Showers are so often a chore. That is, until you are actually taking the shower, which can be a form of bliss, cleaning off the self that woke up and emerging a brand new person, towel-dried and fresh. I’m sitting here with my hair in a purple towel, typing. This morning I woke up with a dull, static headache and intense hunger. An attempt to eat breakfast had my head reeling, so I returned to bed with Skating to Antarctica and wallowed in pyjama-ed and duveted warmth in a world of penguins, icebergs and mental institutions.

It’s a beautiful book; a little strange, but I think that’s the attraction. She gets right deep down into the comforting blankness of depression and whiteness. Having taken a trip to Antarctica, she begins to question whether she will actually get off the boat and set foot on land. What would it mean to travel all this way and not actually be on Antarctica? It’s a question I had to get my head around, but I think that’s the point. The reader asks: how could you even contemplate this? But she answers: does it really matter? What difference will it make to my life? Will anyone back home ever find out? And no one does, since she never tells us. It’s about challenging expectations and our ways of looking at the world, and of travel, as a series of experiences to be mounted up as conquests. She takes no camera, no camcorder, suggesting that the other travelers are missing out on something by already seeing their journey in the past, sitting at home with their family and friends showing slides or jerky home movies. Although, to be critical, writing a book about the experience is hardly refusing to capture and display it; but what she displays are her own reactions to the landscape (along with her memories of childhood – a very disrupted one), rather than the still snapshots we have all seen a hundred times. It’s the essence of writing: the conveyance of personal reaction, so that each piece of autobiographical writing, or even all writing, in a sense, is about the author and how they perceive the world. When we say each book contains a world, we mean it is our world seen through someone else’s eyes, like trying on funky glasses to see how the tint changes our perspective. Jenny Diski’s glasses are white and ice-blue, and they look inwards and back, searching out a need for absence and nothingness that gives us some meaning in life. It could be a really depressing read, but, rather surprisingly, it isn’t. Any book that makes you look at life slightly differently is a positive thing.

So now I am showered and fresh and my headache has gone, and I want to sit in a white room and write.