Random Writings

It’s the little things, you know, that make the place feel different. Here are a few of them:

• Static electricity – if you’re not careful in your choice of footwear (trainers are bad) then you get electric shocks off everything and anything. The dry air is the main culprit here – it’s much easier for a charge to build up.
• Leftovers – we often eat leftovers for lunch, as we like to try and minimise food wastage. Some things get recycled into other things – so left-over pasta’n’sauce is often put in a baking tray, given a topping of grated cheese and then baked in the oven. The best recycled food this winter has been a carrot cake whose major ingredient was left-over carrot and orange soup. Oh, and the soup had been made from canned carrots and orange juice concentrate. It sounds foul but was actually delicious!
• Toilets in most of the buildings flush with seawater (fresh water takes a lot of electricity to produce) so you can sometimes smell the sea in your bathroom
• Catering-size everything – giant tins, giant bags of dried food, giant dishes and giant sinks to wash them up in. I think that going back to a domestic kitchen’s going to feel rather cramped.
• Fresh bread every day – or nearly every day. We have a good selection of bread flours (plain white, wholemeal, malted, etc) and we usually have a fresh still-warm loaf or rolls with our lunch. There are also conventional tin loaves for toast and sandwiches. But it’s a far cry from supermarket plastic white!
• Boneless meat – to avoid introducing diseases into the wildlife, the Antarctic Treaty forbids the import of any animal bones. For the same reason waste meat products are incinerated (in the nominally monthly “meat burn”) rather than going down the waste-disposal (“muncher”) and into the sewage treatment plant and then into the sea.
• After a few weeks watching the aircraft come in to land you can tell which pilot is approaching from their style of flying!
• Fox Hat. This is our twice-weekly film night (Wednesday and Sunday) in the bar. There’s a Fox Hat rota, and the person who’s night it is gets to choose a short (usually an episode from a TV series) and a main feature film. Some people rapidly get a reputation for good/bad Fox Hats so the question “whose Fox Hat is it tonight?” is loaded with significance! Oh, and the name comes from a media visit some years ago by a team from Fox Productions, who were afforded lots of help by the base team and faithfully promised to send a parcel of goodies to say thank you. When the parcel eventually arrived it consisted of one branded baseball cap. After some deliberation, it was decided that the hat should be worn by the person choosing the film… although the hat has now vanished!
• Wearing sandals and socks indoors is not considered a fashion crime at Rothera, in fact, it shows your acceptance of base life! Some people do pad around in just their socks (especially in the summer) but this leads to accelerated sock wear and eventual deterioration of the socks themselves. Of course, some people choose to dispense with wearing socks at all whilst on base. Similarly, wearing orange clothing (boilersuits, fleece tops, jackets, etc) and thermal baselayer tops is considered normal behaviour.
• Fostering an unusually precise obsession with the weather. We all look at the display from the automatic weather station with alarming regularity, and have become quite good at guessing temperatures and wind speeds from a 1 minute walk across the yard between Admirals and Bransfield.
• Sewing. Many people have learned to use the sewing machine in Fuchs House and some are pretty expert with it. This comes in handy for running repairs, but also for making costumes for fancy-dress nights! It’s not uncommon to see people wearing jeans/shorts/shirts/whatever patched or even bulked out with different coloured fabric – orange tent fabric is a popular choice.
• Drinking unusual drinks, or indeed unusual combinations of drinks, when the bar is suffering a shortage of something. After an evening in which several people developed a taste for White Russians (Kahlua, vodka and milk) there were then some further variations with Kahlua, amoretto and milk, and indeed the latter plus rum-and-raisin ice-cream!
• G&T on the V – gin-and-tonic on the verandah. Very British – Bransfield and Admirals both have a raised wooden deck outside, and the Bransfield one is a real sun-trap and can be very pleasant on a sunny afternoon, even if the air temperature’s below freezing. Shame about the shortage of gin!
• Wierd astronomical things – at our latitude we get funny effects with the moon. Sometimes it can be above the horizon all day (and visible, faintly) and at other times of the month it won’t appear at all for several days. We also quite often see satellites flashing in the night sky, not to mention the southern hemisphere constellations – and Orion upside-down!
• Finally, all the many, many forms of snow. There’s the urban myth that Eskimos (sorry, Inuit) have an unusual number of words for snow, but until you’ve been somewhere where there’s a lot of it, you don’t really appreciate how many kinds of snow there can be. Broadly speaking, we have: powdery snow, spindrift (fine blown snow that ends up in everything after a storm), soft slushy snow that falls in big flakes in warm weather, sleet, neve (pronounced nevvay) which is snow that’s frozen into a texture like polystyrene, and creaks when you walk on it and is good for making igloos out of, champagne powder (which is a mixture of fresh powder snow and ice crystals – lovely for skiing), not to mention soft snow with a hard crust (nasty stuff), hard snow with a dusting of powder on the top, snowdrifts, windscoops and sastrugi (ridges formed by the wind blowing over the snow)

Oh, and for those that don’t get the significance of the title of this posting, it comes from the film Pulp Fiction, where one of the (American) characters explains that in Europe MacDonalds have to call a quarter-pounder cheeseburger a “Royale with cheese” because Europeans use metric measurements. It’s the little differences, he says…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 1:40 am and is filed under Antarctica.