Dripping Yarns by AA Gill

Iceland, March 2000.
Why in all of God’s good earth did anyone ever come here in the first place? And having got here, why didn’t they take one look and turn the family-people-carrier longship right round and go back? What threat, lie, bribe or bet could conceivably have induced anyone to look at Iceland and suck their teeth and nod their heads and say: “Yes, I reckon with a bit of hard work and some jolly curtains we could make this place home?”

The first people settled here in the time before Gore-Tex, convection heaters, Velcro or Cup-a-Soup. When Europe’s population was that of present-day Barnsley, they could have gone anywhere. They were Vikings, for Christ’s sake, nobody was going to argue. “A beach-front property on the Côte d’Azur, Olaf? Help yourself.”

Coming here was Jeremy’s idea, Chipping Norton’s Eric Blood-ale: “Iceland is just [pause, drop voice a gear] the best place in the world.” So there’s him, me and the Monkey driving across the moon in winter, from Keflavik “We never close” airport to the capital, Reykjavik, where half of Iceland’s 250,000 souls live – for want of a better word. I wouldn’t normally mention the Monkey. Monkeys are a wearisome fact of working abroad, like lost luggage, inexplicable street signs and public holidays. Monkey is a journalistic term for a photographer (monkeys climb up things, break stuff and you don’t want to sit opposite them at feeding time).

We all arrange to meet at Heathrow at 11.30; the Monkey had been here since 5. That’s a bit keen, isn’t it? “My wife was flying in from Thailand – I haven’t seen her for six months.” Ah, how romantic. “We’re getting divorced.” Right. I just had this feeling that the Monkey was going to be trouble.

Reykjavik clings by the frozen skin of its teeth to a bay of black pumice, a huddled, head-down, white-knuckle town made of corrugated iron painted in pastel ice-cream tones, the steeply pitched roofs hoarding light and warmth, the streets a slick grey slalom. On one side the North Atlantic, the metallic colour of frozen-to-death, smashes and grabs at the impertinence of human habitation with corpse-white fists. On the other side stretches the hinterland, a jaw-dropping, face-slapping, eye-pricking, awesome empty space of mountains, crevasses, glaciers, geysers, vertiginous waterfalls and a garden centre, trying to blow the limpet city off its face. Nobody owns the middle of Iceland: the natives haven’t found anything you can usefully do with it. After 1,000 years they are still caught on the beach, huddles behind their derelict whaling stations and cod-drying racks.

The list of what Iceland hasn’t got is a saga, and includes trees. In fact, it hasn’t got anything that grows except moss, the closest nature has yet to come to inventing nylon. It hasn’t got neighbours, it sits bleakly isolated in the killer sea, the nearest landfalls are Greenland or Orkney. It hasn’t got public transport – don’t even think of building a railway. It doesn’t have any crime to speak of: anyone who hung around with thoughts of mugging would become a speed bump till late June. Neither does it have signs in shop windows saying: “Lowest-ever prices”. Iceland is hysterically, laughably, expensive. A round of drinks for the three of us? No problem, that will be £60 (and I don’t drink). And that’s not even including nuts for the Monkey.

What Iceland has got are taxes, avalanches of taxes. What it spends them on is something of a mystery. There’s no crime, no public transport, no military except a couple of wind-up fishery boats, and the jail is the size of a small post office. Most of it seems to go on clearing snow, which is a bit like paying God Danegeld. A task that makes Sisyphus look like he’s got a hobby.

It also has active volcanoes. Oh, there goes Mount Hekla spitting lava over an area the size of the home counties, and spuming a mushroom cloud that should give the Japanese tourist a bad dose of déjà vu. Iceland is the youngest place on the globe: it’s still cooking, steaming and cracking after its journey from the oven at the centre of the earth. Because it is so new, contrarily it feels profoundly ancient, like being morphed into a natural history museum’s dawn-of-time diorama. There is enough raw geothermal power to supply Europe for a very long time and, of course, Iceland has fish – 70% of its income comes from the sea. It’s caught by 5% of the population. The other 95% go shopping.

But most of what Iceland’s got is bundles of weather. This isn’t anything as benignly balmy as a climate: this is weather that is like living with a giant psychopathic bouncer, weather of heroic, mythic proportions. The air around you is a sensate physical presence on a mission. For nine months of the year, outside the clattering windows stalks a man-killer that wants your guts for Popsicles. Welcome to Iceland, twinned with Valhalla.

Finally, what Iceland has got are the most beautiful women in the world. I’ll say that again, just in case you missed it. The most groin-throbbingly, pulse-revvingly beautiful women (drop a gear) in the world. Not just one or two, not a handsome few, not a judicious nubile sprinkling, but flocks, shoals, herds, coveys and prides of the most stunningly direct and confident, perfectly formed women. In answer to the timeless question “How far would a man go for a pretty face?”, the answer is, at least in Jeremy’s case, Iceland. The ice-blonde, ice-eyed icing on the icing.

First thing, then, is to get kitted up. We need jerseys with more patterns on them than a blind folk musicians’ convention, and we need fur. We don’t want to just endanger a species, we want to pull evolution’s hair out. The great thing about fur in Iceland is that it’s not some sort of dainty fashion detail, it’s work clothes, it’s a practical necessity. The man in the shop says there’s a problem with seals: “Just too damn many of them, by the way, please smoke. We can’t club them fast enough, do you fancy a sealskin donkey jacket with salmon-skin trim?” do haddock shit in the fjord? I just want to bring all the rodent-hugging animal rights activists in their nylon windcheaters here, stand them on the tundra, and say: “Look, just before your bodily functions cryogenicise, tell me, who’s the dumb animal now?”

So we get big hats, big, big, hats made out of Ivana Trump, and a fox scarf with the head on, and it’s time for dinner. At the homely Two Overcoats, whose name is a small Icelandic joke because the overcoat rack takes up most of the room, smoked puffin to start, followed by whale steak au poivre – whale is man’s meat as meltingly soft as fillet, it has a round, brown flavour with just a touch of iron, where else do they fry Willy? – and Iceland was starting to grow on me. The clear-eyed relief of so much profligate political incorrectness, and it was still early.

Downtown Reykjavik is a winding shindig of bars and clubs, arranged so that you don’t have to go more than a couple of freezing pixie steps between drinks. Every Friday and Saturday, anyone who is solvent and ambient gets out and crawls. Jeremy, with the assurance of a seasoned tracker, leads us to a bar that he knows is so bodaciously stuffed with Scanda-totty we’ll need flame-retardant underpants. I have to keep reminding the Monkey to keep his tongue indoors or it’ll freeze to his chin. The bar is a wooden barn on three floors, stuffed with 14 Icelandic men in dun-coloured Crimplene parkas, sipping pints of lager and sliding their little piggy, albino-lashed eyes.

It is one of the remarkable features of Iceland that the male and female of the species should be so diametrically different. The men are universally, unremittingly hideous. There is a definite look, a sort of weedy, crumpled, and dim Hitler- youth thing with seal-coloured hair that grows in random tussocks and moults in rotation. The answer to this fundamental disparity, I suspect, like so much else, lies in DNA. Iceland has a unique communal gene pool. A thousand years of being Sven No-mates, and regular cataclysmic genetic bottlenecks where the population has been whittled down to a freezing handful, mean that they all share the same genes. Iceland is one glowing advertisement for incest – just as long as you’re female, of course. There appear to be no other ill effects. In recognition of this, the Icelanders have very sensibly dispensed with surnames. The phone book is alphabetical by first name and profession; Thor the Fisherman followed by 20 Thor the Shoppers. Your second name is your father’s first name with either son or dottir added. Illegitimacy is therefore never an issue. Well, it is an issue, but not an issue, if you see what I mean.

Just as I was considering the complexities of all this, a brace of girls of a perfectly humdrum radiance and suicidally few clothes passed by, trailing glare of piggy-eyed lust. “What are you doing here?” one said to me. “This is a bar for parents.” “No, grandparents,” corrected the other. It was recommended by a very sad old man, I replied. “Oh, let us show you all the really happening clubs and bars in Reykjavik. I’m Angeline, by the way, and this is my friend. I’m twenty; she says she’s twenty, but she’s only nineteen. I won a prize for having the prettiest eyes in school, but I don’t think it’s very important. My worst feature is my bum, don’t you think so? No, feel it. Do you mind if I sit on your knee? I’ve got a boyfriend, but he doesn’t like me having fun. I like having fun. Do you like having fun? I’d love a drink, surprise me. Is this uncomfortable? I’m a gymnast, you know, I can do the splits right here (she could). Do you think I talk too much? Everyone says I talk too much.” I turned to Jeremy just in time to hear him say to his nearly-20-year-old: “Right, given that Iceland’s not in the EC, does the common agricultural policy, and in particular the fishing policy, have a specific impact on the island’s GDP?” I promise I’m not making that up.

What followed is something of a blur, of being led by the hand from bar to bar. A translucent cheek pressed to my cheek, while a stream of prettily lilted inanities poured steadily, unquenchably into my ear. All around, the most beautiful girls and troll-like boys drank and danced and fumbled and snogged in a surging tide of 1970s pop classics, beer and hormones. In one shambling interregnum I do recall Jeremy saying that what he liked best about Iceland, apart from all the other things he liked best, was that he could be completely anonymous. Nobody buttonholed him about gaskets. Then, finding a long, ice-sculptured queue for a club, he marched up to a bouncer and produced his BBC identity card, which says: I’m that bloke on the satellite telly.” He spent the next half-hour surrounded by excited, sweaty Scanda quick-fit fitters arguing about gear ratios.

Reykjavik on the razzle is cool without cynicism. They don’t pose or preen, there’s a barely restrained sense of enthusiasm and expectation. They go at the drinking and lust in an elegantly unselfconscious manner and there is no Icelandic word for “excuse me”. I was particularly impressed by the girl in the gents’ loo, who took her turn at the urinal and peed standing up. By 5.30am we’d washed up at the bar of a sardine sauna club, the girls had finally drawn breath, and Jeremy and I were doing what middle-aged men do best and most often, just watching.

The punch that decked the Monkey was a good punch. Not that I’m much of an authority on punching. But it had a meaty, compact ferocity with plenty of Viking shoulder behind it. It caught the Monkey right in the kisser. He came up spitting a satisfying amount of blood, doing that “Hold me back, hold me back, I’ll kill him” routine. Jeremy and I caught each other’s eye and in a flash of deep male recognition knew what had to be done. We were three travellers alone, joined by a professional bond, but also by a deeper, playground-learnt camaraderie – all for one and one for all. Without a word, for none was needed, we made our move. As the barman wrenched him to the door by his neck, we turned our backs and pretended we didn’t know him. “His flash didn’t work, for all practical purposes he’s pointless.” “Absolutely, no reason for all of us to get the bum’s rush.” “None at all, what are you having?”

Outside, in the coldest, bleakest hour dawn, the glittering icy streets shoaled with avid Icelanders giving each other saliva transfusions, twining eelishly in doorways, blowing like whales in gutters and just having lost the battle to remain bipedal on the French-polished pavement, lying on their backs waving at the brooding bungalow sky, like stranded crabs. Marvellous.

Next morning, the Monkey stumbled into breakfast with a scab that satisfyingly resembled a nasty dose of herpes, and a look of abject misery. “Before you say anything, I’ve got your box, Jeremy’s got your camera. He slumped with relief. “And the bag?” What bag? “The bag with all the lenses and film.” Oh, good grief.

Reykjavik is this year’s European city of culture. It’s taking the honour with a remarkable humility. In fact, it is so humble about it that it a hasn’t even put up a sign. Iceland’s one great gift to the world is the 10th-century sagas, a collection of prose, myth-history and legend that includes the origin of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the discovery of America (another reason Jeremy likes Icelandics is because, having caught America, they threw it back). The sagas are utterly compelling and violently beautiful; they make Beowulf read like the diary of a gay hairdresser. Reading them here, with the ravens raggedly soaring overhead, makes them seem spookily like plausible current events.

Icelanders are very cultured people. They stay in school until they are 20, mainly because it’s too cold to go into the playground. They are phenomenally well read. They travel widely and dress fashionably. Per head they spend more in London than any other nationality. But Reykjavik isn’t an ostentatiously aesthetic place. True, there is a natural history museum that reputedly has a stuffed great auk that was the most expensive piece of taxidermy ever.

But there is only one absolute must-see. The penis museum, appropriately secreted up a back passage. What’s extraordinary is not so much the penises – though you do see that nature is as inventive as a Swiss Army knife when it comes to the nozzle of reproduction. What is extraordinary is that someone (a man) woke up and said: “Eureka! I know to what great end I shall devote my life. It’ll be the great end. I’ll collect a penis from every species of animal in Iceland.” There are no animals in Iceland. It’s a very small collection, with the exception of the sperm whale. Which isn’t. There is an affidavit signed by a farmer promising his own pocket gristle to complete the set. “Why wait?” said Jeremy. “We could just leave them the Monkey.”

After taking the Monkey to buy a new flash and film at gratuitously Icelandic prices, we walked down Reykjavik’s Bond Street. Jeremy pointed to a café. The last time I was here I interviewed Miss World, who was Miss Iceland, in there. Lets go and have a cup of steaming euphoric recall.” And at that very moment, with a synchronicity that would make you puff out your cheeks in disbelief of this were fiction, a voice called, “Jeremy,” and there she was, Miss World, like some fabulous heroine from a sword, sex and sorcery saga, with a brace of handmaidens who even by local standards were dropdead poleaxing. “Come and have coffee. I know, why don’t we all have dinner and then go out clubbing with all the current Miss Iceland contestants that we just happen to be judging?” All of them? Another 24 dazzling blondes. I was planning on having an early night and arranging my woolly collection by zigzag. Another icy blonde? I don’t know that I could. I’m right up to here with gorgeous, blue-eyed Valkyries. You only get invitations like that once in a lifetime. No, you only get invitations like that in 10th-century sagas.

But before clubbing with goddesses, there was Jeremy’s fun to get out of the way. He was ever so overexcited. “I can’t wait, I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see you do it.” Driving a snowmobile is stupid. Driving a snowmobile in convoy in a blizzard is deeply stupid and frightening. I now know that oblivion is a real place, and I have been there. If you want to know what it’s like to turn you face into a Christmas decoration, then hop aboard. But frankly, growing icicles off my eyebrows and out of my nose is not a party trick I wish to repeat. Then Jeremy and I fell down the Jules Verne memorial crevasse and only his vast beer gut prevented us from plummeting to the centre of the earth. Oh, and the monkey hit a rock and landed, on his new flash gun, which broke. That was funny, that made us laugh – a lot.

I got my own back by feeding Jeremy shark, not just any old shark, but shark that had been buried for a year. Nowhere else in the world has anyone else thought of burying a shark a year and then putting it in their mouths. It looks innocuous enough, like yellow blocks of caramel, and it tastes like nothing else in the solar system. No, it tastes like one other thing. Sharks have cartilage skeletons, not bone, and as it rots, cartilage gives off ammonia. After a year this tastes precisely like urine, ferocious, vicious, diseased urine. You know the burning sensation of an Extra Strong Mint or Victory V? Well, imagine that, but with the flavour of a Turkish long-drop lav – in August. Oh, his face was a picture. Or it would have been if the Monkey hadn’t been pointing the other way.

Oddly, the place Iceland remind me of most is Cuba. Another no-mates, quarantined island where they gyre and gambol long and hard and in public. Where the sense of isolation has bred a sort of self-sufficient, self-generating, cool confidence. As the rest of us in mainstream Europe become more harmonised, precious, pasteurised, sani-wrapped and timid, a one-size-Fritz-all culture, Iceland shows that you don’t have to be in it to have a life. Today more than ever, this last frontier seems spectacularly attractive and remarkably enviable. It’s the end-of-term dance at the end of the world.

By the way, apropos the evening out with the putative Miss Iceland Dottirs, I don’t like to boast or anything, and I’d never divulge an indiscreet confidence, but they did all get together and ask if I could possibly be a judge. What a country – become a legend in a weekend. Sadly, Jeremy will be filming in Birmingham.