I have just been to one of the loneliest and loveliest islands on the planet. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, found it memorable and transcendental, yet fervently hope never to go there again.
And I don't want anyone else to go there either. To all who may be curious, I'll say simply and bluntly: travel anywhere you like - but not, please, to Prion Island.
Prion - named for a bird that doesn't really live there any more - is a tiny and faraway British-run island off the north coast of the much larger faraway British-run Atlantic island of South Georgia. It is close to the Antarctic, and is settled in a sheltered bay well-protected from the storms of the Roaring Forties. It is nonetheless surrounded by bitterly cold seas speckled with icebergs, and has a climate that, save for a short period in the Austral summer, is decidedly and lethally harsh.
But a number of charming and fascinating creatures live on Prion. There are many idiotic-looking gentoo penguins, armies of impossibly cute fur seals and, for the twitchers among us, there is the most southerly songbird in the world, the South Georgia Pipit. Prion is also, and crucially, one of the few breeding grounds and nesting places for that most emblematic bird of the southern seas, the Wandering Albatross.
There are no trees, of course - there are just about no native trees anywhere in these latitudes, especially not in the Falkland Islands, which lie 1,300km to the northwest. But there is an abundance of tussac grass. From afar on a sunny day the little island looks as green as a Cotswold meadow. In presenting such a contrast to the forbidding ice-covered crags all around, it looks a really most inviting place.
Tourism in these parts has increased almost exponentially in recent years. Plutocrat travellers, long since dissatisfied with Ibiza or Phuket, finding little that is new in Timbuctu, and wanting bragging rights for having made it to the raw edges of the planet, are now streaming into the world's more fragile places.