An Adventure

This is a story of heroism and derring-do, travel and alarums. But first a picture of my brother walking safely on the frozen Tjörn. We call this proleptic irony.

On the last full day my brothers had here with me in Iceland, we decided to rent a car and go to see Vík, a beautiful black-sand beach at almost the very south of the country. It's about 180 kilometres from Reykjavík. The town's real name is Vík í Myrdal (I can't work out how to put an accent on the letter 'y', but just imagine it's there), which means 'Bay in the Marshy Vale'. But don't let that put you off. Ben drove all the way there and back, excellently.

We left as the sun was coming up, at about eleven am. It's not a particularly exciting drive, but you know, it's authentically Icelandic. We stopped at various points to drink coffee, take pictures of waterfalls

and admire Icelandic agricultural machinery.

We also noticed the desire to live in large communities which is so manifest an element of the Icelandic character.

We got to Vík at about two pm. There are some nice stacks there


and Tom and Ben performed a few characteristic activities, viz. taking photographs of sand and walking about looking rugged.

The adventure started shortly after I took this photograph. I was standing on a rock facing the beach, when suddenly a larger-than-normal breaker hit me from behind and knocked me over. The North Atlantic ocean is particularly chilly in early December. I got up fairly quickly, certainly before the next wave came along, but I was sodden wet, in the middle of Iceland and without any dry clothes. So, we hurried back to the car and I took my trousers off. There is a photo of me, naked from the waist down, in the passenger seat of the car, but I'm not going to share it with just anyone. Ben and Tom were both incredibly competent and highly compassionate. Ben picked me up. Tom gave me his spare jumper and bought a large beach towel covered with puffins in the souvenir shop at Vík for me to cover my modesty (which, given the cold water, was a more-than-adequate fig leaf). Ben allowed me to sit my naked self on his jumper so as not to get the car seat wet. Oddly enough, he decided not to wear the jumper today. We drank a lot of coffee and then pottered home, because it was getting dark. Excitement enough. One interesting thing is that in the time it took me to get hit by the wave, fall over and get up again, all my pockets were filled with sand. So I am finding little bits of gravel and pummice and basalt all over my bedroom today. Time for a spring-clean (pre-Christmas-clean) perhaps.

Twilight looks pretty much the same at both ends of the day.