spring, but not

today's the day that officially we are all supposed to have removed our winter nail-tires. It's appropriately ironic that today I woke up to a white world, and since then it's been snowing on and off. The view outside my office is one of those classic Icelandic days, the sky aswirl with clouds and pierced by gentle shafts of sunlight. A crowd of seabirds has just taken off and are reeling against

localized memory loss

Last Thursday night the first real autumnal weather arrived, a howling wind that spattered rain on the bedroom windows and tore leaves from the trees. It roared all day Friday, bringing with it a strange high mist that blurred the edges of the landscape. Along with rain, this wind blew in the memory of Iceland when it's not summer.Every year as soon as the darkness disappears in late spring, the

gale force arrival

On Friday I was due to fly back to Iceland but had heard from several people that the weather was not supposed to be particularly friendly, so when I landed in Oslo I started checking the airline website. Everything was cancelled going in or out of the domestic airport, but as far as I could determine there was no disruption whatsoever in the international arrivals.So off we went and just before