I made it! Last night, about 3 a.m., I flew into the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen and descended into what might well be Alice's domain of Wonderland.
To be more precise, perhaps, I might have gone Through the Looking-Glass, because while there were no walruses or carpenters upon the ice, the scene was otherwise exactly as described in Lewis Carroll's rhyme:
The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright - And that was odd, because it was The middle of the night.
Spitzbergen, at 80 north latitude and 700 miles or so from the North Pole, is about as far north in Europe as it is possible to get without being called intrepid.
By a side-effect of the tilt of the Earth's axis which gives us our seasons, here inside the Arctic Circle for a period around the summer solstice the sun, day or what should be night, just never sets at all. And so it is at present in Spitzbergen.
This perpetual daylight provides a strange and eerie sense of the surreal. It is well after midnight as I write, and yet the sun is high, beaming brightly over Isfjorden, the Ice Fjord. And it is shining in the northern sky, an orientation possible in this hemisphere only north of the Arctic Circle.
The temperature is minus 4, some bare soil can be seen as the land emerges from the harsh Spitzbergen winter, the snow on the surrounding mountains every now and then pours down in avalanches, and drifting ice-floes fill the nearby fjord.
We are warned, and this is not a joke, not to go unarmed outside this little settlement of Longyearbyen for fear of polar bears. Among the houses one is relatively safe; six weeks ago a polar bear encroached on the street, but it is two years since anyone was, as they so nicely put it, "taken".
It is a majestic land, yet desolate. As I strolled in the freezing cold and midnight sun a little while ago, I thought of Kipling:
There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken in any way you please is bad, And strands them in forsaken guts and creeks No decent soul would think of visiting.
And then, between the brightly painted wooden huts and snowmobiles, I found Karl Bergen's pub, and life improved.
You wonder, perhaps, why I should be here at all and what Spitzbergen has to do with meteorology? Well, all will be revealed. Be patient and just watch this space.