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

fills you with wonder that such an apparently peripheral part of the body can cause so much trouble.

So, I say, tell me about your politics.

He tells me that he was raised in a strongly socialist household. No-one from Pétur’s clan could say otherwise: we need to get rid of money, Pétur says, and go back to barter. But Tómas Gabríel’s mother relied on example to show him what was right; she never told him how she voted, so when he came of age he did his own research and came to his own conclusions. Tómas Gabríel ‘fell in love’ with the Left-Greens, the party that formed a coalition government after the Pots and Pans Revolution. When he started his philosophy degree at the University of Iceland, he made friends with the students running the youth branch of the party, and in autumn 2008 he joined the managing committee. It seemed, he says, like a way of changing things for his country and his generation, as if all that he and his friends needed to take power was courage. The idea of standing for parliament in your early twenties is not as fantastic in Iceland as it would be in the UK, especially since the elections in 2010; the youngest member of the Alþing is in his early twenties and there are government ministers younger than me.

‘I went to all the demonstrations at the beginning, when they were peaceful. And then things started boiling up in November and December. My friend was becoming more of an anarchist, and it was a wild ride getting to know everyone – not the people behind the scenes because there was no ‘behind the scenes’; they were at the scene, the people you saw in all the pictures and footage of the demonstrations. And then one of the activists, someone who became my friend later, made this really good protest. He took the Bonus flag, you know?’

Bonus is owned by the corrupt banker who owns most other Icelandic chains and indeed owned half the British high street. The same man owns Hagkaup, and there are well-substantiated rumours that when the produce in Hagkaup gets too old to sell, it is sent to Bonus for poorer people to buy. The Bonus flag, which flies in every Icelandic village and suburb, is daffodil-yellow with a bright pink pig on it, presumably not intended as a symbol of greed.

One Saturday in December, Tómas Gabríel’s friend climbed up the parliament building, one of the taller buildings downtown, and replaced the Icelandic flag that flies there with the Bonus pig. The crowd of protesters roared, but the debate in the chamber went on. There were only two police officers present, as it was the first mass demonstration and the police were taken by surprise. The demonstrators helped the climber to get away, having been alerted to the imminent arrival of the ‘Viking Squad’. (The Viking Squad is Iceland’s armed response unit, not to be confused with the Viking Raiders, although these multiple claims on ‘Viking’ identity are revealing.)

Ordinary citizens have a right of access to the parliament building. This right is important to Icelanders, symbolic of communal responsibility as well as rights. There may be broken windows but there will be no bombs or guns. You can park right outside the door, less than a metre from the debating chamber. I regularly take a shortcut between campus and the city centre that passes between two parliamentary buildings. (It’s also under the flight path of the city airport, less than a kilometre from the runway, the one used by the planes on which you’re allowed to take firearms and up to five kilogrammes of ammunition.)

Tómas Gabríel continues. The following week, his friend was arrested on questionable grounds to do with his membership of Saving Iceland, a charity and campaign group concerned to protect Iceland’s pristine landscapes. Tómas Gabríel’s friend had been protesting against the building of the Kárahnjúkar dam in 2006. Most of the people I know protested against that. One of the last projects of the discredited government was to flood a huge swathe of the highlands, bulldozing some of the oldest archaeological sites in Iceland, to provide hydroelectricity for an enormous, American-owned aluminium smelter. The contractor used immigrant labour to build the dam, and is alleged to have kept the workers underground for twelve hours at a time without access to drinking water or lavatories; there are reports of people licking the tunnel walls for water. Kárahnjúkar was demonstrably the most dangerous workplace in Iceland since records began, and there are accounts of foreign workers being forced back into tunnels before poisonous explosive gas had cleared. There had been an outstanding warrant for Tómas Gabríel’s friend for three years, and the police came for him as he left his philosophy class on the Friday before a large demonstration planned for the Saturday.

‘So he had an outstanding warrant and he had to choose between doing jail time and paying a fine, and he chose to do jail time because he didn’t want to give any more money to that government. We have a long waiting list for jails in Iceland, and the law states that you have to have three weeks notice when you get to the top of the list, so that you can put your affairs in order with your family and at work.’ (There are so many uniquely Icelandic assumptions in Tómas Gabríel’s explanation that at first I don’t understand what he’s saying. There is a waiting list for Icelandic prisons, because there aren’t enough spaces in the prison for everyone who receives a jail sentence. So, after conviction, criminals go back to work and home, and when a space comes up in prison they are given three weeks notice of their incarceration.) ‘But they didn’t give him the three weeks notice. It didn’t escape anyone that this was an attempt to take control of the protesters. It backfired, because after that demonstration we marched up to