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

as excess was to his grandparents’ generation. Young Icelanders keep telling me that there’s no class system in Iceland, that inequality is a foreign phenomenon, but the fact of many of my students’ alienation from poverty seems to prove Icelandic social inequality. I remember a colleague in Sociology telling me that not only is there a difference between the middle class and the poor, but the difference is so great that the existence of the poor is news to some of the middle class. Einar starts his car. ‘I did not know,’ he says. ‘That is the worst thing. I did not know.’

Maybe, I think. Or maybe the worst thing is that I’ve known about poverty all my life and I’m not shocked.

14

Knitting and Shame

Teaching is over for the year. My students drift away, many into jobs (although there aren’t meant to be any jobs), some abroad to seek their fortunes or find themselves. My colleagues are reaching the lower floors of their towers of marking, and the piles of books to read over the summer are growing on their desks. There are plane tickets in the shared printer at the end of the corridor, people going to libraries in Paris and Copenhagen and conferences in the USA. Our tickets, our one-way tickets, were booked last month, and these final weeks seem to blur into each other. The nights are brief again now, each day blending with the next, and the sea flickers under the sun, the light in the sky electric, too bright, after winter’s candle-light glow. I flutter around Reykjavík, trying to make the most of it, restless as a bird not quite ready to migrate. I talk to an archaeologist who worked on the Skálholt dig and to an expert in eighteenth-century northern European ceramics. I invite new people to dinner, as if there’s any point in making friends now, as if I can concentrate our aborted Icelandic future and take it home with me.

I have been unable to get to Singapore, although I packed and went as far as Keflavík airport twice to find my flights cancelled because of the volcano. I have, however, reached Cornwall, albeit by a circuitous route, and I have been offered that post. My prospective new employer in Cornwall, reasonably enough, won’t wait for the volcano to subside so I can visit Singapore before making a decision and so, in the end, Eyjafjallajökull decides for us. I like Cornwall. The job will suit me well, and there are good schools. The imagined smell of flowers heavy with tropical rain, the imagined suddenness of tropical nightfall, the imagined taste of chilli with fresh lime and coriander, drifts in my mind like the perfume of someone who has left, a future that won’t happen.

I’ve meant to find out more about Icelandic knitting all year. Icelanders knit everywhere. On buses, in restaurants, during meetings, in class. In the first week of term, several students came into the classroom, put down their cups of coffee, took off their coats, hats and scarves and pulled out laptops, power cables, poetry anthologies, knitting needles and wool. I didn’t, I decided, mind. (Not that I would have dared, then, to say if I did.) I can crochet while watching a film. Women in Shetland and St Kilda used to knit, often rather complicated patterns involving several colours, while walking miles with toddlers over rough ground to milk the cows. Icelandic undergraduates, it turned out, can knit while drinking coffee, taking notes on their Apple Macs and making enlightening contributions to discussion of Lyrical Ballads. I watched the pieces grow from week to week, comforted, somehow, by the progress of socks and matinee jackets as we worked our way through from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ towards The Prelude, as if the knitting were a manifestation of accumulating knowledge. Colleagues knit in meetings, which seems a far more constructive use of time than the doodles produced in the English equivalents. I wonder if anyone would say anything if I tried it in committees at home, instead of drawing borders of trees and wonky geometrical patterns around the minutes. A couple of cafés have a kind of free-range knitting, left in baskets for anyone to continue, although the results aren’t as exciting as you’d hope. Every Icelandic girl, the students tell me, has to make at least one Icelandic sweater. It’s a rite of passage, a step on the road to full Icelandic status.

Icelanders also wear their knitting. The people on the streets of Reykjavík wearing handmade Icelandic sweaters are not tourists. When it’s possible to go out without wearing a coat (it’s never sensible, never Icelandic, to go out without carrying a coat), you can see that the next layer down is an Icelandic sweater. My mother had a phase of making them when I was a child, and I remember the multiple balls of wool and the special needles, connected to each other by a plastic filament so you don’t make rows but just keep going round and round, following her around like a loyal pet. The finished jumpers had intricate patterns in soft shades of grey and purple – no chemical dyes in my childhood – and they kept us warm on the hills, although it could be hard to move our arms and I still shudder at the memory of the wool against my neck. Icelandic wool is as thick as a pencil but so soft you can easily pull it apart, still smelling of sheep and coming out almost waterproof if you knit it tightly. The high-end yarn shop on Laugavegur offers the odd Danish or even Japanese import for specialist tastes, but in general it is un-Icelandic to use foreign wool and all the supermarkets – which have a knitting aisle after the loo paper and washing-up liquid – carry the standard range of three kinds of Icelandic yarn.

I’m not a knitter. I like the idea. I can