Claire of the Antarctic

It was also interesting to see that some of my mail had taken quite a circuitous and undoubtedly warm route in order to reach me! Not quite sure how the sorting office confused Falkland with Cayman Islands, however just in case you did not know, the postcode for the Falkland Islands is FIQQ 1ZZ!

There is now a last minute dash on base for everyone to prepare their outgoing mail, our last day for Christmas posting is today. It does seem rather odd to be writing Christmas cards in November; I should have popped on some carols and enjoyed mince pies and mulled wine during the mammoth correspondence session last night… will endeavour to do so next year!

To expedite proceedings Daz and Nathan kindly lent a hand in the sorting process and soon the dining room tables were awash with parcels and letters from all over the world. In addition to our Royal Mail deliveries we also received our Two Kilo parcel, prepared by our next of kins during winter, for me this contained my Christmas and Birthday presents and a Crunchie! I saved it until Friday!

One of the many extra-clinical duties of the doctor is that of Postmistress (or Master depending on gender!).

My postal duties have been comparatively light over winter as we have been without facility for incoming or outgoing mail. However, with summer also comes the exciting prospect of flights and with them post. Our mail is sent via the Falkland Islands, and so with the current flying schedule heavily in favour of Punta Arenas transits as opposed to Falkland ones, our postal delivery service is worse than even a remote village in the North Hebrides. We cannot complain, this is Antarctica after all, and I am just happy we can receive any post at all!

And so it was on Thursday 11th November that we received our first incoming flight from the Falkland Islands, bearing a hefty load of Blue Royal Mail Bags. The winterers who had not received any new mail since February were understandably excited and so I set to immediately sorting the mail, with a crew of eager spectators keeping an eye out for packages bearing their name.

I departed the UK a year ago today, to slowly wend my way southwards to my present location, and this is the last photograph I had taken with my family before I left, in the ever so glamorous setting of Heathrow Terminal 2 Pret a Manger!

I clearly remember my last hours in England; Ashley negotiating my excess baggage South at no extra cost and sweetening the aircrew for our flights to Madrid, Santiago, Punta Arenas and finally the Falkland Islands! Our dual family lunch with both Ashley and my family devouring Pret’s finest offerings; the tearful farewells at the security stand, knowing I would not see Mummy and Beckie until April 2011, and then Ashley chivvying me along airside with our speedy foray through duty free complete with last minute luxury purchases, Hermes Eau du Nil and some Lancome mascara (still going strong and surviving the Antarctic climate well I hasten to add!), and finally frantically scribbling farewell cards at the gate minutes before boarding and pleading with the ground staff to post them on my behalf!

I cannot believe a year has gone by already, so many things have happened, both here and back at home. Summer is ramping up again to full swing here at Rothera and so for now my attentions are focused here, but in the back of my mind the thought that I have less than four months now remaining at Rothera, it really does not seem very long at all now and I am intending on enjoying every moment!

It does appear that I have spent the past weekend in the pursuit of avian photographs, please rest assured I have not become a twitcher in my absence from the real world, and that actually these photographs were all captured in true Claire photography fashion, i.e. rather ad hoc and more by luck than judgement! This particular shot was attempting to capture the Antarctic Terns, the flocks of them that happened to swoop past on Sunday afternoon, alas the camera chose instead to focus on the iceberg and distant mountains… four months to go… I really will endeavour to capture a more convincing photograph in due course!

Life has certainly become far busier since the arrival of the BAS planes, indeed yesterday we welcomed the arrival of the four BAS Twin Otters to Rothera, and so with a full complement of aircraft and a rapidly increasing base population I can safely announce that Summer has started. It certainly is quite different from being just the 22 of us that we have been for the past seven months, however I am quite certain the merits that Summer brings far outweigh any hardships; I am quite happy to forgo my specific coat hook in preference for a conversation with someone new, a newspaper printed within the past week, actually even within the last few months is quite incredible, or most excitingly an apple!

The next new excitement is the prospect of post arriving… fingers crossed sometime this week, weather and plane schedules permitting! Such a simple thing to people in the real world, but rest assured when you have read every item of literature you arrived with several times over, reread letters from home a million times over and devoured the final stash of birthday gifts & chocolate, the hope of something delivered by Royal Mail is exciting!

I must run along now to empty the autoclave of surgical instruments for the Aircraft Medical Boxes, ready for tomorrow and then off to watch the final gig of our winter band, ‘Snow Rhythm’.

The Snow Petrels were not behaving as such compliant posers as the Imperial Cormorants however, as this photograph stands to prove. At least the bird in question features in the shot, albeit rather peripherally!

With just over four months of my tenure in Antarctica remaining I am hoping I may be able to catch a slightly more impressive shot at some point before heading North.

I had not fully appreciated quite how blue the eyes of the Blue eyed Shag, more politely known as an Imperial Cormorant, were until a recent foray around The Point.

One of my extra-medical duties is that of being Rothera Tour Guide. I am quite tempted to have some umbrellas printed up with a suitably catchy logo for leading my merry throng behind, although the rather inclement weather could put pay to that particular idea!

On this particular trip around The Point taking some new Rotherite Residents I took along my SLR and uber lens, which for the first time in my Antarctic residence permitted me a sufficiently close peak at the eyes of these rather elegant birds and indeed their eyes are quite blue, piercingly so in fact.

Not only have the British Antarctic Survey Management Team arrived at Rothera this week following the arrival of the Dash on Tuesday, but we also have noticed a large number of Blue eyed shags about; I do not think the two are correlated in anything more than a contemporaneous nature!

Everyone on base made a real effort with fancy dress for our last party of Winter, amongst the attending were a couple of werewolves, zombie, skeleton, a freaky clown, scream, the grim reaper and a black widow. Fortunately our papier mache creations were successful, not only the pumpkin but also a spider pinata.

We are now back to waiting for the rest of the British Antarctic Survey to arrive and with that the conclusion of winter, for now however we are enjoying the remains of our isolation and the opportunities and privilege that affords. And with present inclement weather it appears that our winter may continue for a few days more…

Without real balloons we again sought locally available materials upon which to base our decorations, including an ancient meteorological balloon. With the addition of parcel tape the balloon quickly acquired a more pumpkin-like shape and we set to with our creation.