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

We invent arts and craft projects using the previous weekend’s newspaper, of necessity since prices are still rising in Iceland and the weekend Guardian, on subscription, is now the only thing coming into the house that isn’t eaten within a few days. You can make lots of things with old newspaper, we find, not just papier mâché which uses up flour we can’t always spare. We have themed collage competitions, spelling games with letters cut from the headlines. We decorate caterpillars made from egg-boxes with pictures from the gardening pages. We roll out play dough and cut out endless horses and elephants. The plastic smell of play dough is still on my hands at bath time. We make paper snowflakes and Blu-Tack them to the window, though it’s clear that everyone else in the block has decided at one of their meetings that we will all hang white star lanterns in the windows this winter. (I tell one of the students about our joke that the residents of each block get together every year and agree on co-ordinated Christmas decorations. Yes, he says, they do. Yes, new ones each year, that’s right.) We have wheelbarrow races across the grey carpet, Anthony wheeling Max, me wheeling Tobias.

I bake as if I’m the pastry chef in an Edwardian stately home, because butter and cream are cheap, it makes me feel I’m doing something productive and the rest of my cooking is now no more than an attempt to make it possible to eat the available ingredients. Swede and turnip are our only fresh vegetables, and we eat wizened apples, shipped from Central America on the slow boat and picked from a slimy heap in Bonus, more as an act of faith in the principle of fruit than because we believe them to have any real nutritional properties. Sometimes there are oranges, big, shiny oranges which are pale and dry when opened, the flesh hanging in bloodless strands. So I make brownies with chocolate from home, sour-cream vanilla cake with a skyr-based icing of which I am rather proud, gingerbread with Danish glucose syrup instead of treacle. Icelandic supermarkets, we discover, sell all the sweets at half-price on Saturdays. It’s called Nammidag, ‘yummy day’, and the candy section is Nammiland. When Max studied the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at school, his class put ‘candy on Saturdays’ high on their list of children’s rights. Icelanders eat more kilogrammes of sugar per capita than almost anyone else in Europe (although dental health is relatively good, a contradiction that reminds me of their high meat, low vegetable diet and good cardiac health). Nammiland is the only place in Iceland to see a winter crowd. Early in the day, young children push and whine, stuffing carrier bags from the pick-and-mix while their parents stand back by the baking goods. Later on, the aisle is full of teenagers shoving and shrieking, shovelling Icelandic chocolate liquorice and Polish cola gums into plastic bags until they’re each cradling a haul the size of a well-grown baby. Late on Sunday nights, when the frenzy is over, the floor is scattered with crushed sweets, bright as stained glass, and gobs of caramel feel like pebbles under my shoe. Some weekends, Max and I enter the fray, looking for alternatives to expensive Danish chocolate chips to put in our cookies. Baked goods and painting; bread and circuses, though for whom I am not sure.

But there comes a time, every day, when we have to get out, when the children are not just chasing each other up and down the flat but chasing each other with forks and malicious intent. We go for walks. We go to the Zoo and Family Park, which has to stay open all year because, like children, the animals need feeding even when there’s no other reason to get out of bed. We swim several times a week. There is, I think, a slow pace to Icelandic winter weekends that I can’t match. Only the thought of Monday morning quiets my panic.

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In early November dawn comes at around nine-thirty. One Saturday there is sun. Esja turns gold, and from the table where we’re having second cups of tea we can see an oddly straight-edged dusting of snow on the top third of the mountain. Winter sunshine commands our presence in the same way as the late-night sun did in July. Get it while it’s here. Don’t waste your chances. You’ll want to remember this day when the wind is so strong the children can’t walk down the street and you haven’t seen Esja all week. We know now how fast the weather changes, that by the time we’ve made a real plan and got everyone into the car we’ll be too late for the sun, so we head for the lava field. The land glows like well-polished furniture in candle-light, the sea glinting an almost Mediterranean blue, and frost melting except where the shadows of street lights and boulders block the sun, a shadow theatre on the ground. There are swans in the bay, and sharp-winged gulls move so fast through the air that at first I imagine the terns, kríur, have come back, winter is cancelled. But it is only the beginning.

We drive into town, to the market by the harbour for fish and flatkökur. We park at the university and walk down to the lake so the children can feed the ducks, but there isn’t the usual gang of geese menacing passing toddlers and we hear the whooper swans fluting from the other side of the lake. When we come closer we can see why: the lake is opaque as milk, the ducks confined to one side by ice that stretches across the water towards where the swans occupy the other unfrozen area by the bridge to the town hall. It is duck-ice, so thin that it bends and creaks when a few brave or hungry birds are enticed