by Paul Heiney
I was to leave the boat in Marcús’s total care for the winter, which was drawing on. My berth was on a floating pontoon off a smart and newly built sailing club, of which I was offered a free run. There was dry space to store the bedding, cushions and clothes, and space too for sails and anything else I might want to take ashore. But this was still in the future; I had a few weeks of Icelandic cruising before bidding Wild Song thanks and goodbye for another season.
It was now farewell to Malcolme, who staggered across the road painfully early the following morning to await the airport bus. I now had four days before new crew arrived. As always, Malcolme had done me proud; he knows my ways, knows the boat, and I can rest easy in my bunk if he is up top and in charge. He’s a great pal and the very best sort to sail with. I was less certain about the crew that was to join me and I had to brace myself to adapt to their ways, make them feel welcome, get a sense of how much I could trust them. It’s very easy for crew to become passengers, and sometimes unwelcome ones. I often think sailing alone makes life so much easier, but I don’t share that view with others because they think there’s something truly heroic about sailing on your own; it’s not, it’s just more selfish. I blearily bid Malcolme farewell and slept for another few hours before fully waking to find myself alone on the boat once again, with strange surroundings to explore.
Just because you are not sailing does not mean the boat needs no attention; in fact, quite the reverse, and the needs of the boat must always come first. When she is bowling along there is little you can do by way of maintenance, but once in harbour the accumulated list of jobs demands attention. I would need water and diesel – never simple. I couldn’t understand, at first, why on the pontoon to which I was moored there was plentiful electricity but no running water. Back home, it is water that is in abundant supply. It was later explained to me that for half the year the pipes would be frozen solid, so why have them? If I wanted water I had to go across to the far side of the harbour, where the fishing fleet moored. I was pointed towards a snaking yellow hose dangling from the pier, gushing cold but crystal clear water. It never stopped flowing; if it did it might freeze, but fast running water cannot turn to ice. Diesel I expected to be easy with a fuel pump being no more than a boat’s length away, but that didn’t quite work out as planned either because I wasn’t a fisherman and didn’t have the right access card – this is how it usually is in foreign harbours.
The Icelanders go in for a convenient marriage of filling stations and cafes and there was one right by the harbour. I am told there is nothing unusual in an Icelander treating a filling station as a restaurant and eating their main meals there. Seeking breakfast, I clambered ashore to feel for the first time the crunch of crumbled lava beneath my feet. My dad used to drive a lorry that removed all the clinker from power station boilers. It looked just like these lava-topped footpaths. In all my time in Iceland, I don’t think I ever trod an earthy footpath – always the crunch of miserable black lava, like walking over the coals from last night’s fire.
The cafe was a workmanlike but dour affair, with lots of Formica and hard metal chairs, the babble of voices from the kitchen, the smell of stewing meat. A gang of seven or eight elderly men were gathered around one large circular table, holding court, chatting loudly in that putting-the-world-to-rights way, drinking endless strong coffee poured from a vacuum jug. I looked at the breakfast offerings spread out in one of those glass cabinets where you lift the front and remove what you want; the sort of displays that were abandoned back home in the 70s. I wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice. There were some tired-looking pastries, and pieces of bread and butter with a thick chunk of grey meat atop and a sauce on the side that looked like horseradish. I later learned this was lamb, which is produced in abundance here and is the only livestock that thrives on the short grass season and can forage on the often wet and moor-like fields. It makes for lamb with a deep flavour you will not find in an animal that has led a better fed life. I didn’t fancy it for breakfast, though, and asked for toast, in English. To my surprise it came, along with a coffee cup and directions towards a flask from which I should take as much as I wanted. Free refills of coffee are the norm here, which cheered me up. The gang of blokes slowly dispersed, the babble evaporated – and how frustrated I felt at having no clue what the rowdy conversation had been about. But I’ll guess: football, politics, car parking, cost of living and all the other grumbles that afflict those who have little else to do but sit with never-ending coffee and get the cares of the world off their chests.
From there, it was a short walk round the harbour to the sailing club, for which Marcús had given me a key. It was deserted and I felt something of a trespasser nosing my way round someone else’s home. I found a well-equipped workshop, but I had no immediate use for that. There was a washing machine but no drying, although energy is so cheap here that the entire clubhouse was heated to the temperature of a sauna – just climbing the stairs left you in a sweat. If you wanted to dry something, all you had to do was hang it on an indoor line for an hour or two, let the tropical heat do its work, and it emerged dry as a bone. Heating is communal, driven by abundant hot-water supplies sourced from deep under the ever steaming earth, which makes it feel almost free when compared to prices back home. I was warned that when I left the boat for the winter I should leave a 1kW fan heater running continuously for the entire five months, but that I would have to pay for the electricity used. Fearful what this might cost, it came as something of a surprise to find that the eventual bill was something less than 20 quid.
The washing machine! Another of those chores that hang like albatrosses round the neck of the skipper of an arriving boat. On seeing it, I sprinted back to the boat, stripped the bunks, waited half an hour till the washing was done, and then I strung it out on a line I had lashed from the bow to the stern of the boat and watched them billow in the wind like untamed sails.
Shopping next, and how disappointing to find that the supermarket that was but one hundred yards from the boat was closed for refurbishment. So I bought a ticket and took a bus into central Reykjavík, heading for what is reckoned to be the capital of one of the cleanest countries in the world, and the safest and the greenest. Iceland, as a whole, is fourth in the ‘World Happiness Report 2018’. Perhaps I would find my fellow bus passengers bursting into song at the sheer joy of being there, for there’s plenty to sing about; they reckon to have the cleanest-living teenagers in the whole of Europe.
The suburbs of this supposedly ‘ultra-cool’ city have spread like those outpourings from one of their volcanoes; perhaps ‘ooze’ would be a better word, for barren lava fields are being ever more invaded by a spread of housing that has that IKEA flat-pack feel to it. It’s all a result of late 20th-century prosperity, which came their way after the Second World War with the arrival of the massive US air force base at Keflavík, now their international airport – it brought floods of American money with it. More recently, it is the tourists who have brought the cash. The new houses, painted white, beige or cream and all similar, are built on the American grid pattern with wide roads, making the suburbs dull. They love their cars here and so the roads are broad and speedy, and footpaths seem hardly used. In the world rankings of car ownership, Iceland comes second after Cyprus. The relentless rise of the motor car has led to some calls for controls and pedestrianisation, but car dealers shriek at the prospect of reduced sales.
On the 40-minute bus ride, it was a repeating scene that presented itself: houses neither new nor old, all similar, neither Nordic nor inspired. I later learned that Icelanders are indifferent to how their houses look from the outside and so some are happily clad in peeling wood or rusty corrugated sheets. It doesn’t mean that they are derelict, or that the interiors might be in any way squalid, it’s just that looks don’t seem to matter. Were it not for distant snow-topped mountains and steaming volcanoes, there was nothing about the suburbs that signalled anything special about this place.
It was one o
f those stop/start bus journeys and my fellow passengers were mostly those clean-living youngsters they now breed here. The appetite for roundabouts is insatiable, one local telling me that the mayor was known as ‘Lord of the Rings’.
Sensing I was getting near to the centre of town by the general increase in bustle and the queues of coaches fresh in from the airport, I got off the bus and started to walk.
***
By accident, I had chosen to start in exactly the right place. I was at the end of what I later learned was Reykjavík’s main shopping street – tourist shopping street, that is. Where Icelanders go to buy their socks, toothpaste or hammers and nails I have no idea, for every outlet I saw was entirely focused on extracting tourist currency from the throng now descending unsteadily from those coaches. It is true that everything you could want is here if what you need is styled waterproofs, sweaters with zigzag patterns knitted in thick wool and still smelling of the sheep from which it had been shorn, woolly hats, souvenirs with elves, postcards, or the same ‘fashionable’ clothing that can be bought in a thousand other capital cities of the world. All at prices that take the breath away.
Ahead of me was a modest white house, the Prime Minister’s residence no less. Not much to look at. Cabinet meetings are held here and government business discussed. It isn’t much bigger than a couple of semi-detached houses, but there again the Prime Minister of Iceland is only administering a population the size of Coventry, although even Coventry manages an imposing Council House built in Tudor style, roughly ten times the size of this. Here, you could mistake the PM’s place for the Punk Museum across the road. No, sorry, the underground Punk Museum is down a flight of steps by the roadside, rather like the entrance to one of our subterranean municipal public lavatories before they were all closed. I thought the red wooden building behind it was the Punk Museum. In fact, it was tourist information. Government and tourism cuddling up nice and close.
But this is supposed to be a vibrant and cultured city, unashamed to be the home of the much sniggered about Phallological Museum – or Penis Museum, as everybody seems to call it – which is, in fact, a scholarly collection of biological artefacts. So where’s the vibrant thump of its beating heart, and where the culture? Behind the Prime Minister’s HQ is the Opera House, which is a good sign, and by looking to the left I could see the new Harpa concert hall, an architectural triumph with its honeycomb glass facade reflecting the ever changing northern light that bounces off the mountains and the sea – a truly world-class building, which I was later to appreciate more fully.
But what about the manners of the population – I mean the way they speak to you, or respond to a request for help? Are Icelandic manners better or worse than anywhere else? Certainly, there’s not a huge amount of smiling goes on, but that’s perhaps because they’re so chilly all the time and survive with gritted teeth, making a smile impossible. But they have another problem too, and it is that their language doesn’t go in for words that speak of politeness. They will not suggest, ‘could you please…?’ or ‘please, come here’. Instead, their style is to give orders – come here, sit here, go there! There’s no rudeness intended, it’s just that they don’t have the words. One theory put forward is that this nation of fishermen and subsistence farmers had no space in their conversation for niceties, and so they never developed. However, only too well aware that tourism is going a long way towards keeping this country solvent, young shop assistants are now being schooled to smile when they see a customer approaching, or at least look up from their phones. If you take offence easily, you are not going to have a happy time here, but be reassured they don’t really mean it.
They do good bookshops, stuffed with volumes in both Icelandic and English, and with always strong coffee flowing and pastries aplenty. Turning right off the main drag, I came across one of the largest, Eymundsson. I am a sucker for bookshops, even foreign ones, and so dived in. The most common Christmas present in Iceland is a book; celebrity gossip here focuses on authors, not rock stars. I read a report of one family where mother, daughter and husband were all writers and staggered publication of their books to avoid competition. Of course, it should come as no surprise, given that this is the home of the Icelandic sagas, riven with mayhem and violence set in a volatile landscape of steam, lava, fire, earthquake and destruction. Also, the winter nights are long, which must help the book trade somewhat.
Eymundsson was stuffed with people, younger rather than older, thumbing books, encouraging children to pick up books. Loitering in the coffee shop, alone, wearing the serious expression of someone who was on the verge of a world-changing novel, were young men and women with fingers flying across laptop keys. But despite their huge productivity, you can probably not name an Icelandic writer, and nor can I. With one possible exception. Halldór Laxness wrote Independent People; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955 and his book cannot be missed. I had never heard of him before I came here and now there’s no escape. His books are as ubiquitous as copies of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon. In Iceland, they are everywhere, from souvenir shops to filling stations to coffee shops, and as I roamed all the floors of this massive bookshop it never seemed to be out of reach. So widely circulated it is that you wouldn’t be surprised to see it on sale in McDonald’s. I bought a copy. Everyone does. How many read it all the way through I have no idea. It is, however, a great work of literature according to those who judge these things, portraying in an epic style the lives of rural Icelanders in the early 20th century.
What makes Iceland such a creative place? A group of young American researchers from the University of Kansas, led by Barbara Kerr, adopted that enquiry for their research.* The first thing they were able to dismiss was the notion that it had anything to do with landscape, so I was wrong about that. The ‘creatives’ they spoke to said such ideas were ‘just the national advertising, policy makers came up with that idea, just trying to attract tourists’. Most interesting was the view, strongly held, that ‘the inspiration comes from community and culture’ and they cite the fact that children are given space for play and exploration. Testing by exam is rarer, teachers act as ‘facilitators rather than lecturers’. Relationships between couples are more egalitarian – ‘every Icelandic male knows how to knit, every female knows how to use tools’ and ‘family life and caring for children are central to adulthood’. Marriage, however, is not a priority – only 30 per cent of Icelanders are married.
Talking of creativity, it was time to pay for my coffee and pastry – a flaky confection that you and I would call a ‘Danish’. The bill came to just short of ten quid. I call that creativity on a grand scale. It set me thinking how a country that was bankrupt in 2007 now found itself in a position where it could make someone from the UK, one of the biggest economies in the world, wince at the price of a cup of coffee. I suppose they’d say that’s a kind of creativity as well.
The price of coffee was not the final torment. As I walked the tourist drag, shoulder to shoulder with what felt like a meeting of the United Nations, my eyes were assaulted by endless visions of puffins.
They were everywhere: on mugs, cushions, shirts, balloons, chocolates, shoes, aprons, posters, jars of jam. But none real, of course. Six hundred miles from home, on a voyage in search of puffins that had already taken me through areas of intense puffin habitation, I had seen not so much as a fleeting glimpse of a cheery striped beak. And the fact that all around me were images and caricatures made it all the more disappointing, and made the coffee feel even more expensive.
I was just about to give up on Reykjavík when between two smart fashion houses I spotted a shop that stood out like a sore thumb. No mannequins, no jewels, no lighting. Only screws, tools, wire, plugs, paint and nails. It was like spotting a Bond Street ironmonger sandwiched between Dior and Chanel. A hardware shop! Have your Dolce & Gabbana, I’ll take anything by Stanley tools any day! I was in there faster than an Icelandic creative off to his publisher.
It smelled, as a
ll good hardware stores should, of oil and paraffin, polish and soap. So much scent reminded me of an urgent need for methylated spirit. The diesel heater, which would surely be needed at some stage in my circuit of Iceland, requires meths to get it going. Like a drunk that can’t face the day without a tipple, that heater needs a shot of alcohol before it can even think about warming up. Diesel is actually quite difficult to set fire to at normal temperatures and if you are not careful all you get is smoke and no flame. This, you might remember, was Malcolme’s problem back in Tórshavn, when I returned to the boat to find him sitting on the lavatory, shivering and cold – he hadn’t offered the heater a stiff enough drink. I scanned the shelves of bottles, all plastic and coloured so I couldn’t judge the contents, and all the labels in Icelandic. So with a bit of miming, together with the shopkeeper’s little bit of English, we unscrewed a few tops until I got the unmistakeable scent of meths.