Random Writings

An article in today’s Observer made mention of a service called Hubbub, started in Islington (of course! Honestly, the Guardian should change its name to the Islington Gazette…) which offers an online ordering and delivery service for buying food from local independent shops. In a similar tone is another article from the Guardian about the value of traditional markets in towns and cities. Now, I entirely buy into the argument that food purchased from independent retailers is often better quality, cheaper and more sustainable than that from supermarkets. I would dearly love to wander, wicker-basket in hand, around a lovely old covered market hall and buy my fruit, veg, bread, meat and other delights from jolly local traders who know and understand their produce. However, I don’t. Almost all the food that I buy comes from Sainsbury’s or Tesco. Why? Because they’re open at times when I can go shopping.

Now, I’m not working silly hours, either: I leave my house at 8am to be at my desk (12 miles away) at 8:45 – and I leave work at 5:30 and get home by 6:15. However, that effectively excludes me from dealing with all independent shops except at the weekend. Now, I could, of course, go and do my weekly shop in the city market, and perhaps visit Northrop’s the butchers’ in Mill Road on my way home. The market trades primarily in the morning – by mid afternoon the produce has been sold – and Mr Northrop doesn’t trade on Sundays (he is due a day off, after all). So that effectively means that Saturday morning has to be earmarked for food shopping, and of course there are lots of other people in the same boat as me, and so the city is heaving. This also limits what you can do with your weekend, and means you have to be out of bed on a Saturday morning before 10am…

So far, so much whingeing. However, I think there are a couple of wider points worth making.

Firstly, extending business hours into the evenings would massively increase the target audience of small shops, and would potentially allow them to compete more readily with big chains and online retailers. Of course, the shopkeepers themselves would need to take on extra staff to cover the extra hours, which would help with our present unemployment problem. The challenge would be to get a critical mass of shops to all open together. Cambridge supposedly has late night shopping on a Wednesday (meaning that the shops close at 7pm, woo, that’s late!) – but by no means all shops participate. For some businesses, a change in their work patterns would also be required. Bakeries, for instance, would need to keep baking through the day in order to have fresh bread in the evenings – in Portugal they do just that, and many people stop by the bakery to buy bread and cakes on their way home from work. Finally, by keeping the shops open, our town and city centres remain busy into the evening – which reduces crime and anti-social behaviour that can otherwise happen in deserted shopping streets after dark.
I’d be seriously in favour of a trial in which government under-wrote the costs of opening shops later in town centres, on the expectation that the retailers would boost their profits and the social benefits of a lively evening culture in towns would save money in other areas of spending. Managed well, I think it would be a great success.

Secondly, there’s a broader point about how we organise our society. We still seem to have a lingering social expectation that someone in the household will be not working during office hours. Courier companies and the Royal Mail attempt to deliver parcels during the day. Last week, National Grid (at four days notice) told me that they needed access to the house in order to replace the gas main. As soon as you bring children into the picture, the cost and hassle and issues associated with childcare, the desire to bond with your own offspring and the societal expectation of someone being at home, is it any wonder that so many parents -mostly women- choose to give up work?

In other countries shops trade late – why not here?

Despite the title, this isn’t going to be a post about HF radio in the polar regions (which was the subject of my thesis). It’s more a compilation of thoughts about how I went about my PhD and how I would have done it differently with the benefit of hindsight. I’m going to divide this into three sections:

General thoughts on doing a PhD

A PhD is the traditional entry point to a career in academia. I knew in advance that I did not want a career as a university lecturer, so why did I do it? Partly vanity, partly the desire to work on my own research project for three years, is the honest answer. Was it a good use of three years I could otherwise have spent gaining valuable career experience in industry? I’m not sure. One comment I will make to my fellow electronic engineers: unlike in pure science, most of the exciting and cutting edge research in electronic engineering is not happening in university research labs – it’s happening in the R&D departments of big companies. I would strongly advise anyone wanting to do postgraduate study in electronics to seek an industrial partner to work with rather than working solely in a university. Read Dave Pearce’s wise, if rather cynical, words on the subject here.

A serious point: my PhD brought me anxiety, sleepless nights and depression at various stages. If you have not had mental health problems before (I hadn’t really), then be prepared for this if you take one on. Depression for me manifests itself as a lack of ability to make any kind of decision unprompted, a feeling of “mental numbness” rather than actual melancholy. If you have already had mental health problems, make sure you know what to do when you spot the early symptoms.

This evening I heard Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell on the radio talking about her PhD, and she made a telling comment that she worried about not getting her PhD (during her writing-up) even though her work had made a groundbreaking discovery and had been published in Nature. Her supervisor and head of department would later be awarded a Nobel Prize for her work! If this is true for her, it will be even more true for you, as it was for me.

Things I got right, and would recommend to others

Seek the funding early and ensure it is in place before the studentship starts. Do not trust academics who promise you funding until all the paperwork is in place.

Funding includes an operating budget, not just your stipend. NERC research grants do now come with decent operating budgets, but make sure you have enough money to pay for the cost of the equipment/fieldwork that you need. One of my supervisors had deep pockets and paid for a lot of my equipment, for which I was very grateful.

Treat your PhD as a job. Work office hours (perhaps customised slightly to whether you’re a dawn lark or a night owl) and don’t expect to work weekends except in an emergency. Don’t treat it like being an undergrad!

Conversely, you have unrivalled flexibility, so take advantage of that when opportunities come along.

Seek out collaborators beyond your immediate environs. I had input from researchers in Australia, Canada and Poland – they were hugely helpful and added a lot to my work. Most researchers are friendly and helpful – if you write a polite email to them (even if you’ve never met) they may well be able to help you. You can often gain access to valuable unpublished data in this way!

You will meet a lot of people. Get yourself business cards – ideally, get your institution to print you proper ones, but if they won’t then buy some of your own from Moo.com or some similar service. It’s much easier to give someone a card at a conference or meeting than to scrabble for a bit of paper and write your email address on it.

Write things down as you go along. I was mostly good at this, but seriously – when you perform some kind of procedure or experiment, write the method down! You may need to repeat it later and will have forgotten some of the nuances. Ideally, write up each little experiment as its own mini-report. It will save you heaps of time later and will also clarify your thoughts.

Use reference management systems from the word go. I used Zotero, which is a plugin for Firefox, and makes it very easy to gather references. Zotero is more of a headache when it comes to writing up, so I’d recommend exporting the library from Zotero into Endnote (if you have it) for the writing-up stage.

Take advantage of all the training opportunities you have. Leicester ran a number of excellent courses for postgrad researchers, the best of which was GRADschool, which is a national scheme. If your uni offers GRADschool, do it! If they don’t, apply for a place on the national one.

Do look after your data, and make use of the right tools to handle it. I amassed a huge amount of data from my year-long propagation study and one of the best decisions I ever made was to import it all into an Oracle database on a server at BAS. It took me a few days to do, but gave me so much flexibility in crunching a big dataset later.

Do consider getting away from the office to write up. My writing-up cruise on the boat worked well for me, but is possibly a bit extreme. A colleague of a friend of mine booked a cheap package holiday in order to get started on a big chunk of his thesis – not a bad plan if you have the self-discipline not to just lie on the beach!

Go to conferences – they are interesting and fun, and you learn stuff and meet potential collaborators. I like giving talks and presentations and meeting people, so I love conferences. If you lack confidence in giving a talk, do a presentation skills course: by this I mean a course on how to speak in public, not a course on how to use PowerPoint. I did one at the BBC – a one day course taught by a former actor – which was excellent and did wonders for my presentation style.

Use Dropbox. Dropbox is brilliant. It keeps your data backed up and synced between multiple computers. Simple, but effective. One point to note is that Dropbox for Windows (XP – this might have been fixed in Windows 7) cannot sync an MS Word or Excel document while it is open in Word or Excel – so even though you are saving, Dropbox cannot back it up for you until you close the document. On the Mac, Dropbox can back up the documents every time you save without closing the document. It’s to do with the different ways that Windows and Mac OS work with open files.

Things I got wrong, and would recommend that others avoid doing

Proposing your own research topic is risky. If your supervisor(s) have a direct vested interest in your work, they are more likely to give you the support you need.

Choosing the right place to do your project is very important. This I got wrong – BAS were great, and provided me with money and opportunities, but there was no expertise in my specific sub-field that I could draw on. I had thought that Leicester would have provided this expertise, but their research interests were not quite in the same sub-field either. The right place to have done my PhD would have been CRC in Ottawa. I am not joking when I say that my four weeks in Ottawa (half way through my third year) were more productive than my entire first year. I had access to the right expertise and the right lab equipment. A fellow student at BAS switched to working full-time at BAS (and relocated to Cambridge) at the end of her first year because BAS was the right place for her – I should have gone to Ottawa at that stage – had I known!

Don’t try and do a “broad” thesis. My PhD topic is much too broad, which meant that I struggled to achieve the necessary depth within the word limit. A tightly-specified “narrow” project will be easier to write up. If your work is interdisciplinary, you may find it difficult to get your thesis narrow enough.

Don’t work in a dead field. Seriously, my field is almost as dead as a doornail – most of the interesting recent work of much value was funded by NATO in the 90s and stopped in about 2000. The experts at CRC had been told not to work on my field for the last ten years, although they are working on it again now. A corollary to this is that lots of important work is published in obscure conference proceedings which are hard to get, rather than in journals. Worse, stuff is published in NATO reports which are out-of-print or not available electronically.

Not having access to publications is a major headache. During my first year, Leicester’s library didn’t have electronic access to IEEE and IET conference publications, only to journals. Cambridge UL (to which I had guest access) didn’t have this either. Most of the work in my field was published at conferences, so I had several trips to the British Library and IET library to obtain publications. The British Library’s computer systems are slow and don’t let you cut-and-paste, so you spend ages typing queries into the search boxes to find the papers you want. You can only get the papers out as hard copies, which you pay for. By my second year, the library had upgraded to a subscription that included conferences and provided a proxy service to give me access to them from outside the university network. This saved so much time and effort.

Choose your supervisor(s) very carefully. Ideally, talk to their existing students and find out what they are like. Many academics are not good at people management and many are lousy supervisors. Also, visit their research group office – is it busy, with an air of quiet industry? Are their adverts for upcoming seminars and presentations? Are the posters on the wall from recent conferences? If not, walk away…

Working remotely from your supervisor is a particular challenge. Do not assume that they read your emails. If you do not receive a reply, call them. If they do not answer the phone, call the departmental secretary (or their PA, if they have one) and find out if they are in.

Do not schedule your viva for Friday afternoon and then start a new and demanding job on the following Monday morning. Enough said, I think.

I shall stop here, and recommend similar posting by two friends of mine – this one is a compilation of advice, while this one is a more personal perspective aimed at mathematicians.

My PhD is now over – all bar a few bits of administration! My internal examiner was satisfied with my corrections and the thesis has now been printed and bound. I had a drink with two of my supervisors to celebrate and give them copies of the finished thesis (as is traditional). All that remains is for me to seek copyright clearances – my thesis will be published on the web by Leicester University, and to do that I need to seek permission from all the people whose images I have used to illustrate it. This means writing a lot of emails and waiting for responses. Once this is done I can submit the final form and await a certificate at the end of January…

Now that I can’t write much (if at all) about what I do for a living – too much is commercially confidential these days – this blog is likely to lurch into yet another form, with random bits of comment and opinion. Here’s one such idea I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

A couple of months ago, I read a book called “Welcome to Everytown” by a chap called Julian Baggini. He’s a philosopher, a writer for the Guardian and appears on Radio 4. The essential premise of the book is that he spends six months living in the “most representative” postcode district of England – as calculated for him by an opinion polling firm – and engages in only the most popular leisure activities. The idea is that he finds out the “essential philosophy” of the English nation – the way that the majority of people think and behave. Now, when I started reading the book I was concerned that it might come across as a “safari to see how the poor people live”, but it’s not at all like that, and contains lots of useful insights.

One such is the idea of communitarianism. I’d never heard of this particular “-ism” before reading the book, but since reading it, I’ve realised how useful it is as a concept, and thought I’d share it. Baggini highlights communitarianism (along with “small c” conservatism) as the essential political philosophy of the majority of English people.

Communitarianism (in the sense Baggini uses it) is the belief that individuals form part of a society, and that rights and privileges are conferred upon individuals only while they retain their commitment to that society. As Baggini says “this makes [communitarians] illiberal, because [they] do not believe that principles such as the right to a free trial or life have to be maintained at all costs: rights can be forfeited or suspended.”

So, we should not be surprised that our more perspicacious politicians like to play to this particular point of view. The noise being made by Teresa May today about the Human Rights Act is pure communitarianism – foreigners are not part of our society, and thus do not acquire the same rights. In the eyes of the communitarians, to commit a crime is to spit in the face of society, and society should retaliate by the withdrawal of rights and privileges from the criminal.

Of course, like all political philosophies, it becomes ludicrous when taken to its logical extreme: a society where being a citizen confers rights, whilst those who committing crime are stripped of their citizenship, denied all basic rights and required to perform forced labour until they earn their citizenship again.

Interestingly, one of the few nations with an overtly communitarian society is Singapore, where the first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew set out to create a society where “for the greater good of society” the rights of the individual are considered less important than the responsibilities of the individual towards their community. This has built a stable but rather repressive society.

Anyway, communitarianism appeals to many people’s sense of “natural justice”, and those of us arguing from a more liberal perspective need to make clear why the communitarian position, however attractive it may seem, leads to undesirable outcomes.

…and my revised PhD thesis (now with 37% more words!) has gone to my internal examiner. He promises to get back to me by the end of the week. I’ll keep you posted.

I went on a training course today, and chose to take the train to the venue instead of driving. I arrived back at Cambridge station at 1740, and went in search of a bus. As I came out through the station entrance, I saw one of the new guided buses on the roundabout – it was snarling up the traffic as it was waiting for temporary traffic lights on the new access road that leads to the guideway. In my transport-fanboydom, I set off at speed down the footpath to the new bus stops for the guided busway, only to miss the said bus by about a minute. Bother. I looked at the timetable: this is peak hour operation, but the frequency on the southern part of the busway (which goes to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and Trumpington) is only one bus every 20 minutes. I walked back to the main bus stops and checked the timetable there. Normal, non-guided buses run to Addenbrookes every 5 minutes, and to Trumpington every 10 minutes. This begs the question: what is the southern section of the guided busway actually for?

Let’s have a look at the timetables. Only one of the four busway routes uses the southern section at all: route A, operated by Stagecoach. This operates one bus every 20 minutes right through the day, stopping abruptly in the early evening: the last buses are at 1830 from Cambridge and 1839 from Trumpington. A note hidden at the bottom of the timetable shows that there are an extra hour’s worth of bus services between Trumpington and Addenbrooke’s after the main service finishes.

The journey times on route A are as follows:

Trumpington – Addenbrookes: 6 mins
Trumpington – Rail station: 13 mins
Trumpington – City centre: 22 mins
Addenbrooke’s – Rail station: 7 mins
Addenbrooke’s – City centre: 16 mins.

Okay, so how does this compare with the conventional bus services? The guided buses have a dedicated route from the railway station to Addenbrookes and Trumpington, but going into the city they are on the road.

Let’s take the Trumpington – City case first. On this route, the guided buses compete directly with the Park & Ride shuttle bus, which makes no intermediate stops between the P&R site and the city. The P&R buses run every ten minutes (twice as often as the Route A buses) and take 16 minutes for the journey. So they are 5 minutes faster than the guided buses, despite being on the road the whole way! As they run twice as frequently, the average journey time for a passenger arriving at the P&R site is 21 minutes (5 mins avg wait + 16 mins journey) for the P&R buses and 32 minutes (10 mins avg wait + 22 mins journey) for the guided bus.

How about Addenbrookes – Railway station? This bit is on the guideway, and so should be faster. And so it is – 7 minutes for the guided bus, as against 10 minutes for the conventional service. However, as the guided bus is only every 20 minutes, whereas the Citi 1, Citi 7 and Citi 8 services combine to provide a bus every five minutes. If you walk out of Addenbrookes at some randomly-determined time and go to look for a bus, you would on average wait 2.5 minutes for a conventional bus, followed by a 10 minute journey time – i.e. 12.5 minutes total journey. However, your wait time for a guided bus will be an average of 10 minutes, followed by a journey time of 7 minutes, making 17 minutes average total journey time. So the guided bus is not much use for going to the station from Addenbrooke’s. The same argument applies to taking the bus to the city from Addenbrooke’s.

Okay, so what about Trumpington – Addenbrooke’s? Maybe the idea of the southern section is to act as a P&R service for the hospital? Well, firstly the every-20-minutes frequency is not exactly encouraging. Secondly, parking at Addenbrooke’s for hospital visitors is not astronomical: £3.50 for 2 hours costs the same as a Dayrider ticket on the guided bus. Thirdly, Addenbrooke’s has a nice new access road that connects it to Trumpington P&R site and the M11, so if a hospital P&R service was required, there was no real need to build a fancy new busway – the buses could just as easily use the new access road.

So, to summarise: the guided buses only offer faster journey times on certain parts of their route (and even then we’re only saving three minutes) but their low frequency means that most people will be better served by the conventional bus service. Providing a P&R service between Trumpington and Addenbrooke’s could have been easily done without the guideway. So what exactly is the southern section for? I still don’t know…

Following a change of job, I’m reluctantly selling “Innocenti”, which has been my home for the last four years. An ideal liveaboard boat, sold with all the accessories. The boat is currently undergoing a full repaint (hull blacking and superstructure) at Fox Narrowboats in March, Cambridgeshire, and should be completed in early August.

£40k including all accessories listed (and probably some others I’ve forgotten!)

Photos of Innocenti – more will be added once the repaint is complete.

General details:

Built 1991 by Heritage Boats
All steel construction – 12mm baseplate, 6mm sides, 4mm superstructure, all doors are steel.
59′ long, 2’5 draft under stern
Last survey in 2007
BSC issued 2010, lasts until 2013
BW Gold Licence until December 2011
Portholes throughout
Side hatch on port side opposite bathroom
56W Unisolar flexible solar panel on roof above office, with Empo-ni MPPT regulator
Fluorescent lighting throughout

Aft end:

Generous 7′ (bulkhead to taffrail) cruiser deck
Gas locker for 2 x 13kg Calor propane cylinders (included)
BMC 1.5 litre diesel engine, skin tank cooled with Polar heat exchanger
PRM Delta gearbox (replaced with reconditioned unit in 2010)
Aquadrive flexible coupling
200 litre diesel tank
4 x 110Ah Numax leisure batteries
1 x 110Ah starter battery
Smartbank Advance split charge system
100A alternator with Adverc charge controller
Automatic bilge pump

Kitchen:

Very spacious 11’6″ kitchen with lots of work surface and cupboards
Electrolux 3-way fridge, plumbed for gas operation
Spinflo Caprice built-in cooker with 4 burners, grill and oven
Morco gas water heater
Sink and draining board
Victron Phoenix Multiplus inverter/charger: 1600VA model, will supply 3kW in short bursts.
Hitachi 12V DAB digital radio
Shoe cabinet
Antique safe welded into hull under the kitchen sink, a novel feature!

Study / walk-in-wardrobe

Fitted corner desk with keyboard drawer
Drawers, including one that takes suspension files
Bookshelves above desk that take A4 files
Clothes hanging rail
Lots of storage space
12v and 240v sockets

Bathroom
Shower
Basin in vanity unit
Electric heated towel rail
Mansfield Traveller dump-through toilet
20 gallon holding tank (pump out)
Fluorescent and LED lighting

Main cabin (20′ long)
Real wood flooring, walls lined with pine boarding.
Fixed double bed at aft end, with storage underneath
No other fixed furniture, feels very spacious
Ikea gateleg dining table and folding chairs, can seat 6!
Two plywood boxes with upholstered tops make bench seats, an L-shaped sofa, a long single bed or a small double bed. They have storage underneath and can also pack flat.
Natural Heating “Ladybird” stove with two hotplates, can be cooked on.
Ecofan
Poujoulat twin-wall stainless steel chimney gives excellent combustion and minimal smoke
Steel outer doors and double-glazed inner door onto foredeck
Forward locker underneath foredeck, with Jabsco water pump and accumulator
12v and 240v sockets

Foredeck

1000 litre water tank below the foredeck
Useful steel storage box (can be removed) for firewood, etc
Red and green navigation lights
Headlight
Horn

Accessories included in sale
Honda EU10i petrol generator, very quiet and reliable
Steel jerrycan that can be locked to the boat
Mains cable for hooking generator to boat’s external socket
Security cable for generator, allows it to be on shore whilst running and remain insured
Gtech hard floor vacuum cleaner, compatible with inverter
1600W iron, compatible with inverter
Ikea tabletop ironing board
Portapotti portable toilet
Mains isolating transformer
Water hose and reel
Comprehensive collection of windlasses – BW, EA Great Ouse, Middle Levels and even a Calder & Hebble handspike!
Cast iron kettle for use on woodburning stove
Gangplank
Barge pole
Scaffolding poles for winter flood protection
Mooring ropes and pins
Folding anchor and anchor rope

My viva was on Friday afternoon. This is the traditional conclusion to a PhD, when the candidate is examined orally by two or more examiners about the work that they’ve done. The examiners also give their opinions on the candidate’s thesis. At most universities, one examiner comes from your own university and another (the “external” examiner) is a senior academic at another university brought in to ensure that the work is of a sufficient standard.

I wasn’t especially nervous about my viva, as there’s not a whole lot that you can do about it in advance. When it finally began (at 2pm on a Friday, which is rarely a time when anyone is at their best), it quickly became clear that the two examiners were going concentrate their attention on the physics aspect of my thesis, which is my weakest subject. In the initial conversation it was pretty clear that they did not think there was enough weight to my thesis, which rankled somewhat as I’d been specifically told by one of my supervisors to keep the length down to around 20,000 words (out of a possible 30,000).

There were several embarrassing moments when the examiners went through the introductory physics chapter of my thesis – particularly when it was pointed out that I had completely mis-explained the key physics of how radio waves are reflected by the ionosphere, a lot of which is GCSE-level physics! Oh well.

It therefore wasn’t surprising that the two examiners (both of which are engineers but with a very strong maths/physics bias to their own work) felt that my thesis required significant further work.

I was offered the choice between a “pass with major corrections” or a “referral”. The former means that you are awarded your PhD subject to producing a revised thesis within six months to the internal examiner’s satisfaction. Failure to achieve this results in a total loss of the PhD. A “referral” kicks your PhD into the long grass, giving you twelve months to produce a revised thesis, whereupon you have to resubmit the thesis formally, pay a re-examination fee and potentially have another viva. I chose to take the major corrections route.

I’ll receive the formal list of corrections from the examiners this week. The major items are two pieces of analysis work – one based on the use of propagation prediction software, and one based on analysing some data that I had not had time to work on during the main part of my PhD.

I may be curtailing my social life somewhat until it’s done. Sorry about that.

Thanks to everyone who helped me get this far. Somehow I feel that I’ve neither passed nor failed, but been assigned to a special form of graduate student purgatory… oh well.

The weather has been unseasonably fine in Punta Arenas since we’ve been here. It’s gloriously sunny, mostly pretty warm and the winds are relatively light. Given that Punta Arenas is normally renowned for being extremely windy with optional sideways-blowing rain, sleet and snow, we’ve got off lightly!

Sadly, the weather at Union Glacier has been day after day of snowfall with light winds, and now the ice runway is under half a metre of soft snow. Apparently the weather’s improving, and a gale is forecast for Monday which should help to blow the soft stuff away.

In the mean time we’ve done more prep work, been issued very smart new staff uniform jackets and hats, had an excellent barbecue and been to see the penguins on Isla Magdalena. The trip over there by boat was great – lots of pingus, seals and seabirds to look at.

Now we’re playing a waiting game and trying not to eat and drink too much…

For those of you that don’t already know, hot on the heels of finishing both the Writing-Up Cruise and the actual writing up of the thesis (hurrah!), I’ve embarked on a new job in Antarctica. I’m working for Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions, who provide support to private expeditions and governmental organisations and also operate guided trips to Antarctica under the brand name Adventure Network International. I’m spending three months as a communications operator/engineer at their main camp at Union Glacier, in the Ellsworth Mountains. But right now, I’m in Punta Arenas in Chile, doing the manic pre-season organisation and training and waiting for the conditions to be suitable to fly in to Union Glacier.

I got to Punta on Wednesday evening, having left Cambridge at 0530 on Tuesday morning! I took a cab into town, a coach to Heathrow, a flight to New York, another flight overnight to Santiago, and yet another flight to Punta Arenas itself. That’s three flights, five airline meals, thee meals in airports and about five hours sleep… In Santiago, they called my name and said that one of my bags hadn’t made the connection in New York: as I queued up to fill in the forms, I met Fran, one of the other ALE staff and a veteran of many seasons. As I completed my final form, a man appeared with my missing case – but poor Fran was concerned that her bags had gone AWOL in New York. Fortunately we had a long connection in Santiago, and Fran’s bags caught up with her in Punta Arenas…

Since then I’ve been getting to know everyone, done some introductory training in how the company works, done some field training (revision of my Rothera days!) and run round like a mad thing trying to get computers, meteorological and communications equipment organised for the first flight. We fly in to Antarctica on a giant Ilyushin-76 transport plane, flown by a band of jolly Russians, Belarusians and Ukranians – and it lands on an ice runway. Just at the moment the weather at UG is non-ideal – lots and lots of soft snow – and the runway isn’t yet usable. We should have flown today if conditions were right, so now we’re on daily standby!

In the mean time we get to enjoy Punta Arenas, its four-seasons-in-one-hour weather and its tasty food and drink. I’ve met the first of our clients, Chris Foot, an ex-Marine who’s planning to be the first person to ski from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole and back without being resupplied by air or using a traction kite. Chris is at one end of the ALE client spectrum – the other end being wealthy, elderly guests who come for a week’s holiday at UG and a day out to the South Pole by air. In between are lots of different expeditioners, tourists and scientists! Once I’m at UG I’ll have no web access and only limited access to email. I’ve got blog-by-email set up, so hopefully once I’m on site I’ll be able to keep everyone up-to-date via the blog.