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This rule, which I had accepted quite easily in the briefing, proved far harder to keep in practice. There was one pup in particular, on a beach near the hut, whose mother had disappeared after a gale. For four days I recorded its condition each morning, noting the changes as it weakened, and on the fifth it was gone.

Readjusting to ordinary life took longer than I had expected. For weeks, the noise of traffic made me flinch, and I found supermarkets almost unbearable: too bright, too crowded, too full of choices that did not matter. I caught myself scanning car parks for anything slightly too smooth to be a stone.

The work itself began at first light. Each morning we divided the island's coastline into sections and walked it, recording every pup we found: its approximate age, judged by the state of its coat, its position, and whether its mother was nearby. The newborns were easy to spot, bright white against the dark rocks. The older ones, which had begun to moult into their grey adult fur, were maddeningly well camouflaged.

Kofi, on the other hand, had never set foot on a seal colony before. He had analysed other people's counts for two years without once seeing a live pup, and he confessed on our first evening that he was rather nervous of them.

None of the numbers in it were remarkable on their own. But each of them stood for a cold morning, a careful walk and a moment of seeing something that, a few weeks earlier, I would have walked straight past. I have never been so pleased to see my work reduced to a list of figures.

There were three of us in the end: Ruth, a retired biology teacher who had done the survey twice before; Kofi, a doctoral student whose research depended on the data; and me. We were taken to the island by a fishing boat in early October, along with a quantity of tinned food that seemed excessive until the first storm arrived and the boat could not return for nine days.

What helped, oddly, was the sheer scale of what was going on around us. By November there were hundreds of pups on the island, and the beaches were loud with the bawling of hungry young and the groans of their mothers. Set against that noise, one loss, however painful, began to take its proper place.

By the third week I had become, if not expert, at least reliable, and my counts began to match hers. This pleased me more than I would have admitted. I had not expected, at my age, to care so much about being good at something so specific, or to feel quite so proud when Ruth stopped checking my sections.