Blow, blow, thou winter winds

We have just survived Mid-Winters week, which is as the name suggests is smack bang in the middle of winter. While the solstice is treated as no real biggy in the Northern Hemisphere, it is much cherished down south and treated with very much like a Christmas atmosphere in Antarctica… with a week off, lots of events, BBC World Service broadcasts, and pressie giving on the 21st. It was a fun week.

Considering the amount of physical challenges, i.e. the Winter Olympics and drinking challenges, i.e. the base bar crawl we all survived remarkably intact. And mentioning the bars, some of them were spectacular: ice caves dug into the cliff face...

...the timeless classic of grabbing a beer while attached to a bungee rope, the transformation of the surgery into a kinda seedy torture chamber (just look at the glee in the eye of the mad doc!), but personally in was the dive chamber that took the biscuit.

It just takes one second, and only one second, for a tiny amount of food to appear on a face before a full fledges cream fight ensues. But my lasting memory of this will be two of our Scottish contingency dutifully carrying on playing the violin while chaos and mayhem ensues all around them; all I could think of was the scene from Titanic where the band kept playing on the deck as she began to sink with all panicked around them.

Classic memory.

Each day had its moments and all through the week we constantly received Greeting messages from our entire fellow over winterers around Antarctica… we even had a message from Tony and George W! Blimey.

But the big day is Thursday, June 21st, Mid-Winters Day…