Jonathan, a manager at a geographic information company in Newcastle, who explained stuff to me about my GPS. He was polite enough to speak in such a way that we could understand him at all times. There weren't any other northerners there to talk to, anyway. It must have been Andrei or Dennis who mentioned to me a couple of years ago that English speaking people have no "code language" in which to speak to each other so as not to be understood by others. English is the language everybody understands; when an aside needs to be given during negotiations, or planning to leave a boring party, it's easy for other people to slip into Romanian or German or (to choose examples from this trip) Tamashek or Hausa or Fon and not offend outsiders with snippets of inappropriate opinion or fact. Or Geordie. Dave and I unfortunately speak the most common dialect, the California kind which is heard on television by the entire population of the world, and our opinions must ever be revealed. Caitlin behaved sometimes as if she thought Jonathan was the pick of the litter but I suspect that everyone on this expedition is just a little bit too mature to do what they want to do in that respect. It wasn't a reality TV show populated by vacuous supermodels. Even allowing for such handicapping, he is, as you can see, a tolerable hottie for an Englishman and a super nice guy by any metric. Since we got back (as of 11 July 2006) he's raised over £1700 for the hospital we visited in Bilma. Anyway, Northern accents are appealing in their incomprehensibility. By the time we post this he'll be atop some mountain in the Russian Caucasus.