And he’s gone. I smile. Hold the prospect of him like a slow chocolate in my mouth. He’s an ordinary bloke. Dad would approve. He wishes upon his children nothing but ordinary lives. He’s got two new kids. I asked him at my farewell barbecue what he hoped the new lot would be and he said to me, quietly, they’re only average kids, they’ll get a trade, nothing flash. There was relief in his voice as he said it and he’d turned and looked, bewildered, at me. My father’s a builder. He can’t understand why I want to go to Antarctica. It’s not the sort of thing a young woman should be doing. I know he won’t be listening to my reports that’ll be beamed back to the mainland by satellite. He doesn’t listen to my radio station. He says the voices are too posh.

My mother, on the other hand, is always wrangling with the bloody-minded tenacity of mediocrity. She wishes for her children lives and things that aren’t ordinary. She wishes for them everything that she didn’t have growing up in her fishing town. With her daughter, the campaign began with the sound of her voice. Elocution lessons from the age of five. It’s no wonder my parents split. As Raymond Carver says, their energy was all wrong.

I fall back against the mesh of the fence and watch the tight knots of families and lovers and friends. I watch the engineers who are protective around the expensive complexity of the helicopters. Their eyes are on a line of snotty looking kids stretching shy grubby hands to a machine’s shiny belly, as if they’re patting the side of a very quiet horse.

The mess is crammed. The captain, Tony Crane, addresses us. He wears a baseball cap. He tells us we’re going on the last great sea voyage in the world—to the wild side of Antarctica where no plane can land, across the roughest ocean in the world. There are groans. He calls for a volunteer to demonstrate an immersion suit. There’s a reluctant hush.

‘Get the journo.’ The yell from the back of the room is Jim’s.

‘Thanks, Stiff. Mate.’