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

get back, he comes in, guts and cleans the whole fish that I bought by accident and assembles the bookcases for us. I am childlike in my gratitude. At home, I would invite Pétur and Hulda Kristín to dinner, perhaps send flowers or give wine, take Hulda Kristín’s children for the day or make a gluten-free cake for Pétur. But I have only four chairs, four plates, two pans. There is no florist in Garðabær. I need help to buy a light bulb, to register with a doctor, to connect the telephone, to buy bus tickets, which turn out to be sold at swimming pools. The instructions for configuring our internet connection are in Icelandic. There is no laundrette. We are helpless, the adults children again, with nothing to offer but our thanks, and our new friends are our parents, in whom we trust. Thank you, we say. Thank you.

And then they go away, Pétur to his summer house out in the west, Hulda Kristín accompanying her husband in a campervan on a holiday-cum-tour-of-public-buildings-in-outlying-towns, which must have their safety inspections in the summer when the roads are reliably clear. You need to start to feel you can manage this yourselves, says Pétur, making sure we have his mobile phone number. You’ll be fine, says Hulda Kristín, checking again that I have the number for the out-of-hours medical service in case Tobias has another asthma attack. Our second childhood is over, and we must venture out.

We start at the beginning, with food. Hagkaup is fascinating in the way that foreign supermarkets are always fascinating, offering a glimpse into other assumptions. It is not international law to start with fruit and vegetables. Hagkaup begins with cosmetics, mostly French and mostly at twice French prices. Then there are two kinds of apple, called ‘red’ (big, mushy American ones) and ‘green’ (French Granny Smiths). There are Belgian strawberries, hard and sour, Chilean oranges and bananas. We left Kent in the middle of the cherry season, when the farmers send someone to every lay-by with a van full of cherries: small yellow-and-pink ones, big purple ones, the sort a child can’t manage in one bite, and my favourite, slightly sour, deep reds. Our plum tree was fruiting and we could stand in the garden eating plums warm from the sun. The tomatoes were ripening, and Anthony, who grew up on a Kentish fruit farm, was beginning his yearly incantation of apples. James Grieve, St Edmund’s Pippin, Maid of Kent, Worcester Pearmain. When we went for Sunday lunch with Anthony’s parents, we picked pounds of red and white currants, courgettes fast threatening to become marrows, so many raspberries that I seriously considered making jam. There are few trees of any kind here, and the gardens past which we walk seem only deliberate arrangements of the open spaces between houses and roads: turf, rocks, dwarf birch and rowans no taller than me. Hagkaup has raspberries – Hagkaup has everything, including zebra steaks and Scottish pheasant, for a price – but they come resting on bubble wrap in a single layer with about a dozen in a packet costing the same as two pounds of fish. Well, we say, of course. We’re on the edge of the Arctic Circle here. Who wants air-freighted fruit anyway? Icelanders must have lived for centuries without fruit. There’s plenty of cabbage. There is plenty of cabbage, but it seems to have come a long way and got very tired. Even in Hagkaup, fruit is often squashy, courgettes wrinkled and sour, cabbage leaves floppy as damp towels. It’s necessary to check the dates on dairy produce in the chiller because some of it will have expired. It’s only the prices which make it like shopping at Harrods.

We go further afield. The bus service is cut back during the summer, on the assumption that the main users of public transport are high-school students. The buses used to run almost empty, Pétur tells us, except between seven-thirty and eight-thirty in the morning and two and three in the afternoon, when schools start and end. Adult Icelanders share Thatcher’s view of bus travel. Car ownership, Pétur says, is higher than anywhere else in Europe. We are surrounded by houses with three or four cars on each drive, and the cars are newer than at home and larger, including monstrous SUVs that aren’t imported to the rest of Europe. Icelanders adore America, Pétur says. Most people here won’t be happy until we’re beating the Americans on carbon emissions and pollution. Nobody walks anywhere; people think you’re mad if you walk. Cycling? I ask, because there are what look to me like bicycle tracks running along the coast. No, he says. People say the weather’s too bad, but it’s not much worse than in Denmark, which has one of the highest rates of cycling in Europe. The Norwegians and Swedes drive less, walk more and have fewer and less damaging cars than Icelanders, though Scandinavian winters are in fact colder because Iceland is an island in the Gulf Stream and Norway and Sweden have continental climates. During the boom, says Pétur, sometimes Icelandic couples would each take their own Hummer to the same party. Yeah, and another one for the teenage son, adds his daughter. I think she is joking but I’m not sure.

At first, we think this car-dependence is reflected in the town planning. Walking in Garðabær, or anywhere in Reykjavík except the oldest parts of the city centre, feels like walking in American suburbia. There are no pavements. The only shops are in malls, which have no pedestrian access. We find ourselves pushing the pushchair across dual carriageways and up turf embankments. Going to the other supermarket, we have a choice between crossing the lava field and going along the freeway. Neither is easy with the pushchair, which we need for bringing the groceries back as well as getting Tobias there. (Later, we will find a network of paved off-road walking and cycle tracks, threading parks