The first week on Antipodes Island, in mid-December. The wind is light, the sky is calm and clear. In the evenings, late, the sun swells to a rich golden glow before disappearing behind the hump of the ridge towards Perpendicular Head, leaving the northeast corner of the island in deep shade. It shines longer on Bollons Island, across the often troubled water between the islands which is so unusually calm. The evening are quiet, but for the swelling, braying calls of the Erect-crested penguin colonies around the shoreline, fur seal wails, elephant seal roars, and the occasional flung cry of Light-mantled albatrosses.

This first last light on the island is a wonder. I recall a handful of evenings as warm and rich in colour as this, but far more in tossed cold grey winds, the hut shaking, windows salt-trimmed and blurry. I clamber over tussock mounds to the top of a ridge overlooking the hut and Reef Point, where pairs of Light-mantled albatrosses whirl and spin on pointed wings. They are dark in the shadow, and aflame when the catch the last of the sun. They are perfect in their mastery of invisible air currents, the breezes that buffet me on the edge of the ridge.

Many visitors to the Southern Ocean fixate on these birds, and I’m firmly among them. They’re very different to the other albatross species, smaller, agile, and seemingly made for breakneck pivots that drop them delicately on to their cliff edge roosts and nests. I have a deep and uncomplicated love for them. Watching them in the liquid gold dusk is like a dream.