Blowing hot and cold

The landscape is treeless and windswept but spectacular, with volcanoes, glaciers and geysers, the climate and cuisine nearly always disagreeably challenging: it is sometimes hard to explain the affection and loyalty Iceland has inspired in so many visitors, from Auden and Isherwood in the Thirties to the academic and novelist Sarah Moss in 2009. She too was drawn back when, long after a memorable gap-year visit, she took a job at the university and returned to live there with her family.

My family also lived in Reykjavik, back in the Sixties, when my father was posted there as ambassador. Holidays with our Icelandic and American friends were good fun. This is what I remember: my hair, frozen and clinking around my ears as we walked home from the hot outdoor pools in mid-winter; riding at a fast trot on ponies with wide backs as comfortable as armchairs over the lava fields and across rushing rivers; camping under the midnight sun near a volcanic site rightly called Myvatn (midge lake); skating in the dark on the lake in central Reykjavik — you could be blown right across just by holding your coat open.