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

light and a pedestrian crossing. The light is at red. I check the mirror, want to reach out and lock the doors, as if fearing an elvish car-jacking. I am English; I stop, and am relieved when there is no beeping. No invisible hand has pressed the button, and as I breast the next hill I can see a slip-road onto Route 1.

Next day, I start checking my facts. Checking my assumptions. Statistics are a blunt tool, especially when dealing with a population as small as Iceland’s, and especially in inexpert hands, but it takes me only a couple of hours on the websites of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and Statistics Iceland to find numbers seeming to suggest that Iceland is much more like the UK in quantifiable ways than I, and most of my friends here, believed. Iceland’s murder rate between 2003 and 2008 averages just under 1 per 100,000 against England’s 1.4 (and the United States’ 5.6: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html). There are 1,068.2 burglaries per 100,000 English and Welsh people, and 865.7 per 100,000 Icelanders, which suggests that the basis for Icelanders’ tendency to go out leaving the windows open and the British interest in discussing when it’s OK to shoot a burglar is not statistical. Denmark reports 1,715 over the same period and France a mere 480.6: England and Iceland are both near the European average for the incidence of most kinds of crime, including sexual assaults and crimes against children. I feel safer in Iceland than I do in England (except on the roads), and I feel that my children and my possessions are safer in Iceland than in England (except on the roads). All the Icelanders I know feel safer in Iceland than they do anywhere else, and most will say that Iceland is a safer country than any other. The differences are real, but not, for the most part, quantitative.

I keep exploring, though I’m no longer sure that I want to know what I’m learning. Maybe I’m about to find that Icelandic roads are safer than those at home and that Brits own more cars. I am relieved to find that according to the World Health Organization, Iceland reported 10 road deaths per 100,000 people in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available, compared to the UK’s 5.4. Iceland beats both Serbia and Italy at killing people on the roads, a particularly impressive feat given the new age and large size of cars in Iceland (http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=51310). And Icelanders own 645 cars per 1,000 inhabitants against the UK’s 457, a smaller difference than living in university towns in the UK and the wealthiest suburb in Reykjavík had led me to expect. I go on playing with numbers, comparing the pay gap between men and women in the UK and in Iceland (about the same, despite the highly subsidised childcare; perhaps early child-bearing makes a difference, after all), the percentage of household income spent on vegetables, life expectancy, dental health, number of televisions per capita . . . The next week, I talk to the director of the rape crisis centre, who confirms that Icelandic women are subject to levels of violence similar to those in the rest of Europe, and to the Minister for Social Affairs, who describes levels of poverty and deprivation similar to those at home. The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.

I go back to the yarn shops, pretending to myself that I might make an Icelandic sweater. Everyone does, says my student Anna. I made two when I was a teenager. Do you still knit? I ask her. I want her to prove my ideas about the way Icelandic women don’t conform to Euro-American norms and say yes, but she shakes her head. Not really. Not any more. She’s still, of course, a member of her sewing circle, the same ten women meeting every few weeks at someone’s house since they were all in primary school, but they don’t really sew. I have a wave of envy. Women keep mentioning their sewing circles, and these meetings were background events in some of the Icelandic films I watched over the winter. A couple of the creative writing students have turned in stories in which women returning from abroad don’t fit into their sewing circles any more. Sewing circles seem to be established in adolescence and continue until death, although some are inter-generational and therefore, presumably, infinite. Many women are members of more than one, which is probably part of the answer to my question about what Icelanders do in winter. Yes, confirms Anna, it is lovely. We’re all doing different things now – a doctor, a banker, a teacher, a shop-worker, and most of us have spent time living abroad – but we still get together and it’s still the same. Don’t you still have friends from school? Anyway, if you’re interested in knitting you should go talk to Ragga. She’s the goddess of Icelandic knitting.

So I go talk to Ragga. Ragga works in the Hugmyndahús down on the harbour. The University of Reykjavík, which is mostly a business school, runs the Hugmyndahús in collaboration with the Icelandic Academy of Arts. The Hugmyndahús, the ‘House of Ideas’, is a real house, an old fish-processing unit that was a shop selling the sort of furniture that only bankers could afford during the boom years. The furniture shop went bust when the bankers fled Iceland in 2009, and now people who are trying to set up new creative businesses in Iceland can apply for free workspaces in what used to be the showroom and talk through their plans with experts from the university. There’s a café where anyone can go and sit with a laptop for as long as she likes without any pressure to buy coffee or move on. I’ve known about it since the summer