The Antarctic Alphabet is a series of micro-essays and prose poems, meditations inspired by my voyage to Antarctica in 2016 . Some (B to H, if you are curious) I wrote during the trip. Most have been written with the benefit of internet access, the ability to load photographs and without any seasickness involved.

The series is still evolving; once complete I hope to find a way to publish it with illustrations and photographs and maybe make performances as well. Each entry in the alphabet has cropped up in order since I first posted A in February 2016. So far I have reached Q.  At N I decided it was time to gather the pieces together. I have therefore connected them all here, with links to the original posts. I have written them in alphabetical order, but you can read them in any order you like, or even make words from them.

A is, of course, for Antarctica, and also for Alexandra. Ensorcelled and spellbinding, white screens for our vaunting imagations  https://sailingtoantarctica.com/writers/a-is-for-an-antarcticalphabet/

B is for borders: the contested and invisible world of national boundaries in the maze of the Straits.

C is for Capes, and convergence: places of wreckage and rounding. 

D is for degrees (and, inevitably, for death), the latitude and longitude of mortality. 

E is for Europa, and for Europe. Written before the UK referendum, my support for the EU ideals is undiminished. 

F is for fur: driver of the get-rich-quick fantasy, the gold and oil of early Antarctic exploration. https://sailingtoantarctica.com/journey-blogs/antarcticalphabet-f-fur/

G is for geography and the genetic analyses which confound the maps. 

H is for home, that contested, blurred vision on the horizon. Hearth and heart and home, the place we yearn to belong. 

I is for ice, and the islands already vanishing as the ice strains and cracks. 

J is for Jabberwock: the monster of dreams and mutation modelled by Carroll on Darwin's southern insights. 

The Jabberwocky (Tenniel)

K is for kelp and krill, fundamental parts of life on earth. 

L is for language, the betrayals of understanding and rage visited on the Babelised nations of the UK, the harbinger of international disintegration which can only jeopardise Antarctica.. https://sailingtoantarctica.com/journey-blogs/antarcticalphabet-l-language/

M is for migration, and life on Mars. Penguins build no boats to put their children in when the water becomes safer than the land. 

N is for navigation, for the nostalgia of the good old days when uncertainty was a way of life, not a monster in the corner. 

O is for oil, the black gold of fantasy. O is for opening oceans, the vanishing ice and shifting geopolitics of polar regions.

T is for Treaty. If the Treaty dies, the continent dies. When treaties are broken, people die. Treaties are agreements between those sovereign figments of our collective imagination, the nation-state. The Antarctic is different, but the same.