“Who’s going to cook?” was one of the last queries each night, and two men would volunteer.  It is not great fun lighting an ordinary coal fire on a cold winter’s morning, but lighting the blubber fire at Hut Point when the metal frosted your fingers and the frozen blubber had to be induced to drip was a far more arduous task.  The water was converted from its icy state and, by that time, the stove was getting hot, in inverse proportion to your temper.  Seal liver fry and cocoa with unlimited Discovery Cabin biscuits were the standard dish for breakfast, and when it was ready a sustained cry of ‘hoosh’ brought the sleepers from their bags, wiping reindeer hairs from their eyes.  I think I was responsible for the greatest breakfast failure when I fried some biscuits and sardines (we only had one tin).  Leaving the biscuits in the frying pan, the lid of a cooker, after taking it from the fire, they went on cooking and became as charcoal.  This meal was known as ‘the burnt-offering.’  On April 1 Bowers prepared to make a fool of two of us by putting chaff in our pannikins and covering the top only with seal meat.  The plan turned back upon the maker, for he had not enough left to make up the deficiency, and, as I found out many weeks afterwards, surreptitiously gave up his own hoosh to the April fools and went without himself.  Of such are the small incidents which afforded real amusement and even live in the memory as outstanding features of our existence.

Breakfast done, there was a general clean-up.  One seized the apology for a broom which existed:  day foot-gear, finnesko, hair socks, ordinary socks and puttees, took the place of fleecy sleeping-socks and fur-lined sleeping-boots:  lunch cooks began to make their preparations:  ice was fetched for water:  a frozen chunk of red seal meat or liver was levered and chopped with an ice axe from the general store of seal meat:  fids of sealskin, with the blubber attached, a good three inches of it perhaps, were brought in and placed by the stove, much as we bring in a scuttle of coal.  Gradually the community scattered as duty or inclination led, leaving some members to dig away the snow-drifts which had accumulated round the door and windows during the night.

By lunch time every one had some new item of interest.  Wright had found a new form of ice crystal:  Scott had tested the ice off the Point and found it five inches thick:  Wilson had found new seal holes off Cape Armitage, and we had hopes of finding our food and fuel nearer home:  Atkinson had killed an Emperor penguin which weighed over ninety pounds, a record:  and the assistant zoologist felt he would have to skin it, and did not want to do so:  Meares had found an excellent place to roll stones down Arrival Heights into the sea:  Debenham had a new theory to account for the Great Boulder, as a mammoth block different in structure from the surrounding geological features was called:  Bowers had a scheme for returning from the Pole by the Plateau instead of the Barrier:  Oates might be heard saying that he thought he could do with another chupattie.  A favourite pastime was the making of knots.  Could you make a clove hitch with one hand?