I'm just about to print off the third-last physics laboratory report I've got to do before tomorrow, and then I'm off into town to get some Lindt chocolate to keep me going for the rest of the afternoon. The lab report is a malevolent concept. It takes three hours to do the practical work, about twice that long again to make sure you know exactly what was going on when you did it, and then after wrestling with Equation Editor and Excel for another entire afternoon you produce a report which seems to present no more information than that which you originally scrawled in your workbook, just more glossy and formatted.

I read a few chapters of Sara Wheeler's book Terra Incognita today and was almost able to see what Geoffrey Moorhouse from the Daily Telegraph was getting at when he gushed, "I cannot believe that anything better will ever be written about Antarctica." It's a wonderful book but the best thing is not the way it was written, rather it's how she calmly and self-confidently embraced the continent. It shows a great depth of character over and above the (albeit great) writing. It'd be a wonderful feeling to write something and be able to sit back with real pride and say, "I did that." I've only just reconciled myself with my last travel log, the Europe issue of nerdling. Generally I write something, think it's the best thing in the world for about a day, and then am terribly ashamed of it for a year or two afterwards until enough time has passed so that I can blame the mistakes on my much younger self and put it down to childish exuberance.

George, my man-on-the-inside at Lonely Planet, emailed me:

Here's the bad news on Antarctica: Antarctica's just gone to printer mate so will be a while before the next one (it's on a 4 year cycle). I've sent off a note to David, telling him a little about you, so they might still have something. If nothing else you might be able to wangle a link from the front page to nerdling.net when the book is launched. The 4 year cycle means that it will be another 3 years before they start looking for authors for that area again, but maybe there are other regions you could do? Let me know if you're interested.

There is, however, a gig writing for an international physics education journal. It turns out that my dad's cousin, who lives in a tiny town in Wales called Rosgoch, drove the bus to take the local schoolkids to an astronomy excursion organised by a guy called Gary whose child goes to school with my dad's cousin's son and who is the editor of the magazine... Goodness knows how general conversation turned to a distant relative on the other side of the planet who is studying physics, but the upshot is that he wondered if I could write something about physics in Antarctica for a special Year of Physics issue that's being put out next year. It's unpaid (it's a non-profit magazine), so I should really have put 'gig' in big quotation marks at the start of the paragraph. He's airmailing me a copy for me to take down south and photograph for him with a spectacular backdrop.

It reminds me a little of my onetime boss Greg, who said he and his fellow astronauts used to get asked to take things up into space and photograph them floating. I asked Greg what he took, and he told me that when he'd offered to fly something for his friend Freeman Dyson, Dyson's request was to take a photograph of his granddaughter. I'd read a book by Freeman Dyson. Dyson has even been talked about by Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

If anyone who's been on Star Trek wants me to photograph one of their personal items against an icescape, I'm ready to take your orders.