Iceland Air

I was very excited about our stopover in Reykjavik on the way to London. Iceland is, of course, the most literate country on earth. Its libraries’ shelves are usually about two-thirds empty, because so many volumes are in circulation. Every Christmas, Icelanders buy enough books to supply three to every man, woman, and child on the island. They have the highest per-capita number of artists and writers in the world. All this, in a country where the prime minister still lists her number in the phone book. I expected great things.

The flight itself, on Iceland Air, was educational. Instead of polyester flaps on the headrests, the seats had squares of cream-coloured leather, elegantly embroidered with useful tips on Icelandic life and language. Take care, for example, not to confuse the noun form of the word “love” (àst) with its verb form, or you might end up saying, “I ate you." The in-flight entertainment included similar tid-bits, informing us that two-thirds of the Icelandic population believe in elves, and that the national dish is cured shark-flesh.

The flight crew were all flaxen women with flat cheekbones, who seemed perfectly capable of killing any of us with a thumb, if necessary; the head attendant, Helga, was a strapping Juno with a pillbox hat. Communication with the passengers was mostly in Icelandic, in which delightful language, flight announcements are tilkynningen and cosmetics are snyrtivòrur. English translations were also provided, but tended to contain unhelpful errors. One instruction concerning lifevests, for example, suggested that we securely fasten our seatbelts around them. I was also a bit disappointed to discover that the breakfast did not include many kinds of herring, and that swan-shaped cocktail dresses were not included in the airline’s dutyfree catalogue.

Our entire experience on the ground in Reykjavik consisted of a half-hour gate delay, followed by a dash through the airport to catch our waiting connection flight. As gate delays go, however, I’ve never had a better. It was just dawn, and the fields around the runway were clustered with blossoming lupines – so many, that the eye lost the green of the leaves with distance, and saw only a luxuriant blanket of mauve blooms. Snow buntings burst out of the flowers to loop and zoom and generally behave like drunk stunt pilots. On the horizon, the marshland flats gave way to low, black mountains and a sky of shining mist.

I’ve since discovered that wild lupines aren’t native to Iceland; they were recently imported from Alaska to help rehabilitate lowland areas affected by deforestation. Lupines are good ground cover for erosion-prone land, and fix nitrogen in the soil to boot, but they’ve taken over so completely that botanists now fear for the native lichens and mosses which were still surviving among the tussocks and rocks. Only in Iceland do serious environmental threats come with a faint, sweet scent, and delicately patterned white-and-purple petals.