by Paul Carr
I’d dumped my old, much larger suitcase in London back in July. I was bored of waiting at baggage reclaim for my gigantic case and I knew it was only a matter of time before an airline mislaid it. Given that I carried my entire life in that suitcase, losing it would be pretty disastrous.
Finding the perfect carry-on bag – small enough to fit in overhead lockers and yet with enough pockets and space inside that it would fit everything I needed – took the best part of a week of trawling the web. I read literally hundreds of reviews on travel websites before finally settling on one made by Samsonite.
While I waited for the bag to be delivered, I started the process of even further streamlining my life. I’d already been pretty ruthless when I moved out of my flat, selling or throwing away everything that I could possibly live without, no matter what its sentimental value. I’d kept – so I thought – only the bare minimum I needed to survive: clothes, toiletries, a couple of books, my laptop, my phone and various chargers, passport … But when I looked back at my first few months of living out of a suitcase, I realised that there were even more things that could go. For a start, there were clothes that I hadn’t worn at all in the previous six months. I was carrying around a black business suit on the basis that at any moment I might be invited to an important meeting, a formal dinner or a funeral. In fact I had been invited to just one formal dinner since I’d left London, but one of the perks of being a writer – I’d discovered – is that you can turn up at almost any venue wearing jeans and trainers and people will just shrug. Given that the way I was going the next funeral I attended would be my own, the suit could probably go, which meant so could the shiny shoes. I ended up keeping just my one pair of Converse, which are the first thing I kick off and place side by side next to the door before I start to unpack the rest of my clothes.
If you’re going to own just one pair of shoes, by the way, Converse are definitely the way to go. For a start they’re perennially fashionable, like blue jeans, but also dirt cheap. When one pair wears out you can just throw them away and buy another; either an identical pair, or one in a different colour. Which is easy to do as every shoe shop in the world sells them. Thirdly, for some reason, places that ban trainers don’t seem to mind Converse.
Back to the routine. I open the wardrobe and remove all of the coat hangers, throwing them on to the bed. Now I can start to unpack.
First the shirts: six of them, all dress shirts, which can be made to look casual or smart, as the need arises. Five black, one blue. I remove each one, unroll it (rolling is far better than folding) and place it on a hanger, before laying it on the bed.
Next I remove my two black cashmere jumpers – one V-neck, one polo neck – and my dark blue suit jacket. Like the shirts, these can all be made to look smart or casual. I hang the jacket on one of the hangers and put it in the wardrobe where the folds will quickly drop out; the jumpers stay rolled and I put them on the shelf inside the wardrobe, along with my four black and one grey t-shirts.
Socks: six pairs. Skimping on socks becomes annoying very quickly when you have to find a place to wash them. By having the same number of pairs of socks as you do shirts, you can always launder them at the same time.
One of my biggest clothing realisations was that I really didn’t need more than two pairs of trousers: just a pair of jeans to wear every day and a second pair of light water-resistant trousers that could be worn on a beach, or while I was washing my jeans. I’m already wearing the jeans and I leave the beach trousers in the suitcase. I’m unlikely to need them in Iceland.
And that’s it for clothes. As I packed them all into my small bag for the first time in London, and handed the rest to the woman in the charity shop down the road from Robert’s halls, I felt a twinge of panic. Surely I’d regret this; surely I’d realise that I was missing something from my extreme capsule wardrobe. And yet, six months later, I’d never once found myself in need of any extra clothes. And if I did? That’s what shops are for.
My laptop and chargers plus pens and notebooks and the other tools of my trade are packed in a separate laptop bag: a sturdy leather thing but one that is still light enough to act as a day bag. On travel days, the bag also contains my leather passport wallet.
My MacBook Pro laptop takes care of all my work and entertainment needs – word processor, DVD player, stereo, television; all packed into one handy device. I don’t store anything on the laptop itself though – I have a nasty habit of losing or breaking electronic equipment. Instead I use Google Mail for my email and Google Docs – Google’s online office suite – to store all my files. If I lose or destroy a laptop, it doesn’t matter. All of my files will still be waiting for me online when I buy a new one. I take a similar approach to entertainment too: using online music services like Last.fm to give me access to my music library from anywhere in the world, Netflix.com for movies and so on. Internet experts refer to a reliance on this kind of storage as ‘living in the cloud’, a phrase that has always appealed to me. Most normal people stopped at documents and music but by living in hotels, renting cars as I need them and generally having no ties, I was basically living my entire life in the cloud.
The only concession I make to the analogue world is books. I still like to read on paper, rather than on my laptop screen – but I have a rule that I never carry more than one at a time. Instead I’ll buy a new book, read it and then, after scribbling a short message in the front – ‘hope you enjoy this book. Chapter three is a bit crap, but it’s worth sticking with’, that kind of thing – I’ll leave it behind, either on a train or at an airport or even in a restaurant for someone else to enjoy. Often I’ll include my email address in the front, just to see if anyone replies. Someone did once; a man who picked up my copy of Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday at Chicago O’Hare airport emailed to say it had helped him while away a four-hour delay. That made me happy. Still, at some point I’ll probably relent and buy an Amazon Kindle or some similar ebook reader that reproduces the experience of reading paper on an electronic device. They are thinner than books and I’ve become obsessed with saving space.
The only other things in my suitcase are two waterproof toiletry bags; one containing actual toiletries and the other crammed full of things that I use to keep myself sane: a pack of playing cards, a couple of old notebooks, a spare British pay-as-you-go phone with global roaming for emergencies, condoms, and my one concession to sentiment: a champagne cork that reminds me of an incident with a girl in San Francisco.
I remove the first of the bags – the one containing actual toiletries – and head to the bathroom. I turn on the shower, twisting the controls to the maximum heat setting. (A smell of sulphur immediately filled the room. I smiled, remembering that Iceland runs entirely on geothermal energy. It’s actually quite a nice smell when you get used to it, which is lucky as I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up going to hell one day. Room 689 has no bath, which would usually be grounds for an upgrade, but I was in a hurry, and the room is otherwise great so I let it go.)
I never carry shampoo, shower gel or any of that stuff. There isn’t a hotel in the world that doesn’t provide it. Same with soap and most of the other things that usually go in toiletry bags. I remove my white King of Shaves razor – made entirely of plastic, except for the thin blades: when you carry only hand luggage you can’t afford anything that’s going to upset the x-ray machines at airports – and place it on the sink next to a tiny bottle of shave gel. Next to that goes my hair wax – again, no big bottles of gel or liquid for the xray – and a tiny tube of toothpaste and travel toothbrush. And finally a pair of nail clippers and some tweezers. That’s everything. Anything else I might need – headache tablets, spare razor blades, whatever – can be picked up at any shop in any town; there’s simply no need to add the extra weight or take up the extra space.
By now, the shower should be boiling hot. I head back out to the room and pick up the pile of shirts from the bed. Cramming everything in hand luggage means that they’re crea
sed to hell but a few minutes in a bathroom full of steam will take care of that. I hang the shirts up around the bathroom, as close to the shower as possible.
Finally, I unpack my laptop bag, putting the laptop on the desk and plugging it in to charge. My phone charges via the laptop so I plug that in as well. I open the laptop and try to connect to the Internet, hoping that the wifi actually works.
Finally, I remove the passport wallet from its zipped compartment and put it in the safe in the room. Along with my passport, the wallet also contains my spare debit card – connected to a UK account with exactly £1000 in it. Along with the £50 note and the $100 bill wrapped around the card, it’s my emergency ‘get-the-hell-out-of-here’ money. The safe, like most modern hotel room safes, asks me to choose a four-digit access code. I close the door, enter the code – the same one I always use – and the lock whirs into place.
I’ve arrived.
1104
I looked at the time: 6p.m. I was meeting my guide to the city in a bar across the street at 6.30. My entire unpacking process had taken less than five minutes, exactly the same amount of time as it would take me to repack in a few days. That’s the beauty of having a system.
I closed the curtains – it had been dark outside for hours already – took off the clothes I’d been travelling in and threw my shirt and socks in the laundry bag that I’d found in the wardrobe. I quickly ticked the relevant boxes: wash and press, next-day return, and left the bag by the door ready to drop at reception on my way out.
Just time for a shower to freshen up after the flight before another evening of madness masquerading as work. I was due to file my Guardian column the next morning: 900 words that would justify my entire trip.
The bar was literally across the street from the hotel, and so I was actually a few minutes early. I ordered a drink from the barmaid, who spoke perfect English, as everyone in Reykjavik does. I opened my notebook and began to scribble a few notes. Apart from the fact that Björk is from there, nobody in the UK knows anything about Iceland so I decided to list a few of the facts I’d learned from the guidebook that I’d bought at the airport. That’ll be half a column, right there, I thought.
Fact One: the locals eat sharks and puffins. The puffin, by the way, is the only animal in the world that doesn’t taste like chicken. By all accounts it’s disgusting, but not as disgusting as shark – which emits a smell so putrid that there was a little picture of a gas mask next to it on the bar’s snack menu.
Fact Two: almost all of the energy in Iceland is geothermic. This means there’s no pollution, electricity is as cheap as water – and the water stinks of sulphur. If Dennis Nilsen had lived in Iceland, he’d never have been caught.
Fact Three: Iceland operates a visa waiver scheme for travellers that was described in my guidebook as ‘similar to that operated by the USA’. And, indeed, the empty arrivals hall and unbelievably lax immigrations process at Keflavik International Airport echoes almost exactly that of JFK. If JFK were to be hit with an apathy bomb, planted by Stephen King’s Langoliers.
Fact Four: on Saturdays and Sundays, the bars and clubs – each within walking distance of the others – stay open until 6 a.m. This makes me suspect that the reason booze is taxed so highly is to keep British stag weekenders away. After all, it’s freezing cold, it’s dark and the locals try really hard to speak intelligible English. Take away the ridiculous cost of getting wasted and Iceland is basically Birmingham.
Fact Five: Iceland has a surprisingly large number of Internet companies for a country with only 320,000 inhabitants, roughly the same number of people as live in Cardiff. I had a feeling that there was a fascinating story to be told about the country’s growing entrepreneurial class, fuelled by the scores of technically skilled, highly motivated workers being laid off by the banks. To find out more I’d put out a message on Twitter asking whether any locals might be willing to meet me for a drink while I was in town and give me the low-down.
The first to reply was Brian Suda, a displaced Missourian now working in Reykjavik as a software developer, and it was he I was now waiting to meet. Having read all about my penchant for drink, he’d suggested his favourite bar – which happened to be within staggering distance of my hotel – as the ideal meeting place.
Unfortunately, Brian’s alcohol-related suggestions didn’t stop there.
‘Why the hell are you drinking that?’ he asked when he arrived, pointing at my beer.
‘I asked for something local, and this is what they gave me. It’s called “Viking”. It sounded Icelandic.’
‘They thought you were a tourist,’ said Brian.
‘I am a tourist,’ I said, tucking my Iceland tourist guidebook into my coat pocket.
Brian shook his head and headed to the bar, returning with two small shots of what looked, to my naïve eyes, like vodka. ‘This is “Brennivin”,’ he explained. ‘It’s a local schnapps that literally translates as “burning wine”’ (an alternative name, according to my guidebook, is svartidauði, or ‘black death’).
‘It’s nice,’ I said, necking the contents of the shot glass.
A waitress walked past. ‘Two more,’ said Brian.
Two hours later and the burning wine had done its work. All thoughts of technology were forgotten and Brian and I found ourselves standing at the back of another bar. Somehow we’d ended up at a gig by Magni Ásgeirsson.
Ásgeirsson, in the unlikely event that you haven’t heard of him, is famous – in Reykjavik – as the only Icelandic contestant of the American reality show Rock Star: Supernova. In case you missed that too, the show’s ‘aim’ was to find a lead singer for a new rock supergroup featuring Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee and former members of Metallica and Guns N’ Roses.Ásgeirsson made it all the way through to the final, largely because the entire population of Iceland set their alarm clocks for the middle of the night local time to phone America and vote for him. Sadly, as the entire population of Iceland is less than the population of the town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, Magni finished in fourth place and is now back playing gigs in local Reykjavik bars. Bars like the one Brian and I had found ourselves standing at the back of.
The gig was actually rather good, if you like Icelandic hard rock, played at ear-splitting volume in a nearly empty bar on a Tuesday, which – after half a bottle of Brennivin – I did. But after a few more shots of black death, washed down with a pint or two of Viking beer to sober me up a bit, I decided that Ásgeirsson must be fed up with playing his usual rock set every night and wandered up to the stage with a few requests.
‘You haff a request?’ growled Magni. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m a journalist from England, writing about Icelandic musicians and I …’ Magni’s face brightened and he reached out and grabbed my hand. ‘A journalist! From England! Welcome to Reykjavik – I see you have been enjoying our Brennivin.’ Another shot had somehow materialised in my hand. ‘I would be glad to play your request. What is it?’
Now, I’m prepared to admit that the fault here was all mine. I should have requested something clever and hard and rocky – but the problem is, I’m not really a hard rock person. I’m more of a middle-of-the-road, dorky guys with acoustic guitars kind of person. I always told myself that it was a question of knowing my enemy: that by liking bands that American college girls like – Matchbox Twenty, Hootie and the Blowfish, REM – I would benefit from some kind of special we-have-so-much-in-common power that I could use to woo those same girls. The truth is, though, I just have really girly taste in music.
My drunken amusement at the idea of interrupting an Icelandic rocker and asking for a song request hadn’t stretched as far as actually thinking of what song I wanted him to play. I wasn’t expecting him to be so accommodating. Bloody Icelandic hospitality.
‘Umm …’ I said, and then blurted out the first song that came to mind. A favourite song of my ex-girlfriend, unsurprisingly.
He looked at me for a moment, with an expression that clearly said ‘are you kidding me?
’ But then he shrugged. ‘Hokay,’ he said, ‘I try my best.’ Satisfied, I went back to Brian.
And so it was that one of my last clear memories of the night is of a shaven-headed semi-celebrity Icelandic rocker clearing his throat, apologising (in English) that ‘I’m a little rusty because I haven’t played this since school’, picking up an acoustic guitar from a case behind a speaker and breaking into the jaunty opening bars of ‘Mr Jones’ by Counting Crows.
‘Maybe we should have pushed his repertoire to “Hotel California”,’ said Brian before wandering to the bar to see if they had any shark meat for me to try.
1105
Fact Six: unsuccessful 4 a.m. drunk dials to old flames to tell them about how you convinced an Icelandic rocker to play Counting Crows are even more painful to recall the next day when you realise you made them from Iceland, to America, using a UK cellphone.
I woke up in my hotel room; in my bed; and without any strange Icelandic girls. I won’t pretend I wasn’t slightly disappointed, but I comforted myself with the thought that I at least had enough material for an amusing column about Reykjavik.
I padded over to my laptop and checked my email. It was just after 1 p.m., and outside it was already starting to get dark, which did little to lighten my hangover. Overnight, more Icelanders had emailed to offer their services as tour guides, but my headache told me that I’d probably brush them off and instead spend the rest of my trip recovering in one of the many thermal pools that litter the landscape like hot tubs for giants.
The only other interesting email was from Sarah. I’d last seen her a month or so earlier when she’d made a trip to London to launch the UK edition of her book. As a final act of compensation for my behaviour in Vegas I’d agreed to help Robert interview her on stage at the launch event. Since bonding over their disapproval of Drunk Paul, Robert and Sarah had become good friends too and so she had entrusted him with choosing the venue for the event. Which is how we’d ended up interviewing one the most successful women reporters in a male-dominated industry onstage at the Soho Review Bar – one of London’s oldest strip clubs.