'Coolest job on earth': new team for penguin post office

As a "tent master", whose work involves building big tops at music festivals, George Clarke has never run a post office- and certainly never counted penguins for a living.

- Esther Addley

But these and other idiosyncratic tasks will become part of his daily routine when he joins a small team of new recruits to "the coolest jobs on earth", staffing the world's most southerly museum and post office in Antarctica.

The team of five have been recruited by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, a conservation charity that cares for historic British bases on the continent. Next month they will travel to a former research station on Goudier Island, off the Antarctic peninsula below South America.

There, for five months of freezing temperatures and near-constant daylight, they will live alongside gentoo penguins while carrying out conservation repairs, monitoring wildlife and greeting cruise ship visitors.