Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

The northern sky, dark over the sea, is mottled with green that spreads like spilt paint… The green and white reach towards each other and then lunge away like opposing magnets forced together. I tread water, and watch.

There must be a better reason to travel, a better way of travelling, than the hoarding of sights your friends haven’t seen.

Here, just below the Earth’s summit, there are towns and villages, a tangle of human lives, in the shadow of Arctic eschatology.

Foreigner, útlendingur. Ausländer. I have joined the Faculty of Foreign Languages. British people of my generation don't use that world, certainly not as casually as Icelanders. 'Foreigner' is a word I associate with the Daily Mail and the British National Party, a term used only by people who understand the world in binary terms of Us and Them.

Window weather. It’s not charming, or wimpish, but a state of mind in which a fairly serious hope, that winter is over, that life is returning, is lost. It’s the antithesis of Easter.

we’re all enjoying thinking about how much where you come from shapes what you see when you leave. Home, I tell them, is the paper on which travel writes. Travel writers are always writing home.

Icelandic drivers don’t indicate, Pétur once told me, because they don’t see why anyone else needs to know where they’re going.

I understand why people prefer to be inside on a wet night, but I want to follow the year’s cycle out here on the shore, feel the rain and wind as well as turning my face to the sun at midnight and standing shivering under the aurora.

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.