Email is so important in Antarctica. Each expeditioner has an e-dress on board and on the station.

Finally Napoleon raised his trotter for silence and announced that he had already made all the arrangements.

It was summed up in plain, almost twitterable, English.

"Beyond Hawick to Carlisle, it's going to depend a lot more on the cross-border traffic. Possibly it would be a useful diversionary route if anything happened either on the West Coast route or the East Coast route, but then I suppose it's more difficult to quantify the benefit from that.