When I was seventeen my widowed English teacher stood at the head of the class and told us about the Antarctic explorer Tom Crean. ‘Tom Crean, gentlemen,’ she would purr, ‘now there was a man—a bear of a man!’ That throaty smoky rumble stuck with me more than any of the poetry or Wuthering Heights or when she was out sick and the substitute teacher let us watch 2 Fast 2 Furious twice. Tom was indeed a big man and yes he was a bear of a man. A man of action, like your dad would talk about with his buddies in the front room when they came around to watch the snooker. Big Tom was handpicked for his skills and his disposition and his manfulness by Ernest Shackleton for the expedition, to finally cross Antarctica via the South Pole. When he retired, he opened a pub in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere and called it the South Pole Inn and he never told anyone that he was a hero. Nobody's business but him and the wife. If it were possible for me to bottle this feeling of admiration and respect I have for Tom Crean and take it to Toyota and have them compress the feeling into metal and plastic and rubber and put it all into a huge machine the size of Harland & Wolff and have them pull the chains and let an electrical storm hit the rod and light up the console and after the smoke and the steam and the mustard gas all get sucked out the inbuilt vent, they would be left with my 2005 Rav4, which is for sale by the way.