We have too much food. For the first time, a shipment of new food has come onto base and it cannot fit in the freezer room, which is still packed solid with frozen food from last year and the year before that. Macca, last winter's chef and the current storeman, showed me inside - the whole thing including the aisle was packed floor to ceiling with boxes full of meat and vegetables and fish. I asked him how he got to the back section when he needed to reach a box of something in the far corner. He pointed out a system of gaps and tunnels through the top layer of boxes right under the ceiling, and mumbled something about getting stuck in there once when a whole lot of stuff fell on top of him during a tunneling operation.

The edict was passed down from someone-or-other that all the old food had to be loaded into a crate for shipping back to Australia, where it will be destroyed. We worked for two hours to move and stack it all. Peas, pasta, margarine, fish, squid rings, tenderloin steaks, chips, coffee, ice-cream - most (but not all) was past its use-by date but all of it had been kept frozen and was probably still good.

All this is getting put on the next supply ship to arrive at Davis, the Russian ship Vasily Golovnin, which will return to Australia via some of the nearby Russian Antarctic bases. It will be loaded as "Return To Australia" cargo - but it will be whispered to the crew of the Vasily that we won't really mind if it happens to get lost on the way. Translation: we don't want to burn it; please give it to the Russian guys at the various Antarctic bases, who sometimes have so little food in their stores that they have to shoot penguins and skuas in order to survive, and who are often all but forgotten by their government back home.

So as we stacked the shipping crate completely full of mozzarella and Dolmio sauce and meat and so on, we imagined the Russians eating pizza and ice-cream for the next few months and felt quite altruistic.

In reality, though, the Russians don't have enough storage space for the whole lot. Most of it will still probably end up being burnt.