A coincidence and some singing

Finally at about eleven pm the storytelling came to an end and we got up to be shown around the centre with its library and maps and our host said "Would you like to see my church?" I hadn't realised that he was a priest, having come in a bit late.  The journalist disappeared to the toilet for a moment and during that time we learnt our host's name was Gaer.  He asked G and I where we were from, and when we said Australia he said "Ah, I have a brother there. I baptised his son" and all of a sudden Grant and I knew who he was.  When my friend Mary J back home had heard we were going to Iceland she invited us to dinner with an Icelandic couple she knew. Villi and Aldiss had migrated to Australia decades ago and had been neighbours of hers. in the course of the evening they promised to have us over and tell us all about Iceland before we left. During that evening of wine and maps and suggestions Villi had mentioned he had a brother who was a priest. There, half a world away in the study centre as we stood together waiting for the journalist Grant asked "Was your brother's name Villi by any chance? Is his wife Aldiss?" And that was the case. We had, by pure chance become a link between the brothers who hadn't seen each other for years. We were flabbergasted (what an Icelandic sounding word that is) but he seemed unperturbed "Ah Villi was the adventurous one.  What a life he has had. He was the Viking and I was the stay at home with my books. In the old days he would have died young."
We looked around the fine high modern church with lovely coloured windows and I noticed the wooden frames for slipping the hymn numbers into and asked Gaer what kind of hymns were sung.  "Would you like me to sing one?" "Oh, yes please." and he sang a couple in a very pure tenor voice.  There were two types of hymn.  The old style had the poignancy of plainsong and the new style was more like the English verse hymns that thump on rhythmically verse after verse.  The cheekily he sang a drinking song about "your lovely lips" - that turned out to be the lips of a bottle of course.
We all finally parted and the American journalist said he had to catch a plane in the morning. "Come back and see me when you come again" said Gaer "Don't just pass by like a dog." "I won't be a dog" he promised. We can't imagine coming back to Iceland but promised to bear his good wishes to Villi and Aldiss in Sydney. "You see I've saved you from the rain" said Gaer as he opened the door and we scurried off into our van to find a campsite for the rest of the light night.

A thermal hotpot in the rain and meeting the Ancient Mariner

 We had a strange day yesterday which has totally changed my sense of what Iceland is.  And it so easily mightn't have happened at all.  We'd got back from the Westmann Islands (about which I will blog later) and the weather was still horrible with wind and rain and I really wanted to experience a thermal spa.  Grant wasn't having a bar of that, so I went to the local swimming pool which had thermal hot pots, as they are known.
 Iceland is very particular about its swimming pools.  You have to shower naked, paying particular attention to the armpits, groin and feet, according to an explicit poster.  I was a bit hesitant in case there were modesty conventions too - but no - you just had to be super clean.
I shivered my way out in the rain to the outdoor pool and dived in quick - and oh, it was lovely-warm and kind to all the muscles that had been unusually exercised lately by getting in and out of the high van and gasping and wriggling in and out of sleeping bags in the small space we had.  I swam and swam and then hopped out and into the hot pot which was fed by a thermal spring and warmed me to the very core.  My pleasure was extreme and I should have kept it to myself because G was in a mood when I came back to the van and we were all out of balance.  Even the rather good settlement museum didn't sort things and I decided to let G go to the Snorri, the saga writer's centre by himself.  I was tired anyway and curled up in the back of the van with an Icelandic detective story and quickly slept.  When I woke I realised Grant had not come back.  He'd been gone over an hour and when I went to look for him, the Snorri building was closed for the night.  Where had he gone?  Eventually I rang the bell of the Centre and a young man came to the door and I flung up my hands and said "I have lost my husband"
"Ah" he said "Come this way"
The first thing I saw was Grant and a man who turned out to be a National Geographic journalist completely in thrall to a storytelling gentleman of rather remarkable appearance.  He had white hair and a beautiful waxed moustache, also white. He was wearing an old fashioned tailored tweed jacket that reminded me of Sherlock Holmes.  He had in one hand a silver topped cane.  Most extraordinary, though, was the power he was exerting over Grant and the journalist.  He could have been the Ancient Mariner. There was coffee and chocolate raisins on the table.   My arrival broke the spell a bit but I quickly sat down and listened too.  For the next four hours he had us entranced and we learnt so much.  Now and then he pulled a little horn of snuff out of his jacket and made a black line of it on the back of his fisted hand and breathed it in.  He never seemed to get tired.

In the beginning he talked about the gods - Odin whose thirst for knowledge made him pull out one of his eyes and place it so that it could magically see whatever was going on in the whole world.  He told us about Freya "Freya was like a cat on heat" he said.  "Do you know about dwarfs?"  We said no, and he explained they were industrious little beings descended from maggots.  In the beginning they were sort of translucent.  Well they had made an exquisite jewel and Freya wanted it.  "Can I have it?" "No." they said "Can I have it?" "No." they said again.  "What do you want that will make you give it to me?"  "We want you to lie with every single one of us". They said. And next day she wore the jewel.  I shall never quite hear the story of Snow White in the same way again. Could it be that she died when she choked on the apple and the dwarves ministrations were nature taking its course? Not a comfortable thought.

He told us about Iceland's past. The poverty and the routine famines that killed.  How only a quarter of each generation survived.  When Norway decided that Iceland should convert to Christianity there were four provisos that the Icelandic parliament insisted on.  I can only remember three of them at the moment.  The first was shocking.  Despite Christian doctrines Icelanders should continue to be able to expose babies born in autumn and winter so that they died.  "Postnatal abortion" explained our teacher.  There was so little food in winter that the baby would die anyway and probably take the breastfeeding mother with them.  And she could have another one in the spring.  Another proviso was that Icelanders could continue to eat horsemeat which had something to do with virility and the third that I can remember is slightly comical and yet so practical.  People should be able to worship their pagan gods but only as long as no one witnessed them doing it.  Profound dishonour would accrue to anyone seen worshipping them and their families would share the shame.

I can't begin to cover everything he told us in that long storytelling evening but his love and pity for his country shone through, as well as his relish when he came to describing murderous revenges. He rose from his chair with his stick to demonstrate one thrust of the sword or another.  There were cunning ways of getting under chain mail.  And the insults that Icelanders had at their disposal were special, like "Your trousers are full of cowardice!" He was a superlative actor and puffed out his chest and became an English officer who asked an Icelander who had been a prisoner if he could guide him through the shoals to Iceland. The prisoner did, and conferred on the way with fisherman so that he was able to strand the ship and subsequently hijack it. He had not changed his loyalties at all.  Icelanders never do and they are full of tricks.

One thing he said sticks in my mind.  There were not many slaves in Iceland because slave owners were obliged to feed slaves before themselves and so it was not practical in a hungry country to have that obligation.  The principle behind this was that it was just circumstance that made a man a slave or a freeman and circumstances could change at any time. Icelanders have always lived life on the edge and in some ways still do.

Every so often he would say to us "Am I killing you with stories?" but " No way, go on," we said.  "I'm enjoying it too" he said as he took a bit of snuff.

Like the Ancient Mariner's wedding guest we were captive to his narrative and I at least felt it was changing me from a gaping tourist to true traveller who was letting another world run in my veins even if only for a little bit.

Women have a strong presence in the stories and are just as tricky and passionate as the men.  One of the sweetest stories he told us was from Aegil's saga.  Aegil had decided to die after his much loved son was drowned and stopped eating.  His daughter heard about this and came rushing to him and said she wanted to die with him.  "What a good daughter I have" he said and they sat together waiting for death.  He noticed then that his daughter was chewing something and asked her what it was. "Just seaweed" she said "It passes the time" "Give me a bit" he said.  It was salty of course and she said that a bit of water would not break his fast and he said "All right". When two horns were brought in they swallowed them down together. "Ah, we have been betrayed" said the daughter "They gave us milk". And after that Aegil didn't feel like dying any more and moved on from his sorrow.

I must stop now but tomorrow I will blog how he sang to us and how a most extraordinary coincidence became apparent.

PS All the above is remembered and may be a bit jumbled up.  I  will check things when I get back to Australia. If anyone reads this who knows about Icelandic history do please correct me!

Into a volcano, crossing a blasted heath and langoustines

Today I am going on a trip to the magma chamber of a volcano. I am  going on a trek of three kilometers to reach the volcanic peak across the most god forsaken land I have ever seen.  G and I are in a  walkers' lodge beside the main road.  It is warm and cosy but outside is horrible.  It is raining and blowing and black lava pokes out all around in funny shapes, a black finger beckoning, a fist maybe.  Moss and lichen grow further out from the hut and the last vestiges of the winter snow cling to the mountains.

There is an Icelandic poem on the wall.  I copied it out while waiting as I thought it was good

Hotel Earth by Tomas Gudmundsson (tr Bernard Scudder)

It’s a curious journey this human life we  lead

We are the guests and our hotel is the earth

While some check out others arrive instead

New parties always turn up to fill the berth.

That journey inspires wanderlust in some

But many dread the thought of starting out

Still more in a tearing hurry come and go

While others sit by the hotel window and wait.

But places like that are crowded by and large

With constant hustle and bustle as guests compete

In an endless game of push and shove and barge

To grab themselves a suitably comfortable seat

Yet some are quite content to stay apart

In a corner seat, undisturbed and meek

For different motives guide the human heart

And people vary in the goals they seek.

Admittedly most people are welcomed in

And greeted with ceremony when they reach the door

And many live in luxury to begin

But they start to fret when departure date draws near.

Then we are swamped like a waterfall by the chill

Thought that are stay will cost all we are worth

When Death, that mighty bailiff shows the bill

For all we have put on tick at Hotel Earth

Then we realize this is where our credit stops

There’s no more chance to place some wiser stakes

For all that life has lent us death recoups

Balancing Methuselah and Peter’s books.

My fellow trekkers arrive and I’m relieved to see most are no better equipped than me and not all are young things.  Despite the bubbling enthusiasm of our young guides they seem surly and uncommunicative for the most part.  A lot are from the USA.  One has a fleece on with “Help the Wounded Warriors” on the back.  I ask him what it means and apparently it is a charity for returned soldiers with troubles.  I sort of think he might have a gun or two in his cabinet at home and he wasn't keen on the question.  Perhaps I should've known.

We are all provided with ankle length rubber raincoats in vivid yellow and made to pronounce the name of our mountain and then set off in single file across the horrible heath.  I quickly fall behind but young guide sticks behind me and says it doesn’t matter. 

We pass a deep dark hole with ropes around it and I spot some little clumps of pink flowers and rush on by and determine to be on my own on the way back and never mind the nice young women in charge.  Actually the terrain is not impossible as long as I keep my eyes open for pokey rocks.

The story of this tourist attraction is quite interesting.  After the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in 2010 which stopped all international aircraft,( 17000 flights had to be cancelled) National Geographic wanted to do a feature on the structure of  a magma chamber and paid for a lift to transport cameras and so on 150 feet to the floor of the chamber.  Afterwards, an entrepreneur took over the equipment for lowering us tourists and had done very well.

At the base camp we are given helmets and harnesses and get into a little lift on a cable in our groups..  The lift is open sided and slow and I watch the folded layers of rock as we go down.  Every so often wheels on the side of the cage bump the sides of the tube.

The first thing I notice on disembarking the lift is that my sense of balance is all to hell.  I am grateful for the ropes that encircle the chamber as I clamber the route up and down the tumbled rocks.  The colours on the walls of the dimly lit cavern are every shade of brown and ochre and black.  Above us is a nasty nostril of a lave tunnel with a smear of black around its opening.

I think what I experience most in the crater is a sense of deadness.  All that wild turbulence come to rest and not a living creature (other than silly volcano pilgrims like us) choosing to come here.  Other caves I’ve been in seem part of a life cycle, albeit a slow one.  Stalagmites and stalagtites accrete their millimetres over centuries - but nothing happens here.

We were given a bowl of lamb soup on getting back to the top.  I was a bit cross because I wanted to stay down in the chamber for longer in case the deep earth had anything more to whisper to me, but the tour processed us like sausages.  The soup, was nice but the weather had got a lot worse on the top with clouds of mist and wild wind and lashing rain.  “There’s a storm coming” said the girls.  They didn’t want me to go alone but I argued it was safer if I was slow and steady on my own and anyway they could pick me up if they passed me prostrate in my yellow raincoat on the moor.

In fact it was an arduous but uplifting slog back to the roadhouse.  I licked the sweet rain from round my mouth and held my own against the wind and took time to touch the little pink flowers and the feathery lichen.  There was nobody anywhere for a long time and then two young ones came running past like horses whinnying at the weather in their yellow raincoats.

Grant was waiting for me at the roadhouse and I was soaked so we decided to forgo the delights of sleeping in the van that night and went to a little village, Stokkseyri which had a renowned langoustine restaurant, Fjorubordin.  The village had been a lively fishing place until quotas were imposed.  Our hostel was an old fish factory and had been turned into an art gallery and rather hokey looking ghost museum.  It was huge and empty apart from the little nest like bedrooms  round the edge of the big hall  each of which were a pair or maybe three tourists.

Our langoustines were delicious and I completely forgot my soggy shoes as we cracked open the shells and went “Mmmm” again and again.  What a good day it had been.

Beauty and Punk in Reykjavik and camping in endless daylight

I promised a beautiful and an ugly thing in Reykjavik and I will deliver though a lot has happened since.

The beautiful thing is a marvelous modern church that rises like a delicately pointed  iceberg over the city.  It is huge and white and almost floats like a diaphanous sheet that has been picked up in the middle by a giant. It is called Hallgrimskirkja and has a very big organ at one end,which is being played twice a week for concerts over the summer.  While we were there amongst the tourists, a timid young Icelandic woman who was wearing a red tutu over her clothes went up towards the altar and began to sing slowly and respectfully “Silent Night” in Icelandic.  Others gently joined in and everyone gave her a round of applause at the end and she scurried back to her friends, delighted.  Was it a dare or a dream she had to sing there? Who knows.

The purposely ugly and funny thing we stumbled across was an old public toilet that had been energetically repurposed as a Punk Rock museum.  Down some steps from the street, it was smothered in gross graffiti. Inside were smashed toilets and simulated torn posters providing  the patchy history of punk in Iceland – its failures and successes including an occasion when the police were called because a band member was waving a chainsaw on stage.  It turned out to have no chain but made a point I guess. The place is cared for by a wild looking fifty something year old called Thor.  I first saw the spiral of his cigarette smoke as I looked down into the slightly hellish   entrance beside a sign that said THIS IS NOT A TOILET. IT IS A MUSEUM 1000 ENTRANCE.  I talked to him about living in Iceland and he told me that it wasn’t so easy.  “You see the cranes around,” he said “It was like that before the financial crisis and people fear it will happen again”  He told me that there had had to be soup kitchens because people had lost everything and when compensation was made in the end it was worth very little.  He took our photo for his website even though we protested that we were not quintessential Australians.  I hope he doesn't make too much fun of us silver haired punk aficionados

Certainly the tourist boom that we were warned to expect is not here, perhaps because everything is very expensive now.  Could it be that the boom created by the cheapness following the 2008 financial crisis led to a scarcity of resources which pushed the prices up, and now they haven’t returned to rational levels and so tourists are staying away?  Maybe the current state of affairs here is yet another ripple caused by the corruption of the banks in 2008.

One trace of the tourist boom was the state of the camper vans in the yard where we went to rent ours.  The first two offered us were pretty beat up despite chirpy messages on the side about the benefits of travel and turned out to be non functional.  We were offered a third which had also seen life but sufficed and we set off .  It was lovely to be free and out and about on the good roads in the amazing scenic world that is west Iceland.

 I’d decided to do a tour which offered a trip into the magma chamber of a volcano.  It was hugely expensive but I love volcanoes, and it was just me because G thought it was an appalling idea and was happy to read a book.  I was a bit nervous as the trip involved a mile of trekking across a lava field and decent hiking gear was recommended.  Apart from the fact that I haven’t hiked for years, all I had was my little nursing shoes, but the young woman on the phone reassured me.  Other 70 somethings had done it.

The first night of camping is always gruesome and G and I both thought we had been crazy to think we could clamber in and out of our van in the wind but eventually snuggled up and finished the last of the gin.  We’d fetched up in a little fishing town called Porlakshofn to be near my take off point in the morning.  It had a lot of fish factory buildings and a petrol station café where we had fish and chips.  Restless little boys came in and out looking for something to do and sometimes bought small quantities of sweets before truculently heading off.

The campsite was simple with man-made elongated hills on two of its boundaries, presumably to protect us from the wind, and a big sports hangar next door.  A detail I will always remember with gratitude is that day and night, a lovely radiator heated the single ladies toilet, such a comfort at 5am when I tumbled out of the van to take advantage of it.

Mention must be made of the endless light which is so strange to people from most parts of the world.  Thoughts like “We’d better get there before nightfall” and all the associated cautions to do with darkness just fall away.  It is always day, though the mood of the sky changes towards the late evening with tinges of colour in the clouds.  The temptation to put off sleep is strong because it never seems as late as it is.

Perhaps I’ll save the adventure of the magma chamber till tomorrow as it’s time to move on.

Getting to Iceland

We'd booked an overnight stay in a suburb of Manchester near the airport so we could catch our plane to Iceland in the morning.  Our place had a hotplate so we went to a little supermarket nearby to get something to cook.  Grant particularly likes to inspect supermarkets for what they reveal about the people they cater to and began to lurk amongst the shelves noting Fray Bentos meat pies in tins and diabetic ice-cream.  To the owner, however, anthropological research was looking a bit like potential shoplifting, and he asked us pointedly what we were looking for.  I decided to quiet his suspicions with a bit of chat.  "We just want something for dinner.  We are going to Iceland tomorrow". Inane but disarming, I thought.  His answer took a bit of untangling in my mind because of the strong Mancunian accent  he had despite his Indian appearance.  "Iceland", he said, "They say they have good vegetables there".  "Oh," I said realising he was referring to a chain of frozen goods stores " I thought puffins was their thing". He ran his fingers through his hair and made comprehension noises. We laughed and sorted it out and bought some bacon and eggs and I went back to the flat pondering on life's ambiguities and the work it took us all to understand each other.

G and I had had a bit of a standoff at the airport because my superhuman patience at his slowness to accomplish what was needful was mistaken for slack indifference to the apparent urgency of the situation.  We went off and had separate beers only to reunite at the gate and call a truce. Iceland was in the offing after all.

Getting out of the plane was a shock.  A wind was blowing and all around was an endless, aggressively barren flat land.  Spikes of lava, long cold still pointed to the sky but in between were patches of mosses and lichen, olive and fluorescent green.  Oddest of all were big patches of blue lupins, an English country garden flower.  They gave a delicate mauve hue to the landscape wherever they had taken root.  We later discovered lupins were introduced to prevent erosion but like the cane toad in Australia, had outworn their welcome and become a ferocious weed.

Our accommodation that night was a guest house called "The  Reykjavik Peace Centre" in Mjodd, a suburb of Reykjavik.  In fact it is the headquarters of a non profit organisation which does lots of good stuff and rents rooms when there is nothing happening. It was a lovely place with a kitchen so G and I set off through a park full of sculptures to a little supermarket and there startled Icelanders with questions about what was butter and if the bread was plain or sweet. Ordinary things in particular had Icelandic packaging which kept its secrets from us.   Everyone spoke some English and gave us recommendations and we came back well pleased with the makings of spaghetti bolognese.  Before we left we thought we were the only residents but there were more peaceniks sitting about on our return.  They looked serious and careworn.  This changed, however with the arrival of a merry bunch of German farriers, come to sort out Iceland's horses and we began to feel at home and made friends with a couple of Swedish sisters.  I put a foot wrong with them when I suggested a Norwegian was the first Icelander when according to them it was a Swede.

Tonight I am walking like a puffin, having spent all day exploring downtown Reykjavik which is both stylish and pretty - a difficult combination especially when catering to lots of tourists who seem to need souvenir shops and reindeer skins and so on.  But every shop had a small facade which opened on to bricked walking streets.  Lots more to say but we must go and get our van now.  Tomorrow I will blog a thing of great beauty and another of delightful ugliness.  Bye for now.

Whichever way you throw us we will stand on our feet

As sometimes happens, just when you are about to leave, you get a few answers and things swim into focus. The gentleman in the Welcome office told us the meaning of the motto that surrounds the three legged emblem of the island and I've used it as a title for this blog. ( Mind you he had to google it).  And it seems good for this Island whose vicissitudes have included murderous Vikings as well as masses of tourists and currently men and women in suits making money out of air and probably keeping the whole show on the road.

We'd packed up the car to go when the woman who services the flats arrived and I hailed her because I felt bad about her having to navigate the mess we'd left last time she came, including a difficult frying pan. As I explained, we hadn't realised we weren't looking after ourselves and we'd had to catapult out and move the car or get a fine. It turned out she was Manx. We got talking and I used the "safe" word. Was it really safe here? A shadow passed across her face and she said it used to be. It turned out her 22 year old son had tried to stop a fight outside a venue and had been held down by four Poles and had his jaw broken. It seems the Island, after all, has a dark underbelly like everywhere else. She also told us that the square we had been living in had not only housed enemy aliens - ("scoop em all up" Winston Churchill had said) but had been a POW camp for Germans after the war, and quite a few had stayed on after being released.

This odd fact  linked in with a funny story our accountant friend from the steam train had told us. Apparently the picturesque King Williams School, where he had been a pupil, on one occasion was rented out to make a film about Colditz Castle.   A big swastika was raised in the courtyard and Nazi guards patrolled everywhere. Unfortunately this coincided with the day prospective parents could visit the school "For some reason there have always been a lot of Germans wanting to send their kids to King Williams" our friend said, laughing. "I can't imagine what went through their minds" I wonder if the young Germans might have been descended from the POWs who so took to the place after their imprisonment.

Grant also came across a denial of the Manx cat being the product of Spina Bifida.  "I had a Manx cat" the lady in the gift shop said " and there was certainly nothing wrong with him. But, you know, Manx cats have very developed back legs. Like rabbits. Well, go figure."

And on the topic of the raunchy and unnatural, G and I went to the Gaiety Theatre to see "an adult puppet musical, not for children because it contained "puppet nudity and sex" . It was called "Avenue Q" and emanated from New York, but was performed by the local theatre company with great verve and skill. The puppets were offshoots of the muppets.and were each handled by one or sometimes a pair of puppeteers who moved and sang with them like ventriloquists do. There was indeed a bit of puppet sex and the whole thing was about young puppets finding themselves and was in aid of the Island hospice. "By helping others you always help yourself" carolled the puppet chorus meaningfully.

The last thing we did before driving into the tranquil womb of the Steam Packet Car Ferry was to enter the park that was in the centre of Hutchison Square and we discovered it was dedicated to "the artists' camp"  where one internee painted on newspaper with a toothbrush.until the camp captain, whom they preferred to call Camp Father, organised for brushes and other requirements.  The present day Island art school had made commemorative tiles, one of which depicted a mock menu put together by an internee chef.  The Jews apparently liked the kippers which they called yom kipurs.

The. Island world seems much richer, now that we are about to leave it and its motto about turbulence and survival seems to be spot on.

QUOCUNQUE JECERIS STABIT.

Puzzling out the Isle of Man

It has taken a long time to come to grips with The Isle of Man, which, through no fault of its own looks like something it’s not.  On getting off the ferry in the main town of Douglas you see a magnificent terrace of immaculate cream coloured hotels looking out to sea. The place reminds me of a sleeker and grander version of the run down holiday towns of southern England where I spent time as a girl.  Green hills, with more Victorian terraces,  form a backdrop to Douglas and a purpley mist obscures the horizon way out in the ocean. Seagulls swoop and cry.  There is a lovingly restored Gaiety Theatre and a nostalgic-pony drawn tram that clip clops down the promenade.  On the face of it this is a quintessential holiday town and it is only when we go to the excellent museum and I see old photos of the 1900s with bustling crowds of eager holiday makers that I realize what is odd.  There are hardly any tourists now.

It was the wealthier class of tourist who created the boom towards the end of the nineteenth century when all the beautiful buildings went up.  In fact the Gaiety Theatre was built in 1902 and had a special barrier to separate the well heeled from those less so.  They wealthy had their own entrance too. Until the 1980s (with a little hiccup during the war years) the tourist trade flourished, but then package holidays in distant places with reliable summers siphoned off even the humbler travelers.

 But if so, I wonder why everything is still so nice.  No crumbling ghost town ambience here.  There is an proud museum full of complicated Island history going back to the Bronze Age.

 We share an old fashioned compartment on the Thomas the Tank Engine Steam Train with a young Manx man who dispels some of the mystery.  He is part of the thriving money market that flourishes on the island because of its tax haven status. Twenty five percent of the population are incoming South Africans looking for a safe haven as well as a tax one for themselves.

The word “safe” or “safety” comes up in every conversation we have about what it is like to live on the island.  The kindly gentleman who volunteers out at the lichen nature reserve evaded the question for a bit and talked of seabirds and nature  but then reverted to it “What’s it like living here?  Well its safe”  Our landlady who grew up in the Congo and then tried Italy said the same. “No burglaries”

I suppose there is a point  in every long trip that one feels homesick and one day I did.  Actually Hutchinson Square where we are living was taken over by the British government in the war to be one of several “enemy alien” camps.  There are pictures of unfortunate Jews who’d fled Nazi Germany only to be  interned on the Island.  Many were gifted artists.  They must have been all sorts of homesick.  Because it was wartime there were no tourists so the landladies and landlords must have been quite pleased at having albeit unwilling guests with ration books and an assured income.

I think my difficulty in getting the vibe of this place, simultaneously ancient and old fashioned rather than modern, a tourist destination with next to no tourists, had made me a bit lonely.  Also Grant and I have been forced to sleep in separate beds because the sofa bed is excruciatingly uncomfortable for two. I let him have the nice single bed and in fact I have grown used to the sensation of a cat stepping lightly on the duvet as the sofa springwork shifts spontaneously by laws of its own. And once you think there’s a cat on the bed you can’t help but check.  And then there’s the dawn screaming around 4.30am of seagulls starting their day.  All a bit unsettling, along with the fact that Manx cats are actually poor sufferers of spina bifida brought on by inbreeding.

But that afternoon Grant put an end to my brooding.  He’d come back from scouting for a lemon for our gin and tonics.  He was excited. “You must come to Tesco’s” he said. ”That’s where everybody is”  We went to look and all at once I felt OK.  Gone was the languor of  the seafront esplanade.  People were everywhere bustling and impatient.  Lots of children and their harried and often tattooed parents.  Many tubby old ladies  and handsome men  with round tough Viking faces.  There was a special checkout which said over it “Traa dy lioor” and under that GIVING PEOPLE WITH MEMORY PROBLEMS “ENOUGH TIME TO THINK”.  The checkout person herself was a little slow and that seemed good to me.  I don’t know exactly what “traa dy lioor” means and I don’t suppose any of the Manx do either as their gaelic isn’t spoken now and the bilingual signs are really just for show.  However I am slightly shocked that nobody we’ve asked knows the meaning of the Latin motto that encircles the three legs of the national emblem that’s everwhere “Quocunque jeceris stabit”.

Due to ferry sailings we’ve had to stay here a bit too long.  A friend of Grant’s, Max, has a poster on his toilet door saying something along the lines of “Harbours are the safest places for ships but that’s not what they are built for”

I think I’m ready to sail from the safe Isle of Man.

Dublins fair city

Just a bit more on Dublin which I truly loved. Our place was three stops up from St Stephens Square, a good park with an Oscar Wilde statue in a corner and pale torsoed young men basking in the heatwave.  All around were tall Georgian terraces, their bricks every shade of rust and pink and their big front doors bright blues and greens and yellows and reds.  It all exuded vitality.

The day we arrived the park railings were hosting small exhibitions by different artists and people were buying the pictures too. I asked a friendly looking artist if he could direct me to the Natural History Museum. “Oh, the dead zoo we call it” and he told me how to get there.

One delight of the Irish is the way any question brings forth about four times more words and comments than are strictly necessary.  There was a merriment and generosity of spirit in all my encounters with people in Dublin. There is often a bit of devilment too.  We went on a double decker hop on hop off bus and its driver had an eerie way of seeing all the passengers while we could only see the back of his head.  He got us  to identify our nationalities and then teased us about them.  “Ah the sweet Molly from Australia looks truly relaxed, that’s nice” he said and that was me.

We hopped off at the Gallery of Modern Art which is housed in a huge yet delicately designed old hospital and then went to have a look at the gaol nearby now a museum. I found glass case with an electronic copy of an old fashioned autograph book kept by a prisoner. It had little pictures and patriotic sentiments in it but also this little rhyme which seemed funny and sad in an Irish way:

When I asked her to wed, my sweetheart she said
Go to father
She knew that I knew her father was dead
She knew that I knew what a life he had led
So I knew that she knew that I knew what she meant when she said
Go to father.

Our suburb, Ranalagh, had good ordinary shops and people and also a tram that took us to town in a trice. We had a studio flat with a shower the size of a coffin only taller which drove Grant mad. One quirk of our room was that every few minutes or so you could hear what sounded like an electric kettle coming to the boil and then turning itself off.  It was the tram coming to the station and stopping and I knew it, but every single time my mind sprang to “who put the kettle on and why” until the repeated impact on my brain was like Chinese water torture.  I think G and I were happy to leave the key in the lock of that place but I would have loved to stay longer in Dublin.