Making It Up As I Go Along (18 page)

7 p.m.

Dinner. Delicious. The two young Australian
backpackers have just discovered that the cruise is ‘all in’ and that they can have
as much beer as they want without having to pay for it. They can hardly countenance such a
notion. They have never been so UN-ripped off, in all their days! Their delight is – well
– delightful!

8.45–9.45 p.m.

We watch a show about how cold the Antarctic
is.

10 p.m.

We turn in.

10.59 p.m.

The sea is as calm as a millpond.

11 p.m.

The ship turns into a roller coaster! The sea goes
wild, the swell is enormous, the ship feels like it’s balancing on its side, then it
swoops down into a hollow, then swings up on its other side. This continues all night. I swalley
Kwells by the fistful.

First I have to tell you that the sea was so rough
and the ship so bouncy that when I was putting my sock on, I took a tumble into the shower. I
had to lie on the floor to put my jeans on. And when I lurched down to the breakfast place, the
staff told us that this was the calmest crossing they’d had in living memory.

Right. The story about the creationist. See, in
the dining room, most of the tables are for six people or eight so you get your grub at the
buffet and then you ‘join’ people already sitting at a table, and you say,
‘May we join you?’ It’s bad form to go off and start a ‘new’ table
until the partly occupied one is full. And obviously you have to make chat with the people
you’ve joined. But last night, due to a stroke of tremendous good fortune, Himself and I
got one of the very rare tables for two (I think there might only be three in the whole dining
room). So last night we only had to chat to each other as, all around us, everyone else bonded.
‘SO WHERE DO YOU GUYS COME FROM?’ ‘WHAT DO YOU GUYS DO OUT THERE?’
‘IS THAT A FRANCHISE?’ ‘YOU MAKE A LOT OF MONEY DOING THAT?’, etc.,
etc.

I live in dread of being
asked what I ‘do’, because:

In order to avoid these eventualities, Himself
and I have several cover stories ready. ‘Himself here pretended to get injured at work and
we scammed a big fat wedge out of his employers and we’re living on the settlement money.
Jump up there and show the man your limp’ is the one we elect the winner.

Anyway, this morning there was a woman sitting on
her own, and Himself and I asked if we could join her, and she said, ‘Sure. My husband is
sitting over there.’ And right enough, her husband
was
at another table, and it
wasn’t full, there was still one empty chair at it, so I thought, ‘That’s a
bit strange, but each to their own.’

Then we were joined by two of the staff, two
lovely mens who have PhDs in continent formation and albatross feathers and similar. And we were
chatting pleasantly about the Andes and how they were formed 33 million years ago – you
know, nice, uncontroversial, breakfast conversation, appropriate to an Antarctic cruise, when
suddenly Missis-My-Husband-Is-Sitting-at-a-Different-Table-to-Me pipes up, ‘Let’s
not forget that the planet is only 5,000 years old and that human life originated in the Middle
East.’

Well! I admit I thought it was some sort of joke!
But then she says, ‘All life is thanks to God the creator.’

She was serious! And we were
all mortified. And I was thinking, ‘What are you doing, coming on a trip like this, you
raving lunatic?’

Very quickly we finished up our toast and made
our excuses.

My first breakfast on board was not a
success.

All day

The weather is extremely bright and there’s
heat in the sun and the water is very blue. But the sea is as rough as a badger’s arse and
many of the passengers seem to be seasick.

Outside our window is a massive white bird,
staring in at us, giving us the quare eye. It stays with us all day and Himself says it is an
albatross.

You see, Himself, though he denies it until he is
purple in the face, likes birds. He set up a bird feeder at home and gets annoyed when the
pigeons sit on it and scare away the smaller birds, and he’s always looking out the window
and saying, ‘Is that a
dove
? Well, you hear the phrase “dove-grey”
and it’s definitely grey.’ Chatting away to himself, like.

But whenever I say, ‘You’re fond of
birds,’ he says he isn’t. I tell him there’s no shame in it, but he is adamant
that he has no interest. I think he thinks it’s a boring thing to like. Or maybe an
‘old’ thing.

10.30 a.m.

We weren’t expected to make landfall until
tomorrow, but due to the ‘freakishly calm weather conditions’ we’ve gone much,
much faster than expected, so much so that at 10.30, when Himself
came back
from the geology lecture, we spotted some things on the horizon that we thought might be clouds.
But we stared at them and stared at them until we realized that they actually are land –
the South Shetland Islands. And now we’ve just got an announcement that we’ll be
getting off the ship and going on an expedition this very afternoon!

I do a hasty dress rehearsal of my expedition
clothing: one technical vest, a second technical vest, a technical fleece, a down parka, a
special yellow waterproof jacket that ‘lock-hard’ men and lollipop ladies favour, a
pair of technical long johns, a second pair of technical long johns, ‘furry’-lined
trousers, waterproof over-trousers, two pairs of special thick knee-socks, a blue hat, a pink
hat and a white furry hat, a pink ear-protector, a purple neck-gaiter, two pairs of technical
gloves and a pair of white mittens which look like boxing gloves. I can hardly stand up for the
weight of clothes, but they’ll be needed by all accounts.

The land is hurtling towards us. Big, black,
looming, sheer cliffs, and pointy, flinty islands and icebergs which look like they’re
made of frozen marshmallows. It’s coming up on us really fast and it’s awe-inspiring
and a bit scary.

Does anyone feel like writing a dystopian novel
set in the near future, where the world powers are jostling to own Antarctica because the rest
of the world is used up? I’d be no good at writing that sort of thing, but I’d love
to read it.

And here are the whales! Two humpbacks and
there’s just been an announcement that due to all the stuff to look at, Liliana’s
lecture on penguins has been cancelled.

Another announcement: the ship’s
stabilizers are being taken in – be carefuls!

PENGUINS!!!!!! Penguins at one o’clock!
Swimming in the open sea. Doing little curvy lepps, like dolphins do. And, oh my
God, an iceberg has just gone flying past with a load of chinstrap penguins
standing on it. Really belting along, they are. They look like they’re actually driving
the iceberg, like they’ve decided to escape from Antarctica and the iceberg is their
get-away car. ‘Keep the foot down there, Patsy!’ Very good at maintaining their
balance. And now they’re gone, but there are several more gangs of them swimming all
around the ship.

Himself has just taken a tumble – it must
be something to do with the stabilizers coming off – but he’s up on his feet again
and he says he’s grand.

Every twenty or thirty seconds another batch of
penguins appears out of the black water, like they’re putting on a show for us.

Out on deck, the cold is phenomenal but one of
the Asian hipsters is wearing a pair of paisley-patterned shorts and khaki-green Crocs. Maybe
it’s because he’s young that he can withstand the cold. No sign of his two comrades.
Perhaps they are in the cabin, throwing down some sounds or maybe making a short experimental
film or doing their (frankly magnificent) hair.

We’re really close to land now and the
water isn’t exactly black, it’s like a gunmetal grey, and the icebergs aren’t
white but sort of a pale-green colour, not dissimilar to the ‘shade’ of the
Alexander Wang handbag that I’ve entirely forgotten about.

12.30 p.m.

And here is the bing-bong announcing lunch!
Run!

1.45 p.m.

We took lungeon with a lovely lady from South
Africa and her niece, who are travelling together. We exchange pleasant small talk and no one
asks what anyone ‘does’.

2.30 p.m.

We leave the ship and whip across the sea in the
little zodiac boat. The sky is blue and sunny and the snow on the mountains glares like silver.

We land on Half Moon Island, which is RIDDLED
with chinstrap penguins. Thousands and thousands of them, all along the beach and up on the
cliffs. They behave
exactly
like penguins – they waddle, they hop and they slide
downhill on their bellies, using their wings like oars. They are delightfully comical!

They have really cute pink feet and they’re
not a bit afeerd of us humans: they come right up to us and cut across our paths and bustle
along, looking like they’re in an almighty hurry, like they’re late for something or
they’ve just remembered that they forgot to turn their iron off. ‘Out of me road,
I’m in a ferocious hurry!’

Up on the cliffs, being minded, are the fluffy
baby penguins, which look nothing like their parents.

And the racket out of the adults! They shout in
unison, like they’re doing a football chant. ‘Luton are shit! Luton are shit! Luton
are shit! Come on, everyone, Luton are shit!’

They stretch their necks long and throw their
heads back and open their gullets and howl at the moon like mad yokes.

7.30 p.m.

Dinner. We have got a bit of a handle on the other
passengers now. Mostly from the US, like I said. The three Asian hipster young lads, they are
FABULOUS! One has hair like Sideshow Bob and looks like he’s wearing a black sweatband
just on his hairline. The second has an auburn-coloured quiff and matching goatee-facial hair.
The third has ginormous Perspex glasses, the type you wear if you are working for Securicor.
At all times
, at least one of them is wearing a lumberjack shirt. Himself says it is
only a matter of time before they cycle into dinner on a
‘fixie’. We cannot establish what land they’re from because they’re
chatty with each other, but in general very quiet.

There are many solo travellers on board, which I
find admirable in the extreme. Many young mens – some Scandinavians, some US citizens and
an Asian (am I allowed to say ‘Asian’ without incurring the wrath of someone?) who
might be Japanese or Korean or Taiwanese. And a fair few lone womens also. So far I have
identified an Australian and a French lady.

A misty, colour-free day. We make landfall on an
island that is a deserted Norwegian whaling station and, well! The atmospherics! Ghostly and
spooky and strange and sad and fascinating and fabulous. It’s a (still active) volcano, so
the island is surrounded by sulphur pools which are steaming up into the terrifyingly cold air.
The smell! Mother of divine! Like there are 40,000 hard-boiled egg sangwidges sitting on the
shore.

I love it here. Love, love,
love
it. It
should be called Desolation Island. Because of the volcano-ness, the sand is black. Everything
is in shades of charcoal – dark grey, light grey, medium grey.

Two wooden fishing boats, bleached to the colour
of nothing, lie rotting on the black sand. Whitish whale bones litter the place. A long, low
farmhouse – once the home to the poor-bastard Norwegians – still stands but the roof
has caved in. A short distance from the house are piles of stones, each topped with a cross and
bearing Norwegian-looking names.

There’s a collection of massive metal drums
that look like that famous museum in Bilbao that was designed by Frank Gehry.

Himself is palpably uneasy:
‘It’s all a bit post-apocalyptic. It’s like one of those dystopian books you
love so much.’

Really, I’m
begging
someone out
there to make a ten-part series about a post-apocalyptic world, set here. And if it could be in
Swedish or Danish or Norwegian, so much the better.

There aren’t many penguins on this part of
the island. We pass a group of four, deep in earnest conversation. Abruptly, three of them
waddle into the boiling sea for a swim, but the fourth stands stubbornly on the beach. One of
the penguins gets back out of the water and seems to be reasoning with the one who won’t
get in. ‘Would you not give it a go?’ he seems to be saying. ‘Ah, go on,
you’re making the other lads feel bad.’

But the fourth fella says, ‘No. Don’t
be “at” me. I’m just not in the form right now, I’ll stay where I am,
thanks.’

‘Well, feck you anyway,’ says the
third one, ‘you’re after ruining it for all of us.’ And off the third one
goes.

The Asian hipsters are wearing wonderful things.
Even their waterproof trousers aren’t boring black ones, like everyone else’s, but
blue, red and green. Also, they are garlanded with many ‘items of flair’, for
example Securicor-glasses has an ‘ironic’ little black cuddly dog hanging from the
zip of his rucksack.

Sideshow Bob is lying on the snow on his belly,
taking an up-close photo of something, and I said, ‘There he is, instagramming the living
daylights out of a rock.’ And Himself said, ‘Instagram? Not at all! He’s on
some new, fabulous social-media thing that we won’t hear about until next July.’

7 p.m.

We try hard, for once, to not be the first people
down for dinner. But alas … Mind you, we are not alone. It’s a stampede.

We notice that the lone Asian young man has been
co-opted by
the three Asian hipsters! I tell you, it would gladden your
heart! There they all are, the three hipsters and the very ordinary-looking other bloke, all
chatting and laughing away in their shared quare foreign tongue.