Like most things in life, the email about Antarctica wasn't meant for me. But I decided to take it anyway.

I was sick of being weak. I was sick of following the rules. I was sick of being me. For once, I was going to take what I wanted, and damn the consequences. Just like Jocasta. And I did. I have to give myself that. I took that trip that wasn't intended for me, a trip few people would do, a trip that killed many.

What I didn't know was that this would be the last journey I was ever going to make.

But wait, I'm getting way ahead of myself. I need to go back if any of this is going to make sense.

Start at the beginning. With that email from InTrepid Ice, the one that came to my work.

No, before that. I wouldn't have made such a rash decision under ordinary circumstances. Start with Ben. Ben, my dream, my world, my cohabiter of eight years. Start with Ben, leaving me for Jocasta.

I mean, let's go the whole hog, shall we? This mess actually began twenty-nine years ago, a slapped-red baby in a hammered metal box, screaming into the wind somewhere above the white horses of the slate North Sea.

Turn back, my dad shouted above the thwick-thwack of helicopter blades, the shivery-wet, expectant moment I was born. The bairn's here. We dinnae need to go nowhere now.

Jamiesons don't leave Shetland. That's the joke. Jamiesons stay on the islands. Like most jokes, it's only funny because it's true.

That air, water and movement of my airborne birth must have done something, though. Feet off the ground, head in the clouds. I was the only Jamieson that ever hankered for a world beyond our gannet-splattered, salt-blasted rocks.

I was the only Jamieson that left.

As far back as living memory, as far back as records go, maybe as far back as our ancestors' rapacious arrival on their wooden boats from Norway. The Jamiesons settled, and they stayed.

Until me. I set my face to the wind.

I left.

Jennie Jamieson, slight and sickly of pallor.

Jennie Jamieson: the last Viking.

First at seventeen, for university in Edinburgh, huge rucksack on my back, my mother teary at the CalMac gate.

Then—horror of horrors!—freshly matriculated, newly adult, with my shiny Ecology degree, down to London—London! London England!—for a dream job at GlobalGreen.

Yeah, GlobalGreen. The environmental charity. I'm sure you've heard of it. The one with the boats and the banners and the cool activists and the festivals.

The GlobalGreen!

I not only left the islands, I was going to change the world!

Except I didn't.

I sat in an open-plan office and wrote web copy and answered emails, fielding inane member requests that we stop my neighbour cutting down that tree, or please do something about that beast, Mr. Trump.

But I did meet Ben at GlobalGreen. So my world was changed, at least.

Oh, Ben.

Ben was fantastic. I can't emphasise that enough. He was dynamic and scruffy and popular and smart, everything I'd ever dreamed of—but never met—back on the islands.

Ben worked at GlobalGreen too, but on the boats-and-banners-and-festivals side of things, rather than fielding emails from irate Mr Joneses in Shrewsbury wanting to know exactly what their £4-a-month membership fee went on.

Ben was spectacular.

It took me a while to work out what he saw in me. Quiet little dull little Jennie Jamieson, the girl from nowhere, the girl from the islands with no trees.

That was it, I finally realised. His anthropologist's heart loved that remoteness. My otherness.

That I was the last Viking.

I played up to it, I'm ashamed to say. My accent became more Scottish. Fair-isles multiplied in my wardrobe. I even dyed my hair red.

I wanted to be what he wanted to see in me.

And I was, for a while.

But the novelty eventually wore off.

Ben saw that whales and waves and wind aside, Shetland wasn't so different to the norm. My parents ate their sausages and watched their Saturday night talent-shows on their flatscreen TV like anyone, anywhere else.

I was no more Viking than he was.

After that, it was only a matter of time. I see that now. A matter of time before Ben found someone as cultured and cool and cultivated as himself.

Before I was back in a damp shared-house in an unfashionable part of London, with a long commute across an indifferent city on an unimpressive Communications sub-officer wage.

My new flatmates were ten years younger than me, and totally uninterested. I had no friends—all my socialising had been with him.

I couldn't bear seeing Ben and Jocasta (a film-maker, commissioned by GlobalGreen for a web-ad about Amazon deforestation, can't you just imagine it?) at work.

It's time to come home, Jennie, my mum wheedled down the phone. You've been gone long enough. Grannie's house is waiting for you. There's always a job at the shop.

It was time to go back. She was right.

Time to give up this world I'd never change, and return to where I'd die.

I only wished... I only wished I'd lived a little first.

So that's why I did it.

I'd given my month's notice at GlobalGreen, found another tenant to take my flatshare room when I left. My days in London were numbered. I was ready to go back to Shetland, dreams unaccomplished, tail between my legs.

I'd sunk to rock bottom.

I had nothing to lose.

Or so I thought.

I got the spark of the idea from Jocasta. That sounds strange, but it's not really. I lost so much time in the Bermuda Triangle of her Facebook-Instagram-Twitter it's amazing I had any thoughts that weren't at least tangentially related to her in the period between Ben leaving and me coming to Antarctica.

Jocasta was a traveller. An adventurer. Hashtag-explore-everything, feet-on-a-mountain, here's-my-plane-wing, the lot. God, I'd sneer at her, if I wasn't so jealous. I'd roll my eyes, if she wasn't so much better than me.

After weeks of barely leaving my room, scraping through every corner of Jocasta's online presence—LinkedIn and Flickr and JustGiving, an abandoned old LiveJournal from 2004—torturing myself, poking my wound, I decided it had to end.

I had to do something, before I finally gave up. I had to prove something, before I jacked in my job and went back to the islands to fade away.

That's when I got the Antarctica email.

It wasn't meant for me.

It was addressed to "The Groovy Guys at GlobalGreen".

They were opening an Ice Hotel, this company, InTrepid Ice. The first hotel on Earth's last continent.

Adventure!

Nature!

Exploration!

InTrepid wanted GlobalGreen at the ice hotel opening. The right faces. The right brand. So would we send someone, for the adventure of a lifetime?

I replied before I had time to think; Jocasta in the Sun, Jocasta in Fiji, Jocasta on a camel, riding through my brain.

Yes, GlobalGreen would send someone.

Jennie Jamieson.

They'd send me.