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

Yes, I do.

‘I think this was also an artistic outlet for women in the old days, because you know people knitted all the time, walking between farms or to get the cows—’

‘They did that in Scotland as well,’ I interrupt.

‘There are stories of people who fell down the cliffs while knitting, and one about a girl who fell into a lava kettle and didn’t even drop a stitch.’

Lava kettles are underground bubbles, often taller than a person, formed when the lava was molten and bubbling and now solidified into hollow spheres of smooth rock. People fall into them because the tops are too thin to bear a person’s weight, and then can’t get out because the hole is out of reach and the convex sides are too smooth to climb. There is no way of finding someone lost underground in a lava field.

‘Did she knit her way out?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ says Ragga. ‘Probably. Of course, they weren’t knitting for fun then. Knitted goods were one of our main exports, all made by hand on the farms. I read that one year in the 1800s, there were 30,000 pairs of socks exported. And the population was only about 70,000. Now, of course, you can just go to Europris or Rúmfatalagerinn and buy acrylic made in China, so knitting is for enjoyment, and a way for us to reconnect to our history. You get interested in how did my grandmother do it and how did her grandmother do it, and we’re part of the old Iceland again.’

‘Healing the nation?’ I ask. ‘Knitting Iceland back together?’

Broken bones knit.

‘Yeah. Something like that. And it’s just fascinating. It’s good for people’s self-esteem, especially now people don’t make things much, they sit in front of a screen all day. Lots of knitters say they’re not creative but they are, even if they follow a pattern they choose the yarn and the colour, make it new and different from anyone else’s sock or sweater. And then there’s the second step, the activity, and that’s a kind of physical mantra, monotonous, repetitive, or of course with a more challenging pattern it can be quite complicated mathematics or like chess: you’re thinking ahead three, four, five moves. And then you get the results, and that’s where you find your self-confidence.’

‘If it works,’ I point out, remembering all the times it didn’t.

‘Well, that can be an exercise in how you view the world too. You learn how to do it better next time.’

Ragga’s right. I sometimes think it would be a good writing exercise to get people to knit something complicated and then unravel it, again and again until that yarn is in its best possible form.

‘And another big project we’re working on is developing our own yarn. We’re working with a mill in Belgium at the moment, and our goal is to develop a blend of Icelandic wool and cashmere and alpaca. We’ll have the first batch out in November, and then the plan is to move the production to Iceland, but we can’t do that yet because there aren’t any small mills in this country, just this huge factory, Ístex, which ruins everything. That’s why Icelandic wool is so harsh. It’s not like that at all if you process it differently.’

‘I’d wondered about that,’ I say, although on reflection I haven’t wondered enough, have found it merely logical that Icelandic wool would be coarse and wiry to the touch. Because Icelanders are tough, perhaps, too hardy to notice the rasp of wool on skin, or because it somehow stands to reason that Icelandic sheep would have coarser wool than their Scottish cousins.

‘It’s because there’s only one, national, factory and they just blend all the wool from all the farms so it’s all the same. And they wash it at too high a temperature, use too much salt, card it really badly. You can get much better results with the same wool, but we’re having to go abroad to do it. I’ll show you a sample. It’s never been done before, and some people say it’s wrong, to blend our pure Icelandic wool from Icelandic farms with foreign alpaca. But we’re respecting what’s good about the Icelandic wool, it’s so warm and light, and adding alpaca to make it softer and even better. So we’ll have to see how that’s seen here, but we’re not competing with Ístex, we’re not competing on price. We’re just saying that our Icelandic wool is a resource we have here and we’re not using its potential–’

She breaks off. There is shouting outside and people at the bar exclaiming and pulling each other towards the door.

‘Wow! Foreign rain. Do you see that? We don’t get that in Iceland, that’s European rain. Must be the volcano or something.’

My grandfather would have said it was raining stair-rods, the kind of rain that falls in lines rather than drops. There are bubbles in the puddles in the car park and the sound of small stones against the windows. Two women run in with water streaming down their faces. I am amused by the idea of ‘foreign rain’, but of course she’s right; the rain in Iceland is usually persistent but fine.

‘Anyway, so it’s all starting now, the tours and the yarn and the webshop. It’s going well.’

‘It’s an interesting time to start a business,’ I suggest.

The waiter is giving the women towels.

Ragga laughs. ‘Some would say, yes.’

I count back and realise that she gave up her job in the most acute phase of the crisis, the weeks when the news was worse and worse from one hour to the next.

‘I’ve been asking lots of people about the effect of the kreppa,’ I tell her. ‘Most of them say it hasn’t actually had a huge effect on their lives.’

‘Well, it’s limiting. Cheese is horribly expensive and you don’t buy ham unless you really need it. We can’t afford to travel any more. But I don’t think – I mean, provided you have a job, most people