The program follows Connolly on an epic voyage around the Northern edge of Canada, from East to West, with the particular episode that I caught featured him boarding a Russian Research Vessel and heading off around the Northwest passage – a recently discovered and, until very recently, un-navigable, sea route through the Arctic Ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (thanks, Wikipedia and Global Warming!).

Throughout the program, Connolly gives us a history of the area – full of explorers being stranded in the ice and eventually having to eat each other – and then makes port and comments about how miserable and desolate the wilderness there is. He then goes back to the boat and plays his banjo with one of the other hundred tourists aboard the ship.

This, in a long winded way, is my point: Connolly is not a young, fit man. I’m sure that for his age – even for guys half his age – he’s doing well, but the fact remains that this is supposed to be some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth and it seems that, with enough money, one can ‘do the arctic’ with almost no prerequisite abilities at all. Just look at the Top Gear guys when they drove to the North Pole a few years ago.

Now, in theory, I have no trouble with this whatsoever. I think it’s great that when I’m older and slightly more enfeebled, I won’t be prevented from visiting the Poles or seeing Machu Picchu. I’ll just sign up with a company that can organise Sherpas to carry my bags and provide all the equipment necessary and provide plenty of comfortable rest stops along the way and I’ll be able to do it all!

But there remains a part of me that wants some things to remain a challenge, to keep their high barrier to entry. Everest, I suspect, will always be one of those things, and will always be a target for those who want to prove that they can do anything.

However, for those of us that dream of setting out on an adventure of slightly less extreme scope, there’s always the niggling worry that you’d get there to your destination to find a tour group of thirty sexagenarians from Ohio. Am I wrong in thinking that, no matter how much effort you extolled, the presence of those who took an easier route somehow dampens the sense of achievement?

From the opposite site of things, now that I’m 22, I don’t actually think there’s anything I can’t do, legally/theoretically/potentially speaking. I’m also fairly sure that I should be, if not right now then in the next few years, at the peak of my physical ability. This means that from the point where I reach this mental/physical peak, the list of things I am able to do will only get shorter.

Now, I’m not one of these people who complains at 22 that “I’m getting old”. I’m aware how absurd that it. However, also aware that, if I want go get as much out of this life as I can, I am at a point right now where I can do things that I might not be able to do in the future (this might not even be an age thing – I could damage an ankle playing squash).

So, second and final point, that sort of matches in with the first: What things am I able to do now, in my early 20s, that I might not be able to do in ten years time?

Whatever they are, I should probably make it my business to do as many of them as I can, before I no longer have the luxury.