Happy new year - day 50

Sorry I didn't get round to posting anything over Christmas but we didn't celebrate ours until the 28th. As usual I did all the cooking and Pat shared out some Baileys which was a treat. I managed to rustle up some potato cakes, a quiche and even managed to make a banoffee pie out of practically nothing. Sitting in the tent atrium for 4 hours on my rest day in -17c prepping all the food was not fun. But all of us being in the same tent for a few hours was the 1st time we have really socialised the whole trip. The schedule of marching and camping isn't conducive to inter-tent communications.

So now it is New Years eve and we are 187km from the Pole - I hope only 8 days away, I can't tell you how ready I am, for this to be over. We have had a jolly awful time of it over the last 23 days, the worst possible weather conditions, I can barely remember what the sun looks like as we see it so infrequently, when it does come out I feel I should drop to my knees and give thanks. The worst was Pat's back issue, I really thought he would have to be medi-ev'ced (so did he), but we pulled together as a team, and the three of us shared out all his weight and just got in with it, the sleds were so heavy especially in the new deep snow - I could hear the South Pole whispering to me - "no short cuts Jon and certainly no hollow victories!"

Thankfully, just like his frostbitten thumb, his back has got better and he is now pulling his full weight again, which is great news as we are all pretty shattered from the additional effort we had to expend.

I've had my share of niggling injuries, but all seem to clear up after a few days, I did awaken my cracked ribs from earlier this year and this caused me 4 days of shortness of breath and I still find it very painful to move around the tent.

Today we saw one of the planes, that will pick us up, fly over head to pick up the team that have already made it to the Pole, from where I saw it, it would take them only 55 minutes to reach the Pole - it will take us another 8 days, this spurred me on, up and over the 4ft high sastrugi (snow dunes), some of them are so steep you get halfway up and your sled pulls you back down.

I might sound down about all this but I'm not really, I'm still in very high spirits, and now really happy to be so close to our goal, as I have had always said, anything can happen but the end is in sight after nearly 2 months on the ice. In fact I was thinking today that by the end of this trip I will have slept 125 days in a tent this year and 95 of them on ice....as one of Shackleton's men; David, wrote in his journal on the Nimrod Expedition (where David, Mawson and Mackay were the first men to ever reach Magnetic South)

"None but those, whose bed for months has been on snow and ice can ever realise the luxury of a real bed."

I can't wait to be in a real bed and to have a bath. I have only taken my thermal underwear off once in 50 days and that was to wash my boxers in a pot on the stove! Combine that with my 'Brian Blessed' beard and I wouldn't look out of place asleep in a cardboard box under the arches of the 'M4 Elevated Section'

Can't believe its 2008 already, seems like only yesterday I was sat at my desk in Bracknell....I wonder if I'll do the North Pole this year, now that would be a New Years resolution!