Recently a Bahamas-flagged cruise ship got stuck in the Antarctic with more than 100 people on board. Which led me to think, if you were stuck anywhere - particularly in the middle of an ice field - who would you choose to be stuck with?
I once went to Antarctica with an 89-year-old farmer's wife from Tzaneen. She had no concept of being old and got picked up by an elderly Argentine gentleman in Buenos Aires, who taught her to dance the tango.
Subsequently, when we had a bad day on the ice while in the middle of the Lemaire Channel, she dismissed the incident as "Shit happens!" Now that's the sort of person I would want beside me when facing adversity.
Recently on a rail trip around Europe, our group of fellow travel writers were surrounded by very insistent beggars in an unsalubrious Paris suburb. My colleagues from Brazil, Kazakhstan and India took all this in their stride, as of course I did, being a veteran of Johannesburg's William Nichol Drive and Rosebank.
But the girl from Australia freaked. They don't have beggars Down Under (because of massive social security grants for the indigenous peoples).
The beggars zoomed in on her with all the concentration of their forebears marching on the Bastille. She flailed about helplessly, giving Euros left, right and centre. She was just being emotionally blackmailed out of her camera when we rescued her and gave her a stiff Napoleon brandy. Now you wouldn't want to be in a tight spot with someone like that.
I was once in Botswana's Tuli Block with a ranger who was afraid of elephants. Not a good career choice because every time our Land Rover got charged (which was often in those days because the Tuli elephants were very nervous and aggressive) he flung himself from the wheel, and buried himself under the back seat.
We were making our way slowly through a herd of elephants as dusk was falling (my husband was now at the wheel) when we got a flat tyre. We all survived but to this day that place is called Ambush Alley.
The ranger went on to become a cook.
One wants cool, calm heads in an emergency. Or blind faith. Or maybe inexperience. Years ago when flying over Australia's oldest mountain range in Kakadu, Northern Territory, the wheels of our little two-engine plane got stuck.
"We're not going to be able to land," the young pilot told me. So young I swear he hadn't begun to shave yet.
"What's going to happen?" I asked.
"Dunno, mate," he replied.
"Ah well," I thought, "it'll be a quick end and better than a lingering death in a Benoni old-age home."
After six or eight passes of the bush runway the wheels did come down. If the pilot was nervous it certainly didn't show.
I do know that I wouldn't want to be stuck anywhere with dull, boring people. Raconteurs, teachers, journalists, writers, poets and musicians would be good. Not a doctor (in no time at all we'd be asking about our aches and pains). Nor accountants. And certainly not lawyers.
Our chosen group could all sit swopping stories, making jokes and composing penguin songs and poems until we were rescued.
And being raconteurs, teachers, journalists, writers, poets and musicians, we'd of course all have a hip flask with us.