Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Away with the elves

Jeremy Clarke reports on his Low Life

issue 14 August 2010

We circumnavigated Iceland in a clockwise direction, calling on successive days at Reykjavik, Grundarfjordur, Isafjordur and Akureyri. At each of these places we disembarked and took an excursion led by a local guide.

At Grundarfjordur, I took the Snaefellsnes national park coach tour. Our guide was a smartly dressed, highly educated Icelandic woman who spoke better English than me, albeit more slowly and methodically. Her commentary revealed a comfortableness with contemporary discourses on geopolitics, ecology, economics, culture and technology. Though because we were British, renowned for our philistinism, and willing to laugh at anything, even if it isn’t funny, she tried to keep things simple, and even attempted one or two laboured witticisms of her own. She was of a conservative cast of mind, and when she made this explicit, such as when expressing her profound admiration for the simplicity of her grandparents’ frugal and pious existence, and for old Icelandic culture in general, she coloured a little.

She took us first to a tiny, black, wooden church on a lava plain beside the sea.

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