To the Poles without a Beard, by Catherine Hartley

Finding self-fulfilment on 6,000 calories a day

Jan 4 2000. Cigs 0 (vg), alcohol units 0 (vg) calories 6000 (avg for polar expedition). Am at South Pole, hurrah, that'll show Shazzer and the rest that I am not daffy sort who couldn't find way to end of world without troupe of seven men helping me, although they did. Am first British woman to South Pole! Apart from the other British woman who got here with me at the same time, but these things are complicated.

If Helen Fielding was planning on writing "Bridget Jones goes to the Ends of the Earth" then bad luck – it's already been done, and by a real-life Bridget called Catherine Hartley. Her account of her life before her exploits is straight out of fiction: a thirtysomething singleton working for the BBC trying to herd people on to shows.

The tales she tells are cringingly awful; after a few too many days waking up sozzled, she discovered exploration, and that life was better sober, particularly where there weren't too many other people. So she set off to the South Pole, after first clearing the little matter of £30,000 sponsorship, because she realised she could be the first British woman to walk there unaided.

Then there was the problem of actually getting to the pole through conditions where frostbite is routine, excretion excruciating and precision literally vital, and you have to pull a sled weighing as much as an 11-stone man up and down hillocks. She was a not-too-fit traveller; and the title of "first British woman to walk unsupported to the South Pole" would be shared with another woman on the expedition. I cringed as she hid the frostbite that could have cost a finger, spilt drinks and bottles of urine in her tent, and generally was as much of a Bridget abroad as at home.

Yet she did manage it, in slightly better form than some of the others. On returning home, she then went for the North Pole, where it's even colder, and the obstacles include polar bears and shifting ice floes. She achieved that, too.

Hartley is modest – or realistic – enough never to call herself anything more than an "extreme tourist". She knows that without her guides, and the availability of satellite phones and airplane pickup, she would have been dead. And she did raise money, notably for Sense, the deafblind charity.

This book raises the suspicion that there are thousands of Bridget Joneses out there whose unhappiness stems in part from trying to cope in a world they're not cut out for.

Hartley found happiness in the simplicity of the struggle, where putting one foot in front of the other was the essential task for the moment, the hour, the day. She discovered that although she was just about capable of working for the BBC, herding its guests and scouting locations, she didn't want to go up the corporate ladder. She wanted to go to places so far out of the way that only map-makers bother with them. A vg effort, cringingly entertaining, which accidentally raises far deeper questions than Helen Fielding stumbled upon.