or even 8pm instead of 4.
My latest venture is YouTube. It’s a kind of attempt to expand my little media empire and earn more pennies, although I’m a long way from that. I got lucky in December, with “Iceland in February” and “Is the Blue Lagoon the best geothermal pool in Iceland?” catching people’s attention. I’ve not anywhere near reproduced that success but I managed 1500 monthly views in two and a half months, something that took five and a half years on my blog. It’s a fluke but it was gratifying. YouTube is definitely secondary to the blog. I’m a far more natural writer than talker.
Speaking of writing, I self-published my first book in 2017. It’s gone through various titles and I’m currently Having Thoughts about what to do with it so no link right now but it was about a trip around the Arctic, from Helsinki to Iceland via Sweden, Norway and Svalbard, looking for the Northern Lights, featuring a trip through a train wash, a coastal boat ride, a snowshoeing disaster and being lost in the Polar Night at the mercy of polar bears. It was inspired by Alexander Armstrong’s similar journey and accompanying book, except he did it with the help of a TV production company and a horde of local fixers. I did it on my own and I figured if he could get a book out of it, so could I. I will caveat it with “everything happened… but not necessarily in that order”. Some of the legs were many years apart and where they joined up, they genuinely and coincidentally joined up, like the bus from Kiruna to Harstad/Narvik, the boat from Harstad to Tromsø and the plane from Tromsø to Svalbard. All separate trips, all in different years, but they do join up. Look closely and you’ll see jumps – there’s no quick and easy way to get between Rovaniemi to Kiruna, for example, and I didn’t do them together but I also didn’t invent a fictional journey that never happened to get from one to the other.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m currently coming up to the end of writing my second book. I planned for it to be finished for Christmas but I rushed the last edit and when I got what I thought was the final print, there was an error in the first line. I gritted my teeth but when I found a second error in the first paragraph, I knew it was time for another round of checking and editing and as yet, I haven’t finished. It’s called Lava Land: On the Ring Road and it’s a summer road trip around Iceland, camping and visiting volcanoes. I quite enjoy writing books but it’s mostly for my own joy, to have my own books on my own shelf – and because my friend Tom cheerleads and nags and wants the next one. I’m dithering over whether I’m brave enough to bother agents and publishers with Lava Land and that means I’m also dithering about whether to show them book 1 as well – at last count, I’d sold 15 copies, mostly to people at work who then never mentioned it again. I mean, that’s entirely dependent on being brave enough to send out book 2 and having anyone take any interest but it kind of makes sense to have the two as a pair.
(This might be a good point to mention that a new eruption in Iceland started this morning. It was good news at first – well away from Grindavik, which got scorched in the last one just last month – but unfortunately, the lava trickled down across the main road and has now burst the hot water pipe supplying water from the very nearby power station to the entire peninsula. In Iceland, they use that hot water for heating as well as general hot water, and you do not want a shortage of heating in Iceland in February. No, I will not be booking my flight to rush off to see this one.)
Is there anything else? I use Instagram mostly as as a digital photo album and for keeping real life friends up to date with what I’m doing. I have no real interest in growing followers or making Reels. I occasionally think that I should at least have a look at TikTok but I’m too old to figure out an entire new platform and anyway, if I’ve learned anything in the last week, it’s that concentrating on just the one or maybe two media is a better way to go than trying to do everything and ending up doing it badly.
So I think that’s me. Blogger, baby YouTuber, lover of cold places, snow and hot water, kayaker, Girlguiding volunteer and yes, finder of supermarkets.