A good bit of wiff waff

An earnest game in progress…

It is the end of the long long weekend and we are determined, despite the lethargy, to squeeze in one last adventure before returning to our dull desks and the endless quotidian. E awaits us in the lee of the Tea Building, sheltering from the British summer. It is raining still as it has for days, but as we turn onto Bethnal Green Road, the wind and water rakes the pavement and us, drenching our shoes and jeans below the knees. The rain provokes skittishness instead of the usual damp depression, but yet we will the doorway of Rich Mix westward.

Eventually. Eventually inside and dry, to drip and steam with the rest. The main space of the Rich Mix arts centre has been transformed and is filled with table tennis tables. This is Pongathon. I don’t know why it isn’t pingathon, but either would work, for this is ping pong in overdrive. P and B are already at the table they have booked for the next couple of hours. This is to be the site of our contest.

Conversation is difficult on account of the DJ. But at least he plays songs I want to hear: Joy Division to Human League, via The Long Blondes. Around us, assorted hipsters bat orange and white balls across the little nets on the surrounding tables. Many of these go astray, over-hit and misdirected, and the air is full of wayward plastic bubbles. They skitter across the floor or ricochet from hard surfaces and heads. A woman in a gym skirt and sweat band sweeps through the room with a fishing net, collecting the surplus projectiles. On the stage above us, the players run around what is surely the prestige table, striking the ball on the hoof.

We remain at our stations, playing serious games for serious points. We argue about the rules. We are focused. And yet often we are less accurate than the players of the circuit games above us. B and M and P (and E and J; everyone in fact except K and I) display a degree of competence, but rallies do not last long despite our exertions.

And it is hot: before my socks have dried, my head is glistening with sweat. Competition is fierce; laughter is frequent. The last game goes to 23-21; the penultimate rally seems to go on forever;  then, bang on 9pm, as our table booking ends, I find myself once more on the losing side. But only just.

The room is suddenly emptying. We gather our damp coats to head off into the dying evening light, to Dalston for tapas and wine at the really rather nice Viva. As we leave, J says ‘Good bit of wiff waff, that!’ and I dredge my memory to see if I have ever heard table tennis described in that way before. I do not want to concur with something inappropriate. Deciding it is probably a northern thing, I nod.

Beer World (part four)

This is an odd addition to the Beer World series, both because there is no photograph of a foaming pint (I kind of forgot, for reasons that will become clear) and because its subject is very close to home. About 600 metres from home, to be precise.

The beer in question is Beersley Street, a festival ale from those magnificent brewers at Redemption. The festival in question happened this weekend, and had nothing to do with the Queen and everything to do with books and writing: the third annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival. I missed the second one (I was still in South East Asia at the time, chasing elephants through Cambodia) and only caught a couple of shows at the first. This time, I bought a weekend ticket as soon as they were announced. I was very excited. The news that Redemption were to produce the festival ale only thrilled me more.

Redemption produce some of my favourites among the explosion of new London beers that have appeared in recent years. Their Pale Ale and Trinity are some of the best session beers around these parts, and Urban Dusk is great if you want something a bit more chewy but still digestible. That they hail from North London only makes them sweeter.

Beersley Street itself was a nice light, hoppy affair, not too far distant from Trinity (although I had already drunk quite a bit of free Hendricks Gin, with which the Festival was awash; this might explain why I forgot to take pictures…) That name, of course, was in honour of the Festival headline act, John Cooper Clarke, punk poet and a significant voice of my younger days. He swears, he is irreverent, and he is hysterically funny; his fountain of jet-black, back-combed hair is properly iconic and he has the thinnest legs of any man on God’s green earth.

Beasley Street is probably his best work, and I loved the up-dated, gentrified Beasley Boulevard. Because Clarke is not only a punk stand-up comic (“A unicorn and a Cyclops. That’s an accident waiting to happen”): he can also construct quite marvellously complex rhymes and rhythms, leaving you with take-away images of considerable power: I’ve been carrying “Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies/in a box on Beasley Street” around since the late 1980s.

But while Clarke was the box office hit, there was far more to the Festival than simply him. Jonathan Lee reading from his new novel Joy in St Mary’s Old Church was mesmeric (if slightly dispiriting for my own writing); Jackie Kay was as infectious as ever. In a discussion on the future of the book, China Mieville and Mark Billingham demonstrated that authors know much more about  communication and interactivity than publishers and tech-enthusiasts. I got to be all nostalgic for my NME days, with David Quantick and the World’s Coolest Librarian^TM, Richard Boon. London Obsessive (and Suffolk resident…) Mark Mason made me want to follow in his footsteps tracing the entire London Underground overground, while Nat Segnit’s reading, featuring a malevolent Scottish dolphin called Dean, was a masterclass in the short story. Even the poetry dungeon of the New Libertines threw up some real gems among the overwrought teenagery: I shall be seeking out Marc Nash’s flash fiction for a start.

But back to beer, since that is what this blog post is supposed to be. Saturday lunchtime’s event was Perfect London Pubs, hosted by The White Hart on the High Street. The upstairs room was packed, and not only by men of a certain girth, for engaging readings and pub talk from Pete Brown and Robin Turner and a dependable pint of Badger’s Fursty Ferret. Robin had spent hard months searching for the perfect pub, taking Orwell’s ‘Moon Under Water’ as a template; Pete has written the definitive history of the George at Borough, Shakespeare’s Local. Things quickly became quite philosophical, in the way that pub conversations do, sliding through ideas of transience and permanence, authenticity, and the Sugarbabes. Books and beer on a neighbourhood Bank Holiday mini-break – you don’t always have to travel far to broaden your horizons.

How I love words: a prose poem in praise of cadence

I love words. The way they flavour the things we feel, the things we see, the things that touch us. I love the way that they collaborate, conspire, and conjoin: the shapes they make in the mouth. I have my favourites, of course. Words whose geometry and chemistry give me secret pleasure in their repetition. Cadence. The way it hangs, amplifying its meaning in measured resonance. Resonance itself resonates, but verb and noun taste distinct upon the tongue.

I have no knowledge of the hierarchy of nouns and verbs: which is the parent and which the child. No inkling of the relative pre-eminence of action and indolence, of the transient and the immutable. With adjectives and adverbs things are clearer: they are secondary, the supporting actors of elaboration. But nouns and verbs tussle for supremacy in my sentences, playing chicken and egg with my reasoning.

To delve into the richness of allusion that my mother tongue affords, to unwrap each evocative layer from brute communication, prompts questions. Does a Spaniard savour the texture of expression with such gusto? I have no reason to doubt he does. But I am certain that, of all the advantages of my birthright, this shifting, subtle language is the most prized. I love these words, they are my favourites: which are yours?

Meaning is differential

Language is for conveying meaning, of course.

But it is not that straight-forward. As Elina Löwensohn says in Hal Hartley’s short, Theory of Achievement, “Meaning is differential”. How much more so when we start to translate text into other languages?

That was the central theme of an interesting discussion on Storytelling and Translation, part of the LSE Literary Festival 2012. An engaging panel of Marina Lewycka, Jeremy Sams, and George Szirtes talked around the issue, especially as it relates to the more tricksy business of poetry and opera, where words are always much more than meaning. Sams talked about the relative importance in opera of retaining vowel sounds as opposed to maintaining meaning: most singers apparently prefer the high notes to land on ‘-aah’ sounds, and could care less about the semiotics. The implication seemed to be that prose, and by extension novels, were (relatively) easy.

Then Szirtes (for me, one of the most interesting writers around when it comes to the subject of language, of writing itself) crystallised the topic with some reflections on bread. Bread is a simple word, signifying an almost universal object (not even a universal concept, but a solid lump of something). Yet even here, language is slippery, not to be trusted – it is, as Szirtes put it, always evanescent. The translation of ‘bread’ into the ‘kenyér’ of his native Hungarian is simple enough, but should you ask for ‘kenyér’ in a bakers in Budapest, you will receive something that looks and tastes different to what you would find in Bridport.

Which then is the real bread? ‘Bread’, ‘pain’, ‘brot’, ‘chleb’, or indeed ‘kenyér’?  The meaning even of bread is subjective (shaped by the bread of your childhood, just as the first window you see is the template for every window thereafter). And that is before we even start to consider the wider cultural and linguistic resonances that the word holds. Of course, you do not need to travel across national borders for words to become unreliable: you only have to move across generations, classes, and communities, sometimes just across town, before the ground beneath you becomes less certain.

Of course, words are no that slippery. If they were, none of us would understand anyone else (as in the case of the Metropole in which a professor of linguistics finds himself stranded, the local language resolutley impenetrable). But while words are not meaningless, there is a sense in which they mean so much more than their meaning. The richness of their ambiguity is a cause for celebration rather than regret: bread is more than a cooked paste of ground-up grass seeds in any language.

Jeremy Sams, sometime translator of operas and the key figure behind the enticing new Baroque opera mash-up, The Enchanted Island, made the point with the best joke of the day. A few years before, he had been sitting in a Berlin café, working on a translation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. A local asked what he was busy with; after Jeremy had explained his task, the German expressed his admiration and added: “When you’ve finished, can you translate it into German?”

Beer World (part three)

A trip to the frozen north! Of course there were huskies and the aurora borealis and all sorts of arctic adventures. We spent a very chilly, but very lovely, night in a Sami lavvu at Camp Tamok, where there was more reindeer stew (pearl barley for me) than you could possibly want. But no beer.

The Mack Brewery, Tromso. With snow.

Which is a shame, because the local town, Tromso in north Norway, boasts the world’s most northerly brewery, the Mack Bryggeri. They also boast the world’s most northerly botanical gardens, but we didn’t get that far; it was cold. The brewery was founded in 1877 and, despite stiff competition from the big boys of national and international brewing, Mack continues to have a near total dominance in the pubs and bars of Tromso.

Look out! A polar beer! Mack Pilsner in all its glory

They’re not some hippy-dippy micro brewery (they have the local Coca Cola production franchise) and their standard Pilsner is, while perfectly drinkable, pretty standard. Crisp and clean and all the things you’d want from a basic European lager, but nothing more. At £10 a pint (or thereabouts) it didn’t seem like that great a deal, but it’s ubiquity in town meant that quite a few were drunk.

An almost pint of Arctic Beer in the Ølhallen

But Mack has more to it than that, and much more interesting beers reveal themselves if you have a bit of a root about. The local favourite is apparenlty an unfortunately named Blanding, which is a 70:30 mix of their dark, malty Bayer beer and the Pilsner – a Nordic Black and Tan which I sampled in the rather fine Skarven pub on the harbour. On the other hand, if you’re after that clean, crisp taste but with a bit more finesse, then Mack Arctic Beer (as simple as that) is the perfect refresher after a day of snow-shoeing.

The olde worlde charms of Ølhallen

It’s when you get to Ølhallen (literally ‘beer halls’) that things really pick up. Tromso’s oldest pub, Ølhallen was established in 1928 as part of the brewery and features the full list, including occasional Micro Beers (limited run beers that, on the basis of the two I sampled, are rich and complex affairs). The only thing with Ølhallen is the opening times: 9am until 6pm. And they didn’t appear to serve food.

Afternoon candle-light in Ølhallen

But, in common with most of Tromso, Ølhallen felt dark even in the middle of the day: something to do with small windows and perpetual candle-light. With the limited time, and still more limted funds, that I had, I tried my best to make my way through the annotated menu of 12 beers. It included the Pilsner, Bayer, Blanding and Arctic, as well as the lovely sounding Gullmack, which was unfortunately off (there was also some generic wine – both red and white – for those who had found themselves in the wrong place). They served beer in little glasses (0.17l) for 30 kroner (about £3.40) and – after a pint of Arctic – I moved on to the Haakon and the limited run 1877.

Haakon and 1877 - tiny glasses, big taste

The Haakon was a rich golden ale, very full-bodied and aromatic, and the 1877 was marvellous, a  clean tasting Duvel, with still 8% abv. We had a plane to catch, so I didn’t get to try the Gullbok or the Christmas Beer. By the time we’d got to Oslo, where we were to pick up a connecting flight, you couldn’t find Mack beers anywhere. My last £10 pint of the trip was a Ringnes, which made me long for a Mack Pilsner…

The remnants of my beer and my money

Other, non-beer related, photos of the trip are on my Flickr page, here

Of oats and darkness

It’s getting cold. It’s already got dark: the week started with the drabbest day I can remember in London. Mind you, each year I am surprised by the rapid descent of the days into perma-dusk and the somehow unexpected annual loss of daylight leaves me leaden and fatalistic. In fact there is only one reason to feel jolly at the season: it is high time to start eating porridge again.

I like porridge, but I do not like the conditions that make porridge eating possible. True, it does give me an excuse to have bananas in the house (K really doesn’t like bananas. Really.) and to spend longer making breakfast, thereby legitimately delaying my arrival at this desk. But these advantages are marginal: more than anything the return of porridge signals the confident encampment in these parts of a coldness and darkness that will reside until long after my birthday. It is a time for hunkering down, for cursing this dark, damp island, and for dreaming of the return of daylight.

But at least there is porridge. As a child, it held little appeal, but then neither did coffee, olives or whisky. I did, of course, eat Ready Brek, like everyone else, but the attraction lay in the ladles of sugar I would sneak into the bowl. We’d head off to primary school pretending we were wrapped in a glowing band of orange warmth, unhinged by a little hyperactivity. It was less ‘central heating for kids’, more a frenetic sugar-rush. Oats had nothing to do with it.

But now, older and wiser as I am, oats are, you know, nice. Tasty, even. Last week, I mixed them into the dough of some home-made bread, as an experiment, and I plan to do the same at the weekend, to perfect the blend (I think 4:1, wheat to oats, is going to be about right).

I’m told that there are recipes for porridge, but I’ve never been much of a one for recipes. I learned how to make porridge by trial and error, and it is a permanently evolving art. Currently, I start a couple of centimetres of semi-skimmed milk heating in the bottom of a pan, then stir in whatever oats are in stock at Mother Earth, the local wholefood shop. For quantities, I improvise with a ramekin, depending on how hungry I feel. As the glutinous mass thickens I stir in a little kettle water until it looks right (as with custard, I favour the consistency of a slow liquid, rather than something you can slice…) Taking it off the heat, I stir in some sugar, maybe a teaspoon, and some sliced bananas.

It’s an ad hoc approach but by mid December I’ll have relearned the proportions that work. Then I should be able to make it in my sleep, which is handy because I am not a great morning person. By the time the sun comes back I might be bored of it. But not before.

Into the slush

The pride I felt just a few weeks ago is still there: I can pick up the sheaf of pages, the product of this year’s labours, and feel the weight of satisfaction. But it is an anxious pride now. The novel is now out of my hands, at least for the time being, as I try to find an agent to represent me, to represent my book. I am unsure whether I am more afraid of being ignored or of being read harshly. I only know that I am nervy.

Comments came back during October from the good, good people I asked to read for me (well, from all but one of them, but he knows who he is…) They were helpful, immensely so. The second draft is in much better shape thanks to their generous expertise and insight: characters are sharper, themes more explicit, language tics moderated and repetitions expunged. It’s not there, still, and I doubt it ever will be, at least to my satisfaction. But, as William Goldman said of writing, “nobody knows anything”: it’s all wrestling in the dark.

So the first three chapters have been sent out, along with a 500 word synopsis that was harder to write than the whole thing. And I wait, hoping that my work will somehow make it out of the slush pile and into a briefcase, to be scanned on a tube train, or a sofa, or wherever it is that agents choose to catch up on the masses of reading that they have to process. Maybe, out there, is one who will be interested enough to want to read the rest.

But I can’t afford to hold my breath. It could be weeks before I hear, if ever, and I am slowly relearning the art of managing hope. With cavalier abandon, I’ve started to sketch out a second novel, building characters and narrative as comprehensively as I can under the shadow of my anxiety. I have no idea if this one will ever be completed – I have to find myself a job, my year off drawing to its close – but I don’t see that as a reason not to start. I had no idea before I started whether the first one would be finished. But it is. It may get no further, but it exists. That flash of pride is there again, pouring a little light the drab November darkness.

Walking the Laugavegurinn, August 2009

The Laugavegurinn is a 55km walk from Landmannalaugur to Thorsmork, taking a southerly course through the glorious southern highlands of Iceland. It is a stunning route through one of my favourite landscapes and, since Iceland is the size of England but with the population of Croydon, you very quickly get into something very much like wilderness.

I actually completed the route in 2009, with a group organised by Utivist, but since then I’ve been busy (!) and I have only just got around to posting the photos on Flickr. To accompany them, I have posted the relevant entries from my journal here:

Day One: Reykjavik to Hrafntinnusker

Day Two: Hrafntinnusker to Hvanngil

Day Three: Hvanngil to Botnar

Day Four: Botnar to Basar (Thorsmork)

Day Five: Basar and around

Day Six: Basar to Reykjavik

Day Seven: Reykjavik to London

Laugavegurinn Day One: Reykjavik to Hrafntinnusker

It’s 8.16am and I’m on the bus. The BSI was teeming with hikers this morning – it looks like Reykjavik decants tourists each morning into the interior…  Some of them look really serious, others less so – a lot of my group have plastic boxes full of fresh food; Avi has a suitcase full of bottled water. I feel rather stripped down, with my packets of dried food. My big red bag suddenly looks quite small and puny, which I find strangely reassuring, in what it says about me and my seriousness. But I must resist the urge to drift into the role of smug know-it-all, no matter how comforting. I’m not sure when I’m going to start talking to people, but I’m quite sure that it isn’t going to be yet.

* * *

It’s a beautiful day – clear blue skies, a bit of a chill in the air, but it’s early yet. Hopefully, it’s going to stay this way. The bus is taking us out through empty moor, past Hveragerdi (and Reykjadalur, where I walked last time; I recognised it immediately, what with the steam columns rising above the valley – there’s not a breath of wind). There are more trees than I remember, but only around settlements and cross-roads. There are ponies, and there are houses on flatbed trucks being transported to who knows where. In the distance, there are bits of snow on the hills; something that looks like a glacier.

* * *

We stop at a service station to meet the guy with the jeep who is to carry our heavy bags to the next hut. But he’s not there, isn’t coming, got the wrong day, is still in bed. So this turns into a rest stop. A couple of the women appear to take the opportunity to sunbathe, others to indulge their desire for ice-cream, for breakfast; me, I find a picnic bench far enough from the petrol pumps, to smoke a cigarette and drink my first coffee of the day. I am aware that no-one else is smoking, which makes me feel like a pariah. A guy called Arne, one of the group, has just come over to chat – he started in Icelandic, but switched easily into English at the cue of my blank incomprehension. Apparently, he lives in England and works in either Sweden or Iceland or both. People lead complicated lives.

* * *

Black lunar landscapes of ash and lava fields. A sign by the dirt road – tarmac is a long way behind us now – in the middle of the sand: “Welcome to Fjallbak. Here we drive on the roads”. And we’ve just driven through a river, passing a group of cyclists. I am entering a place of craziness.

* * *

Evening. A round up of what seems like a long afternoon. After a quick lunch, we set off in the drizzle up Green Ghyll – amazing green rocks along a fast moving stream, pouring out onto the boulder-strewn plain at Landmannalaugur. We rose up to the edge of a lava field, which we snaked through and up until we reached the volcanic plug at the first ridge. The path continued upwards, with ever more stunning views back towards Landmannalaugur. The landscape became more lunar – black lunar – with every moment. Those bits of snow seen from the bus became bigger and closer, until we started walking across them.

We stopped for a break, and I took off my waterproof trousers, it was so warm. As we continued, passing a glacier brilliant in the sunlight, black clouds gathered behind us, and the rain came. My legs were soaking fairly rapidly. Trudging through the rain, across a field of shining black stone – obsidian, I guessed; I picked up a piece for laboratory testing [and back in London, Wikipedia confirmed my guess – should have been a geologist]. Later I found out that the national theatre in Reykjavik is being refaced with it, which everyone thinks is awful, as no-one is supposed to remove it from the area; there are only three sites in Iceland where it is found…

Then over a ridge, and the hut at Hrafntinnusker appeared, stranded in this black and white landscape, punctuated by vibrant splashes of green and plumes of steam. Into the hut – eventually – to dry off and make a first dinner (packet tomato pasta – mmm), slowly learning the ropes. A quick snort of whisky and then a trundle up Sodel (the Saddle), the hill above the hut, for the view (of grey cloud). On the way back, Arne decided to ‘ski’ down a snow slope in his boots to a lower path, while I edged along the traverse, talking football with Jon Karl, the guide.

Before lights out, I’ll describe the group, who are tucked up in their sleeping bags in bunks around the room: aside from Arne, the Icelandic doctor who lives in Oxford, there are Nathan and his girlfriend, Janeen, from Toronto; there’s Dutch Priska and Belgian Anne-Sophie, who appear to be together; an Icelandic woman, Julia, who is travelling alone; the two New Yorkers, Deepa and Rana; a French guy, Michel, who has been coming to Iceland since 1963; Avi, who I assume is Israeli; two Icelandic children, and their mothers, one of whom I think is called Rosa; two Icelandic women, one of whom speaks remarkably good English and lives in Sweden, the other of whom seems to smoke (so I am not alone!); two teenage (I think) Icelanders, who might be called Jona and Katrin; finally there are two Icelandic women, one of whom appears to be called Jona Katrin (see why I’m confused?), the other Asta Bjork. Everyone seems to be getting on fine – very chatty – and I expect that the group will bond further tomorrow. There will probably be trouble by the end though… Enough, good night.

A more complete set of photos is on my Flickr page

Laugavegurinn Day Two: Hrafntinnusker to Hvanngil

Busy chatter and rustling in the hut. People are finishing breakfast and packing for the day. It’s not quite 9am – we’re supposed to leave by 10 – but most people are getting towards done. I’ve eaten my porridge, washed up and am nearly packed. It’s hot in there – it was all night, which, combined with the chorus of snoring, meant I didn’t sleep much. The rain came down hard in the night – I am really very grateful not to be in one of the tents ringing the hut, pitched inside low sheep-pen walls against the wind. But the weather seems to have settled for now – the fog is lifting slowly, and more of the valley, black and white through the grey, is becoming visible. The low humped hills look like giant killer whales, beached on a surreal shore as the cloud sea recedes.

I guess I have 45 minutes to fill my water bottle, finish packing my stuff and make one last use of the latrines, which I think are surprisingly OK for earth closets (although everyone else is rather less impressed). Only the Scandinavians could make holes over a pile of human waste this sanitary. Or maybe the Swiss. I mean, there is even toilet paper.

It’s going to rain today. Probably a lot. Lots of waterproofing – trousers, pack cover, everything – from the off.

* * *

Well, it didn’t rain. And it was a fantastic day’s walking. I’m writing this by torchlight at about half ten, in the hut at Hvanngil – I’m in the upstairs room with Deepa and Rana, Michel and Arne, which is luxurious after last night’s sardine tin. It’s getting dark outside, and the air is thick with sulphur – there is an eruption under the neighbouring glacier – and I’ve left the downstairs room, where there is a sing-a-long in progress – with guitar, somebody brought a guitar! Strange amalgams of songs that start in English and end in Icelandic, or vice versa, some of which I recognise: House of the Rising Sun and You Are My Sunshine.  But enough about now. I’ve had two gin and tonics, thanks to the evermore resourceful Arne, several slugs of whisky, and I think the ‘exposure’ is starting to get to me – I’d better capture the day before I drift off.

* * *

Today’s walk started at 10am as promised, first across the same black and white landscape, before rising to a ridge, where I got a mobile signal, and sent Kitty a text (there is no reception at Hvanngil or anywhere else it would seem). We paused and were passed by an older guy on a bike, who had set out from Landmannalaugur that morning and planned to be in Thorsmork by sundown. Somewhere between awe-inspiring and out-and-out mad.

The path then continued along a small river, dipping up and down, with the ice caves hanging from the steep banks. Once again the colours were various and astounding, the views stupendous. Around midday, we left our packs by the path and took a detour up Haskerdingur (1281m). The ascent involved crossing a small glacier – before we reached the snow and ice, we had crossed a stream-strewn, sandy plain. Jon Karl explained that until recently, the glacier had extended across this plain – he said on 20 year old maps, the area was still marked as glacier; my map, bought this year [2009], also has it marked as glacier, suggesting that the retreat of the ice is even more pronounced.

After crossing the snow-field, the path rose steeply through loose sand and gravel, until it reached the rocky summit plateau. The top gave views over the full majesty of a stunning landscape: to the south a massive dome of ice, which blended with the low cumulus, shrouding its shoulders (the small glacier on maps of Iceland, but it looked big enough to me); then the green pointy mountains and valleys, where I am now; then back across the ochres, blacks and whites of this morning – you could just pick out Hraftntinnusker, where the day had begun. Beyond, were the far, far mountains. It was sublime.

The descent was less so. A steep snow slope, down which I staggered while others strode on and still others ‘skied’ down only in their boots – maybe it’s the Icelandic national winter sport: ski-less ski-ing. Across the glacier, long thin cracks appeared at 20 metre intervals, weak spots where the ice will no doubt sheer away in sections – the implications of them moving at that point didn’t bear thinking about. I chatted with Deepa on the way down – she has similar issues about descents, and a dodgy right knee to complement my left – and we eventually found our way back to the path and lunch.

We followed the river again, until the rocks changed dramatically – soft black shapes, wind-eroded, producing strange overhangs. A waterfall, crashing through a red gash down the mountainside before meeting the green plain 600 metres below – actually, less a plain, more a broad flat-bottomed valley. The path zig-zagged down sharply until we reached a grassy bank by the stream, where we filled our water bottles from the stream and regrouped before heading off again.

Our first river crossing was less adventurous than I anticipated – some made it over with their boots on. After that, I went off ahead towards Alftavatn (Swan Lake) along an easy path through the flat valley bottom – stillness and beauty. The path was reliable enough for me to spend most of the time looking not at my feet but around me at the grand sweep of the hills and the precise details of the flowers littering the valley bottom. At the lake, we regrouped by some huts – some of the group wanted to stay there – sitting in the sunshine.

Then across vibrant green moors until the second, and rather more significant, river crossing – both Priska and Julia fell in the mud. Feet dried and boots replaced, with lush green all around, the river followed us down, under a particularly spiky Tolkein-esque mountain, until we reached this hut at Hvanngil. It is much more relaxed (there is only us and one other small group here) and beautifully set. There are showers too (tomorrow…) and flushing toilets. Some of us – Arne, the Canadians, the New Yorkers and Brynhildur (? – the Icelandic woman living in Sweden) – sat out, chatting, drinking gin and tonics, watching the sun go down. A rainbow-like ice cloud hung over the other side of the valley, defying attempts to capture its glory photographically.

Things are packing up downstairs, and the snoring has started in earnest up here – I’ve just realised that the three star snorers from last night are all in here with me… So I’m going to wrap this up and give Steinbeck a go.

A more complete set of photos is on my Flickr page