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

I think again, with gratitude, about our underfloor heating and almost-free gushing hot water, which seemed distastefully extravagant in August, about steaming Jacuzzis at the pool and the way I need to turn the radiator down and keep the window open at work even when there’s a blizzard outside. I am glad that my brain is spoilt by money which means I have bought a down snowsuit for Tobias and thermal underwear all round. Most of all, I think, atrophying my muscles as I curl up on my IKEA garden chair with my laptop, I am glad not to have to eat slátur, blood pudding.

Our friend Guy plans to come to Reykjavík for a long weekend. He’s a car-lover who, he assures us, would relish nothing more than a day spent negotiating the second-hand-car showrooms of Reykjavík. I am not entirely sure I believe him – my disinclination to engage with the tedious world of car-buying is one of the reasons we are still walking to Hafnarfjörður to buy tinned tomatoes – but I am so grateful for the suggestion that I react by planning a menu to compensate him for his day rather than questioning his willingness. Guy comes to meet me at my office when I finish teaching, and we set off. Two buses, and the final kilometre on foot, along a dual carriageway through the industrial quarter. A blizzard has blown in from the sea, and we clutch each other as we bend into the wind that’s pulling my coat away from my body and hurling chips of ice into our faces. I suggest to Guy that we might take something for a test drive in the first showroom we reach and then use it to get to the others. He eyes up a Porsche, I suggest borrowing one of a row of Volvo police-cars left with the keys in the ignitions along the edge of the forecourt. By the time we reach the showroom’s office and discover that all you have to do to test-drive a car in Iceland is ask for the keys, we can’t make eye contact without giggling. We spend the afternoon driving around in a sequence of borrowed cars and nobody once asks for any proof of identity or signature, much less a driving licence. The combination of unfamiliar cars, the blizzard, the need to drive on the wrong side of the road and fear of Icelandic drivers makes me lose my nerve entirely and Guy does all the driving, with the aplomb of someone who learnt to drive in Texas and now insists on driving across central London every day. You will, he warns me, need to come to terms with this. I’m back at work on Tuesday, I can’t stay and be your chauffeur. I know, I say, I know. But not yet.

Late in the afternoon, when it’s been dark for a while and I’ve given up trying to keep my feet and trousers dry, we find a Volvo. I’ve never driven an automatic before and am alarmed by the prospect, but the car is of recent manufacture, cheap, in good condition, with a full service history and winter and summer tyres. It will drink fuel, Guy says, but it’s the only one within your budget in which I’d happily take children on the road round here. We take it to an empty car park and I get behind the wheel. Yes, I say, it’s fine, I can reach the pedals and see out of the windscreen; it’s comfortable. Start the engine, says Guy. Go on. I drive it about twenty metres, stop, and make Guy take it back. Yes, we say, we’ll take this one, please. And less than an hour later, having signed two forms, we drive – Guy drives – back to the Big Flat. Insurance is sorted in one phone call, tax arranged as part of the purchase. Still no-one has asked to see that I have a driving licence. By the time Guy leaves, three days later, I have driven across Reykjavík and back, white-knuckled and swearing. The following weekend, we drive to Pétur’s house. Pétur comes out to see our new purchase and I set off stylishly, waving, on the wrong side of the road. I’ve been driving for fifteen years in England, I am fine on the M25 and around the mountain lanes of the Peak District, can cope with ice and, as long as my mother isn’t watching, reverse-park with pride. But I’m infantilised again by my foreign-ness here. It will take me weeks to brave driving in the dark, even though dark is now most of the time, and for the first half of the winter we will use the car to stock up on food when the roads are clear and then walk and cycle as long as there’s snow and ice underfoot.

The greenhouse-grown Icelandic salads are over for the year now. There is still fresh cabbage, but apart from that all the vegetables are imported, expensive, and long past their best. Fruit is waxy apples or squashy bananas, although a king’s ransom will buy you tasteless, mushy plums in Hagkaup. I rub legs of lamb with smoked paprika and cumin from my hoard, and roast potatoes with butter and shards of rosemary picked in our garden at home. We have found good food in Reykjavík. There’s a French bakery on Laugavegur and a Vietnamese noodle bar just down the hill from Hallgrímskirkja and a sushi counter on the top floor of the bookshop that has American magazines. There are more formal restaurants that boast of tapas and pierogi and mole poblano, though the chilli tends to be dumbed down to toddler levels. There’s a Thai grocer by the bus station and an English cheese shop near the zoo, and the rumour of a Polish bakery out in Hafnarfjörður. Mads has directed us to the treasured farm