Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

none of the complications that came later. The mountains are red, as if the cinders haven’t yet cooled, or the black of embers, carved by valleys where it seems that if you watched long enough, you’d see that the rock is still flowing. The elements are translated here: what is solid looks liquid, rock like water, earth like fire.

We stop in a fishing village called Ólafsvík for lunch. There is a local museum, on the first floor of the building that used to house the town’s bar, where we look at old toys, butter churns and agricultural equipment. There are mincers with handles to wind and cast-iron balance scales of the kind still in use in my mother’s kitchen. We go down the wooden ladder to what is now a craft shop and café on the ground floor, where I wander around stroking the knitwear, and the others stand in the doorway, watching a large fishing boat come in. All the garments, jumpers in heavy wool and hats, scarves and mittens in lacy einband lopi, have labels with a woman’s first name and an Icelandic phone number in biro. I look up to where a group of women sits around a table in the café, knitting. There are two girls of about ten and twelve behind the counter, setting out coffee on a tray. I wander over, carrying a sweater I like, and one of the knitters catches my eye. I made that one, she says. I look inside and admire her thoroughness in catching down the yarn she was carrying over. It’s like a knitters’ secret handshake – she smiles and we start to discuss Icelandic increase technique and lacework. I try on the sweater, and Ragga, its maker, tells me that she and her neighbours have established a crafting co-operative. They knit at home, and together in the café, and in summer the visitors come and buy. Ragga takes me over to the table while her daughter wraps my sweater. None of the women is using a pattern, and most of them are doing intricate work, with lace stitches and cabling and multiple colours. I think of the weekly Knit Club I’ve joined in Cornwall, where we don’t distract the person doing a cable row and all watch when Jo’s knitting a particularly complicated bit of lace, and soggy photocopied patterns jostle the glasses on the table. Novices. Amateurs. In Ólafsvík they can set the thumbs on lace mittens while recounting what Halla says Jón did after she broke the news. . . It’s just traditional piecework, I remind myself, glossed a little for the tourists, but even so I linger a little as Tobias tugs my hand in the doorway.

We go on to the end of the road, and then get out and walk to the lighthouse at the end of the peninsula. There’s a different geology here, a glacier of older, black lava calving onto a beach populated by purple-grey pebbles, each round and sensual as an egg, shiny as marble. I steal one. Waves scribble the length of the shore, and Arctic terns scold overhead. The lighthouse speaks of harder weather, its windows arrow-slits doubly barricaded, the door tunnelled like the entrance to an iglu. Today the sun warms our backs and midges cloud the reeds.

We turn back, across the plains between the mountains and the sea, down the other side of the peninsula. Farms are scattered here, on a blanket of flat green fields spread at the feet of the volcanoes. I begin to see how the sagas might make a new kind of sense here. You would end locked in feuds with your neighbours in a place where you can always see them, always know what they are doing, and never see anyone else, where impassable mountains surround a glacier behind you and the Arctic sea laps your fields in front of you. One berserker would go a long way.

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We leave Stykkishólmur for Akureyri, Iceland’s ‘second city’ with a population of 17,000, 5,000 less than our Cornish ‘small town’. Kathy and I were in Akureyri for her nineteenth birthday, sixteen years ago. We blew some money that could have been spent on food on swimming pool entry, and spent most of the afternoon in a jacuzzi, looking at patches of snow on sunbathing mountains and watching fishing boats going up and down the fjord. It was our favourite town, with a high street of early twentieth-century wooden shops and cafés, and gardens foaming with flowers and trees that don’t grow anywhere else in the country.

To drive from Stykkishólmur to Akureyri feels like passing through geological time. We take a gravel road around the coast, bumping and leaping through an exaggerated Alpine landscape with a few Norwegian fjords cut-and-pasted around the foothills. There is no other traffic, no people, but grass and blueberry bushes and low birches massing on the hillsides. Streams glitter across the valley in the sun. The fjord is full of swans, and sometimes sheep wander into the road. Birds call. We go on, and up, and up, and down, Guy driving and the rest of us watching the land as if it’s some kind of new technology we’ve never seen before. At last, an hour and a half from the last settlement, there’s a farmhouse between the road and the sea, with net curtains in the window and a swing set and trampoline on the grass. How do you think they get their post, I ask, thinking about internet book shopping. How do the kids get to school, asks Anthony. What if you run out of milk? Max looks up from his book and says ‘cows’. The Alps end, and with them the summer. Now we’re in the Scottish Lowlands, among rolling grey hills. There are herds of cows and low, white farmsteads, and it’s early spring, bright and cold, and then the gravel ends and we see ahead the junction that the Sat Nav has been promising