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We also got specialist equipment suppliers The North Face to kit us out with suits designed to survive Himalayan exposure, and ended up looking like Bibendum after a Chernobyl city break.

Roof provided a funky-looking helmet and we scored a heated waistcoat and gloves from the guys at Ariel - courtesy of a company called Klan - which plugged direct into a rewired Atom.

Land Rover gave us an expedition-spec Disco 3 with a fridge in the back. We took that to be a joke. To be honest, we thought we'd overkilled the equipment, but that it'd look great in the pictures. We thought that would be enough.

Fuelled on thoughts of Boy's Own-style adventure, we sallied forth to Newcastle for the 19-hour ferry trip to Kristiansand on the southern edge of Norway, planning to be back within a few days.

We were attracting plenty of interest wherever we stopped, especially when we rocked up at the Royal Docks and encountered real Norwegians. At first we laughed at the little sucking noises they made through the teeth.

The twisted-up purse of the lips that signified both incredulity and the prospect of reading about us in the local newspaper. People kept looking at me with the kind of sad, remorseful look you might expect if you told someone you had a terminal disease.

'Oh dear', said their eyes, 'how awful for you'. Extravagantly mustachioed Norwegian men strode up to the car, inspected the blatantly stud-less tyres and announced: 'You are doing this? In that? Now? You are crazy! No, actually, I think you are stupid.' We laughed, with only a slight edge.

It wasn't so bad, was it? The trip to Newcastle had been OK, to be honest. Twenty-one hours later, we're checking the return ferry times and trying to think of a plausible excuse for only getting as far as Oslo.