26th November: Falkland Islands
From the air the Falklands looks bleak, and beautiful in a lonely sort of way. Since starting the journey from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire I have been carried through various military spaces. Ascension Island seems like it might have been invented just to provide the military a pit stop. It ‘s about as far from anything as its possible to be. Waiting for refueling, we had an hour looking out at the Volcanic landscape through the bars of our cage and then ascended once more, leaving the tiny rock to disappear into the endless Atlantic waves. After 8 more hours we finally began to descend onto the flatter, emptier, colder east island of the Falklands.

28th November: Falkland Islands

Who on earth would fight over this...?

The Falklands is incredibly empty – it looks like Scotland after the bomb. There are no trees except the sad convicts planted by the few residents. Stanley only seems to exist through grim determination and fleecing the cruise ships. In every direction along the water there are wooden or steel wrecks slowly giving in to the weather and the hills are littered with bits of war machinery. I walked out of Stanley through an ice wind and eventually reached the breathtakingly beautiful dunes and beaches of Gypsy Cove. The sand is blindingly white and the water is travel-brochure blue but everywhere there are warning-signs showing a one legged man and the words ‘danger mines’ - only the oblivious penguins enjoying the cold Atlantic surf.

2nd December: Scotia Sea
I love being on the ship – so far we've been through two force ten storms. As the RSS Ernest Shackleton is built for forcing its way through ice it means that it is far less stable in the sea. The boat goes through all sorts of strange motions as paintings hang off walls at 30 degrees. Its strange the way everything is the same but gravity just works in a new direction - plants become like triffids - spontaneously groping in one direction and then another, towels on rails waving like aerobics teachers. I was filming one of the paintings when an unexpected lunge, sent five people on armchairs flying past me, to end up on the far side in a tangled heap of beer and legs. Every now and then there's a huge judder as the ship hits the bottom of a trough and then the portholes all turn white as it rolls over the next crest. But (praise to god) I seem to be immune to seasickness.

4th December: Signy Island
Signy felt like the last conceivable outpost of mankind – pirate, craggy needles of island covered in weird wildlife that snort and fart at you as though you have no right to be there - and in fact there hasn't been anybody here (apart from scientists intermittently) since the whalers left a 100 years ago.

After a day delivering supplies and looking at the elephant seals, we again board the incongruous, cheerful-red Shackleton. Before reaching the ocean though we have to thread our way through the most incredible field of icebergs. The colours look like someone has messed with the RGB settings in your eyes. They vary in size from a small crofter’s cottage bobbing though the swell to huge slabs of South London housing estate 8 stories high. Some were standard snow white, some smaller bits are see-through (like huge lumps of ice from the fridge) and then there are the blues ones that seem to be glowing from the inside with a weird synthetic blue light. They vary from off-white Styrofoam blue to a sullen brooding dark-blue - lurking with 90% below the surface.

6th December: South Georgia
South Georgia’s mountains appeared and disappeared out of banks of mist and cloud – at times like a split screen montage of ocean and glaciers. After 100’s of miles of sea it looked like we had happened upon a wall of Alps floating above the waves.

Nosing its way out of the swell through twisting inlets, the Shackleton reached the abandoned Whaling station of Grytviken - glowing rust-red beneath the black and ice of the jagged skyline. The station here studies marine life in carefully chilled tanks and the whaling museum deals with cruise-ship millionaires carefully delivered in identical, red Antarctic outfits.

The islands have been scarily, beautifully bleak. It’s a relatively big island (size of Wales?) but with absolutely no one on it. As we left to head further south, we stopped off at Stromness - the abandoned whaling station where Shackleton finally found salvation. Arriving by rubber powerboat onto the crumbling jetty was like entering a post-apocalypse movie, a 'Planet of the Seals’. The Norwegian buildings are slowly collapsing but look like they were left at a moments notice. Cups sitting on counters, chairs still waiting at tables, and beds and baths lying empty. All of it, though, now overrun with elephant and fur seals fighting, shitting, howling and sleeping in a post-human era with snow drifting in through the broken windows. Literally every room had a new cast of blubberous inhabitants sliding over the breaking remnants of early 20thC life.

11th December: South Sandwich Islands
Sailing through the night towards Zavadovski - an erupting volcano on the northern edge of the uninhabited South Sandwich Islands. All the lights are out on the bridge, the only illumination coming faintly from arrays of blinking buttons, radar screens, GPS monitors and the two powerful search lights beaming out through the fog. Trained on a small patch of ocean, like a ballerina’s follow spot, they create an expectant circle of immanent icebergs. All that appears, every now and then gliding through the beam, is one of the huge wandering albatross, shining impossibly white against the black rolling sea.

The air begins to lighten and the yellow blips on the radar screen show various huge bergs still passing unseen in the fog. A fin-whale blows a jet out of the swell and rolls lazily forward as it dives away from the ship. Finally a bigger lump picked out in the ghostly yellow radar takes shape as Zavodovski. Hidden behind the fog, we can smell its fumes blowing in the air. Nearer icebergs begin to be populated with the black dots of penguins - suburbs of the millions of ‘chinstraps’ inhabiting the geothermically ice-free island and adding to its smell. Finally, we can just make out the passing grey/black coast at Noxious Bluff - but the smoking mountain stays in its clouds.

20th December: Weddel Sea
Night and day the GPS screens in the bar are slowly counting up the degrees of Latitude as we get further south. Incongruously, though it was ‘sunbathing’ weather on deck today. Hung-over from the night before, bodies lay on the sun-warmed steel. I found a spot on the Monkey deck, at the top of the ship, and tucked out of the wind behind the Conning Tower (albeit in hat and gloves) I basked in the fierce UV sun and read Gulliver’s Travels.

22nd December: Weddel Sea
The sun has stopped setting and Christmas is approaching.
Part of my onboard duties is to decorate the plastic tree and secure it to the floor and ceiling with strong black tape. As we are now due to arrive before Christmas, carol singing was arranged on the Foc’s’le. Facing into the bitter wind, whilst the prow of the ship broke through the ice – the mulled wine chilled instantly and the singing didn’t last much longer.

23rd of December: Antarctica
Strange thing – but from a distance the ice cliffs of Antarctica looked vaguely like the low chalk cliffs of Ramsgate.

Everything here is implausibly white and blue - filming out of my porthole, as they smash they're way through the sea ice to create a mooring point, I have to wear sunglasses just to look out. The snow and ice is sculpted and fractured into strange cartoon shapes. Where there's a crack it does the trick of glowing from the inside – 'gas-ring' blue. The path that we'll be taking up to the station is marked out with black oil drums and black fluttering flags on bamboo poles meandering up the slope through a gap in the ice-cliffs – all very minimal Japanese styling.

Scale is a weird killer here. Part of the dislocation is caused by all reference points having been removed - there's no 'thing' to re-calibrate your senses against. Maybe when I can get off and look back at the boat it will start to makes sense but at the moment it's a hallucinatory jumble of blue ice, white snow and grey sky. It’s actually very unreal and kitsch in places - the braking sea-ice cracks up in huge chunks like monstrous mint cake - blue inside with a coating of fluffy white. Startled emperor penguins look on - outraged that their backyard is being demolished.

I guess it does sort of look like Christmas - just a scary, grown-up, older-brother of Christmas.

I'm all packed and waiting for the Sno-Cat.

24th December: Halley Research Station
12.05am and the sun is arking off the sparkling, undulating snow. Frail, spidery bits of humanity are scattered around a few, flat kilometers. Radio masts, buildings on stilts, snow cats and skidoos buzzing and levitating across white space. All the orange boiler suits busy carrying things from place to place - like an endless wide shot of the evil empire HQ.

But beyond this circle of silhouettes - nothing.

Pure, undiluted ‘nothing‘ as far as the eye can see. Except that I have no way of gauging how far my eyes are seeing – between the flimsy bits of Halley there's no-’thing’ to see.

I walked out to CASlab - the 4th building set slightly apart so that they can measure the pure air blowing across 1000's of miles empty Antarcican continent. Following the rope handline (for when you can't see further than your feet) I was walking steadily towards the building that was just there in front of me. I walked... and I walked... and I walked... but the building didn't seem to get any bigger. I looked back and the Simpson Platform was slightly smaller. I walked some more, overheating in all my Antarctic gear. The untouched snow (unbearable to look at without goggles) was alive with crystal fireflies of light but for all my clown-walking in huge moon-boots, the shimmering building ahead only grew a tiny amount - floating through infinity white. An evil angel was playing with me - blowing the building away across the featureless plain of white. If your eyes tell your brain things that don't make sense, your brain tries to fill in.

Distance is totally screwed, space is warped and time packed up and went home. Nothing seems real - I think I’d better draw the blinds as tight as I can and try and sleep.

28th December: Halley Research Station
This is a bizarre place - not scenic at all (in a traditional sense) just flat, and insanely white. The light is so intense its like the world has been deleted. The windows on the platforms all have thick blinds, the frames having added flaps of plywood to try and create a light seal – but still the glare seeps through like bleach.

I go round and round trying to find words and metaphors that will describe this.

Part of the problem is that it’s not actually a place. The oblivious, flat ice shelf surrounds the structures on all sides. There's no topographical reason for the platforms to be placed here. Someone just decided - took out an empty white map and drew a cross. Because of windtails (banks of snow that form down wind of anything left on the surface) rather than huddling together the platforms are paradoxically far away from each other – like neurotic patients quivering in the middle of a field. The platforms look like miniature, ad hoc oil-platforms - each year they have to jack them up another meter and a half to stop them disappearing beneath the snow and each year the ice-shelf slides another 50 meters further out to sea. The whole thing seems insanely arbitrary, makeshift and pointless - perched like frozen insects on an iceberg waiting to happen. Globally important science is going on here, but somehow against the scale of Antarctica it looks slightly rediculous and frightened.

Part of the reason for the base to be here is to maintain a British presence. Like the scramble for Africa, Antarctica was carved up in case it turned out to be useful. In this instance, though, the carving was very neatly done with each country’s slice radiating out from the South Pole. Neat that is, except for the fact that Argentina, Chile and Britain all claim the same slice.

To bolster their territorial claim, Argentina flew in a pregnant woman to give birth on their base. The Chilean’s responded by bringing several couples to live, conceive and have children - and the British opened a post office. Perhaps in a misguided quest for normality, I got the postmaster (who is also the base commander) to open up the post-office. Housed in a metal trunk beneath his desk, I bought postcards of an ice-encrusted base beneath an aurora sky and stamps featuring a silhoetted Queens head floating above an ice-shelf.

2nd Jan: Weddel Sea
2.30am and we're sailing along the ice cliffs - Antarctica getting smaller and the sea clearer.

3rd Jan: Weddel Sea
The ghost ship is quiet after all the madness. On the trip down the boat had every available bed filled and all space above and below deck crammed with supplies for the bases. On the way back, though, it’s just the crew and 5 lost souls traveling back with the rubbish – 1 dentist, 2 doctors, Dr Ice (a Portuguese iceberg scientist) and one artist.

I've been sleeping for a 1000 years, luxuriating in the relative expanse of a single cabin where the top bunk means and I can watch the bergs drift by, rocked by the boat and fall in and out of sleep.

Sanity levels are slowly returning.

5th January: Weddel Sea
My sleep is totally confused. Last night it got dark for the first time in weeks. I lay in my bunk happily sleepless, imagining people in the real world and listening to the sea snoring.This morning, I saw a seal out of my porthole - flopped on the pack ice, woken by the ship.

10th January: Stanley
The Shackleton made it to the Falklands just in time for last orders. Once the gangplank was down, we raced to the nearest pub – a typically ugly Stanley building on the edge of town, but at least it has a pool table.

Pool is a game I love even when I don't win. At once, it consists of a mathematical purity of angles, velocity, spin and momentum but also requires a very visceral melting of your body into a perfect Euclidean space. A space where you are lost if you try to measure degrees but rather (if you are on form - and tonight I was) you can feel the angles, sense the cause and effect and even perhaps detect the slight warps in the fabric of space and time (although perhaps this was the table). Tonight, however, this feeling was eclipsed by the wonderful appreciation of a place that was still enough for pool balls to stop rolling. In the empty bar even the monosyllabic bartender was charmingly still. After two months in a shifting, unreal world of water and ice the Falklands now felt intoxicatingly normal.

Outside, the air seemed to have found some peace and was unusually still - we walked back along the shoreline of Stanley Sound, through tussock grass, past Upland Geese and beneath unfamiliar stars.

11th January: Above the Sahara
On our way back to the military airport we passed a new attempt at growing trees – a camp of sad, waist high conifers hunched right over and dead on one side. They could be useful if you needed to know the direction of the prevailing wind - except that you never would, because invariably the same wind would be clutching at you, shaping your body into a lopsided hunch.

But right now, though, I'm flying through a very different kind of air - miles above the Sahara desert with the icebergs still gliding in my mind. The journey back with the others ejected from the land of whiteness is crackling in my brain - watery molecules of memory slowly forming. Dancing through the night in the hot, rolling bar, staggering drunk and dripping into the frozen moonlit air, reflecting off the ghost-blue icebergs, drifting silently through a black and bottomless sea.