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

All families had the same Sunday meal: it was always a leg of lamb with brown potatoes and sauce and red cabbage, and the potatoes were sweetened with brown sugar, horrible.’

Pétur doesn’t like sugar, for a range of sound ideological and physiological reasons. I do, because it’s what gets me through the day, but even I don’t like Icelandic caramelised potatoes. Or the sweetened mayonnaise that Icelanders put on salads, or the sweet brown paste labelled ‘mustard’. Being in Iceland has given me my first opportunity to feel superior about sugar.

‘But it was a beautiful meal, and I said thank you for the meal, and then I asked where the lavatory was. Everyone sort of looked into their plates and looked away – it wasn’t a question I should have asked. And they were fairly modern.’

‘How did you find out what you were meant to do?’ I ask, fascinated.

‘Jon took me out to the barn and showed me the cowshed. There were three or four cows on the farm, in a stone and turf building. They’d be bound in their stalls all winter, and there was this run that they’d shit in, and you’d do the same, why not? Or go out onto the tún. But you know there was a lot of doubt about running water in houses when it first came, lots of people didn’t like that idea at all, thought it must be unhealthy.’

‘So they just heated water on a stove? For washing?’

He grins. ‘One of Messíana’s friends once tried washing her hair in cow urine. That was the way they did it in the old days. Apparently hair looks beautiful if you wash it in cow urine.’

Messíana looks about sixty. ‘When was that?’

‘Oh, in the 1950s. Up on the farm we were still making our own soap in the late 1960s, boiling sheep fat down with caustic soda. And we made our own svið, singed sheep’s heads, using the old forge. Torfi would have used it in the old days to make horseshoes, but we burnt sheep’s heads in it.’

If you look into the meat section of an Icelandic supermarket, burnt sheep’s heads will look back at you, milky eyeballs peering out of brown skulls. Apparently they come cut in half, so you don’t have to saw through the skull at home. Max wants us to buy one. I am pretending I don’t think Tobias has eaten sheep’s brains at nursery. Icelanders regard svið as an easy week-night supper and my students are amused by my horror. You eat lambs’ legs, they say, why not the head? They are right – I can see that it’s moral as well as logical to eat the whole animal once you’ve killed it – but I’m still not going to touch one, much less take it home and scoop its brains out.

‘We blew everything off with a blowtorch, and then we used a hot poker to get into the areas around the ears.’

I can’t suppress a whimper.

‘And I would go out every now and then into the outhouse, and take a new sheep’s head and saw it in half and drag it back for us to eat. Torfi would recognise the sheep, and to us the meat was very good.’

‘So people say.’ I sound like Queen Victoria responding to a dirty joke.

He smiles.

‘So you learnt to fit in.’ I look at Pétur, whose shoulder-length curly grey hair is twisted and pinned with small barrettes, on whose bookshelves Derrida in French jostles Virgil in Latin and collections of medieval and modern Irish poetry. Most people look happy at the mention of his name, but I don’t think anyone could say Pétur ‘fitted in’ in contemporary Reykjavík, and nor would he wish to. ‘How long did it take for you to be accepted? As a foreigner?’

The farmers of the valley accepted him, he says, as he learnt Icelandic, and worked in the fields. Always as a foreigner, but they accepted him. Pétur and the farmers shared opposition to the American military presence in Iceland and to the Independence Party which was in power then and until the ‘Pots and Pans Revolution’ of 2009. They shared support for the co-operative movement. I am repeatedly surprised when the people who have known Pétur longest refer to him by his English name and not the Icelandic patronymic he embraced when he became an Icelandic citizen, as if they are unable to recognise his Icelandic identity, but Pétur knows that foreign-ness is permanent, and not necessarily a disability.

Winter comes, though I don’t feel as if we’ve had autumn. I’m not sure you can have autumn without trees. In mid-October, I buy a bicycle. I tried all summer to find a second-hand one, but even with Hulda Kristín and Matthew’s help couldn’t do it. The manager of one bike shop asked Hulda Kristín why on earth anyone would want a used bicycle. Matthew said there were bikes in the storage area of his apartment block that hadn’t moved for a couple of years and he was sure the owners had moved out months ago, but neither of us quite had the stomach for that. This still feels like a place of excess to me, like a country where everyone has more stuff than they know what to do with. (Rich words from one who has left her own country to escape Great-grandma’s embroidered linen tablecloths.) New bicycles cost about twice what they do at home, until October when Hagkaup sells off all the things Icelanders buy in summer, patio heaters, ride-on lawnmowers and jet-skis, to make room for skis, winter tyres and snowmobiles.

I start riding to work, ten kilometres along the coast path. At first, the sun rises around the time I drop Max at school. On a clear day, the frost feathering the pavement and dusting the grass glistens pink as the sun comes hesitantly over the hill behind the city. Other days, it feels as if there’s no convincing source for the grey