When you’re issued Big Red, it comes with your name on a white plastic laminated strip Velcro’ed to the left breast pocket. From the first time I saw it, I couldn’t help but think of fridge magnet poetry. So… I managed to get a bit of extra Velcro on my way through McMurdo and created a larger vocabulary to work with. Started out with the most obvious of phrases (“MAPCON is not a game”), and have been changing it every few days.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that someone had started messing with my tag. My assertion that “the internet clearly needs more chocolate” had transmogrified into “the chocolate clearly needs more internet”. A few mornings later, I’d started with “the internet is groggy in the Antarctic. Needs coffee”, and by afternoon it had become “the Antarctic is groggy. The coffee needs in.”

This makes me happy. Someone, anonymously, has taken up the challenge. I don’t know who, and I don’t want to know. who – I just want to keep playing this game.