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

and thought that I ought to have used the café as a place to write, especially on the days when I found myself arguing with Max over who got to use the car parked outside the flat as a reading-room. I was too shy.

But now I’m braver, and today I’m going there to meet the Goddess of Icelandic Knitting. Her website makes me want to knit full-time until I can do cabling and intarsia and Japanese shaping and speak in the language of knitting patterns. The day’s so warm that I walk across town with my coat open. The space around Tjörnin is full of terns, flickering snow-white against blue sky. Daffodils rustle under the low trees in the gardens of the old wooden houses, and tourists are beginning to shamble around the city centre. I bump into one of last term’s students and stop for a chat, which means that for once I’m almost running late. I hurry down a side street and come out across the road from the old herring-processing plant, white in the sun and tall behind the rat-race of cars, navy sea and grass-green mountain sunbathing behind it. The new opera house, the one Iceland can’t afford to finish and can’t afford not to finish, is taking on its final shape, glass fish-scales glinting on its stepped sides. I cross the car park, and notice that I got here without thinking about it, that not only did I not look up directions on the internet nor carry a map, but neither did I look for street names and lefts and rights, didn’t have to imagine a bird’s eye on my progress.

I go in. The space is so big, so white that the doorway seems to contract behind me, and the café to one side is like Playmobil, its tables waiting to be rearranged by giant hands. I go over to the bar and ask for Ragga. Round here, says the woman who was sipping coffee and laughing with the waiter. Follow me, it’s time I got back to work anyway. We cross the concrete floor, scarred as if the giants have dragged something heavier than Playmobil across it, and round the corner, in front of a glass wall overlooking the harbour where a trawler is coming home, is Ragga. There she is, says the woman, have a good talk. (I didn’t apologise for speaking English, I think, I just walked in here as if I had every right and expected people to speak to me in my own language.) Wool has entwined Ragga’s laptop and there are knitting books open among the spreadsheets on her desk. Children’s jumpers lounge on the chairs and across the bookcase. Ragga is writing, and while she finishes her paragraph I read the itinerary for one of the tours that she’s running this summer. I want to go on it, and I want to go to the Loops Nordic Knit Art festival at the Nordic House, which starts the day after we fly home.

We settle on sofas in the café with hot chocolate. Clouds are hurrying over the sea outside and the light has changed, muted as if someone’s flicked a switch.

I tell Ragga about the way the students knit in class, the way I’ve noticed people knitting on buses and in meetings and in the slow moments of political protest. (Why is that worrying me, asks Anthony. Les tricoteuses, I reply, and then wish I hadn’t when we have to spend the next twenty minutes explaining to Max.) The way even knitting addicts don’t knit in public at home.

‘It’s completely normal!’ says Ragga. ‘Why wouldn’t you knit? You’re waiting for a bus or something, use the time. I first heard about this, the way people in Europe and America don’t knit, when I read about this KIP, Knit in Public Day. It started in the US. I read a blog by a woman who said she took a sock with her and knitted on the bus and I thought so what? Everyone knits on the bus, what else would you do? But she says she’s some kind of rebellious knitting icon because she knits waiting in line.’

I lick cream off my spoon. ‘It’s not exactly rebellion. It’s not as if knitting’s indecent. It’s just not done. I don’t know why.’

‘I wonder how that came to be, how societies came to this. We never stopped. Everyone here has some sort of relationship to knitting, everyone learns how to do it in elementary school. But it seems in the English-speaking world most knitters start after thirty or something. It’s just so weird.’

When did the English stop knitting? Women in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels are forever knitting and sewing, always have their ‘work’ about them, although Austen and Brontë are both pretty scathing about it, and even Elizabeth Gaskell remarks what a shame it is that rich women are so bored they have to invent unnecessary labour while poor women work so hard outside the home that they don’t have time to mend their children’s clothes. Most of my friends think my crocheting habit is bizarre.

‘What about during the financial boom?’ I ask. ‘Did people knit just as much?’

‘Maybe not quite so much. I think it was around 2007, 2008, suddenly there were knitting cafés starting up, and then it escalated as the economy faltered. I published a knitting book in December 2008 and that was the beginning of a flood of new knitting books here. I’d been living in Sweden and I moved back in 2008 and started a group in the yarn store – you know, on Laugavegur? – and then there were groups popping up everywhere, hundreds of them, meeting two or three times a month, and now I’m sure you’ll find one in every little town on the island. Before, back in the old days, say 2006, 2005, there was this tradition of the sewing circles, but they weren’t really about sewing or any kind of crafting, just gossip