TV presenter and comedian Alexander Armstrong discovers the secret of staying warm in Alaska
Nome, in the north-west of Alaska, is an old gold-rush metropolis peopled by workers from out of town. It’s rather splendid, and in the sweep of its town centre you get the feeling that it has hardly changed since the glory days. Huge civic buildings of yesteryear (nearly all of which have massive old gold pans outside their entrances like the trade symbols of medieval merchants) jockey with bustling engineering companies and colourful bars.
I’ve been making a circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle for a documentary. We’re reaching the end of our journey, and this is the first town the crew and I have been to that has more than two bars. It has a galvanising effect on us. We check into our hotel and head back out with unseemly haste. We discover the main activity in the bars of Nome is – weirdly – scratchcarding. People sit up at the bar in silence, industriously working their way through fistfuls of scratchcards and throwing them over their shoulders. At one place, the Polar Bar, the floor is knee-deep in discards.
I am in a fabulous state of suspension where the earth itself has taken control of me and my workings
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