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

are just eating differently and travelling less. I don’t know anyone that bought Range Rovers or took huge foreign currency loans for a house, not personally. But of course for some people it’s horrible, everything is ruined. It’s all comparative, anyway. When I moved back from Sweden, things were weird. Everyone was like, wanting to work in banks, and changing their kitchens all the time, and wanting to live in these new buildings and flying to Europe for the weekend. And a lot of people think it’s not bad that these excesses were stopped. Even though it’s traumatic and we’re hurt and we didn’t really want to believe it was happening. It was really shocking to realise that this country, this Iceland which we thought was the best in the world, was really full of corruption. The whole atmosphere was just so strange, there was something about people’s attitude, the relentless adoration of the money people, it was surreal, it wasn’t my home. We never knew where the money was coming from. We thought the bankers must be so brilliant that the rest of us were too stupid to understand. And of course you don’t ask many questions when the money is everywhere. Our money used to come from the fish in the sea but there were no more fish and suddenly there’s this new way of doing it. It seized our society, we were in a weird collective state of mind. I have a friend, an Icelander living in Sweden, who felt so bad about it, because she wasn’t keeping up with her peers at home, she was renting a small apartment in Stockholm. Her friends here were buying Range Rovers and moving into these huge new houses and putting in new kitchens and automatic lighting and everything, and she wouldn’t let them visit her she was so ashamed. Such a waste of energy, all that shame. It was horrible.’

‘So you’re starting a new business for a new country?’

‘People might say it’s crazy to start a new business in Iceland in 2009, but if you’re going to do it, this is the right kind of business. There’s a global movement towards buying something sustainable, traceable, buying quality. And internet shopping is going up. I think these are long-term trends, not passing crazes. So I have very little money at the moment, but I’m optimistic about the future.’

We’ve finished our drinks. Ragga walks me back to her desk and lets me fondle the prototypes for her new yarns and turn her jumpers inside out to admire the colour-work. I pick up a schedule of this summer’s tours and wonder how much Anthony would object if I came back to Iceland for a week or two once we’re settled in Cornwall. Maybe I’ll have another go at knitting. Maybe I’ll buy some more wool and take it home to make an Icelandic shawl.

15

Last Weekend

We have one week left. I still haven’t been round the National Gallery and we never made it to Pétur’s summer house in Stykkishólmur. Anthony and I have not had an evening out together, barely seen the city after the children’s bedtime. We haven’t bathed in a natural hot spring. I haven’t learnt to knit the Icelandic way. We haven’t travelled more than a day’s journey from Reykjavík, and our plans to drive all the way around the island have been displaced by the need to go home and move house before a new academic year begins. I’m not ready to leave.

While the children are at school and nursery, Anthony and I spend the day driving out to the depot on the far side of the city to collect our packing boxes, back into the centre to hand over my bike to Ása Björk, whose friend wants to buy it, to Kronan for the last time. We buy dried fish and flatkökur to take home, our last Icelandic lamb for the weekend, and poke the sad apples and oranges and think that it is nearly cherry time in Kent now. Without quite meaning to, I add a few more balls of wool to the trolley, although I’ve already got more than I’ll use in the next two years. Good padding for packing, I explain to Anthony, who is not fooled. New wool is literally the substance of things hoped for, the future in material form.

I’m finding it hard to say goodbyes, ducking and weaving, pretending each time I see someone that I’ll see her again before we go, that this isn’t really goodbye, not yet, although we both know it’s nonsense. Our flight leaves (volcano willing) early in the morning, so we’re spending the last night at the airport hotel in Keflavík, a refurbished US army barracks a few kilometres from the terminal. Pétur has offered to cook for us and then drive us out there on the last night, closing the circle begun when he drove out there at midnight to collect me when I first came here for my job interview eighteen months ago. We should, then, be saying goodbye to everyone else. But I’m not.

Our friend Guy is due into Keflavík today. He’s been trying to return to Iceland throughout the spring, repeatedly thwarted by the volcano. We’ve been checking the flights online and it seems that his has actually taken off. It’s a hot morning, hot enough that Anthony and I have the car windows open and I discard the shawl I wrapped around my shoulders as we left the house. There’s a slight haze in front of Esja, which is still there even as we drive towards it, and as we return to the flat the haze thickens to a pale yellow cloud. Esja’s been our barometer all year, entirely or partially visible, the snow line higher or lower, smog at the bottom or cloud at the top. This must be a summer version of winter’s green smog, I think, and prepare a quick lunch. School ends at 2 p.m.,