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

He knows everyone in the young Left-Greens. Tómas Gabríel is Pétur’s oldest grandchild, son of Ása Bjórk the priest, and he was at the forefront of the demonstrations that brought down the right-wing government in a hail of stones and burning benches last winter. I’m keen to meet him because those demonstrations, leading to the Pots and Pans Revolution, took place between my acceptance of the job at the university and our coming to find an apartment and a school in May. It was hard to follow the detail from outside Iceland, especially without reading Icelandic, but I knew that the events of December 2008 and January 2009 were unprecedented in Iceland, and that some of my Icelandic acquaintances experienced those days of political activism as a time of personal as well as national revolution.

There had been protests outside the parliament building every Saturday afternoon through the autumn of 2008, sometimes as many as a few hundred people listening to speeches, holding placards and occasionally throwing eggs and toilet paper at the windows of the debating chamber. People were protesting against a government very closely allied with the ‘Viking Raiders’, the small group of bankers who had brought Iceland to the point of sovereign bankruptcy. Almost all the banks failed, their debts far in excess of Iceland’s GDP. The news during those months worsened from one week to the next, as unemployment rose from less than one per cent to ten per cent, average household debt was revealed to be 213 per cent of disposable income, and foreign currency transactions were suspended, jeopardizing the import of some medicines as well as books and fruit. University staff were asked to minimise the use of printers and photocopiers because the state institution could no longer afford ink and toner cartridges. As the value of the króna crashed against other currencies, the cost of Icelanders’ foreign-currency car loans and mortgages rose far beyond the value of the collateral as well as beyond the reach of the debtors. It became clear that Icelandic banks had been lending to Icelandic consumers without any consideration of their customers’ ability to pay. It was reported that Icelandic banks had lent money to their own employees to enable those employees to buy shares in the banks, using the shares as collateral for the loans. The suicide rate climbed sharply. Internationally, Britain used anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Icelandic assets, and the provision of aid from the International Monetary Fund was blocked by the Dutch in the hope of putting pressure on Iceland to repay Dutch investors in high-interest Icesave accounts. The extent of the government’s involvement with the Viking Raiders began to be apparent, although as I write in the winter of 2011 investigation of this corruption is still under way.

The government remained in power as its complicity with the Viking Raiders was exposed, and took the usual four-week Christmas recess despite Iceland’s state of acute crisis. When parliament reconvened on 20th January 2009, an angry crowd gathered. It was reported that the parliamentary agenda for that day included the possibility of paying organ donors, rearrangement of traffic priorities and discussion about allowing grocery shops to sell alcohol. (Most alcoholic drinks must be bought from the state monopoly ‘wine shops’ under current legislation.) The crowd grew. It was the day of President Barack Obama’s inauguration in the US, and Icelandic protestors had banners saying ‘Yes, we can!’ People brought household implements to make enough noise to force MPs to stop discussing wine shops and recognise their presence and their demands. There were old ladies banging spoons on pans, younger people with spades and wheelbarrows, fishermen with fog-horns. Some people lit emergency flares. Protestors banged on the windows of the debating chamber, and when the riot police arrived they were pelted with eggs and skyr. The police retaliated with pepper spray, using it indiscriminately and sometimes over walls and around corners to attack people they could not see. The protestors set up a nursing station to bathe victims’ eyes with milk before taking them to hospital. The crowd grew as the night wore on. No-one wants to stand still outside for very long in Iceland in winter. Every Christmas, Norway gives Iceland a Christmas tree for Austurvöllur square, where the parliament building is. The tree was still there, and made a good bonfire.

It took a week of protest to topple the government. Around 30,000 people, ten per cent of the Icelandic population, joined the demonstrations. Most of the people I know were there, with pans and banners, and those who were abroad at the time recall their shock at seeing pictures of angry crowds, tear gas and police batons in Iceland. I would like to hear from someone on the front line.

Tómas Gabríel lives just over the road from campus, and I pick my way there through heavy rain, over ankle-deep slush, as the sun goes down one day in March. He comes to the door, a thickset young man in a black T-shirt, and stands patiently while I pick with cold fingers at my boot-laces.

Tómas Gabríel lives in a block like Mads and Mæja’s, one that looks to British eyes like unloved 1970s council housing, where the outside space is worn grass with rubbish blowing around and – even here, even in March – the occasional used condom caught on low bushes. There are pebble-dash walls, and that kind of subdivided double-glazing that speaks of beaded macramé plant-holders and brown plastic upholstery. But not here. Inside, there are white walls, gleaming wooden floors and a comfortable clutter of well-designed modern furniture, plants, musical instruments and books. A pair of desirable embroidered shoes lies on the floor where someone has kicked them off to curl up in one of the chairs, and there are ironed white linen cloths on the table. Tómas Gabríel brings me coffee. His arm is in a sling, following, he says, surgery on a dislocated little finger. It sounds like one of those mishaps which