Valentine's eve in a spermaladeco

Valentine's eve was a hard day. It was cold with grey snow ladened sky.

The pulled muscle was quite undermining as it affects so much of what I wanted to do. I couldn't walk in deep snow or push on the sled very easily. I couldn't even get on the snow mobile for a lift because my leg just didn't work. Tobias said as I hobbled to the sled "How's morale Emily?". I said "awful Tobias, awful".

Having said that though, when we were due to leave, I was trying to get the anchor/grapple thing out of the ground and not doing all that well. I couldn't pull it out. In fact, I couldn't even get down to pull it out. It had also frozen into the ground. In the gym, Serbo was making me do dead-lifts of 80 kilos and now I couldn't even lift an anchor! Hugo, who is the guy in charge of the dogs, started shouting at me. Whilst I was shouting back at him that I was trying, Tobias came over and pulled the anchor out for me, which was really sweet of him.

Things really started going down hill when I couldn't find Margaret's St. Christopher. I realised that I had dropped it. I was either somewhere in the snow or in my suit. I managed to find it eventually and felt much better having done so. After lunch, I fell again when the slender lady dogs were up to their tricks. They kept stopping to file their nails and have a chat. The snow got very deep and I couldn't scoot to help them. It was hopeless.

The best part of the day was the fishing. Tiasto, a man who wears nothing but seal fur, was in charge of teaching us how to fish. He was very polite but clearly convinced that we weren't going to catch anything. We all gamely dangled our rods into holes in the ice. The fishing rods looked like toys, which underlined our attitude that it was all a bit of a laugh.

Tiasto looking for fish

But my line twitched. I told the man with me, who's name I don't know. He is referred to as "Marcus's sidekick" or "the Norwegian". He didn't believe me but the line twitched again and he was less sure. I started to reel it up anyway and blow me there was a fish on the end. I screamed. Fish and line and hook plunged back into the hole, but the Norwegian shoved his arm into the water and caught. It was a huge freshwater burbot. It was gutted and the fish liver and roe left out to freeze. The rest of the guts were about to be discarded and Nick Clegg said this would surely cement my reputation as a woman not to be messed with.

I felt enormously proud of myself. I had never been fishing like that ever before and had managed to catch a fish in ten minutes. My morale, Tobias, was pretty good by that stage.

I was exhausted when we got to the hut. No water or electricity. But we did have a fire, cooker, beds and a spermaldeco (Sami for "sperm box").

That evening, It turned out to be cooler inside Meerilees' sleeping bag than it is outside. This was because her bag has been in the sled all day and although we got to the hut at 4pm it still hasn't fully frozen.

We managed to get the fire going as we cooked for everyone. Everyone crowded in for supper and it was really warm. In fact, it was -26 C outside the hut and +26.5C inside! We had to cook with melted snow, by candlelight. We couldn't cook the fish because it had frozen, so we left it to thaw and had it for breakfast.