I blame Jack London. As a child I was an obsessive reader and at the age of 11 or 12, I came across Jack London. I started with "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" and went on to read through most of his novels. As a result, I was hooked on the idea of the "frozen north" and having my own team of sled dogs battling through blizzards and living on what I could trap (Bit of a strange fantasy for a boy living in the urban wastes of Slough not far from London UK).