Iceland

I've always wanted to go to Iceland. I think each year for the last 12 we have sat down and worked out whether we could go, and scrapped plans early on. This year though, for our 10th anniversary things were in its favour. The exchange rate was also suddenly more favourable; instead of the hypothetical budget revealing that it would be hideously expensive to visit, this year's calculations showed it to be just very expensive indeed.

Reykjavik is well documented in the travel guides, and so in order to do something completely different, I plumped for Akureyri in the north, attracted by its remoteness and the fact that it is situated at the base of a fjord. This turned out to be an inspired move, and the perfect antidote to a life lived mostly in Croydon and the hustle, bustle, crowds and drudgery that goes with it. Up there, it was all peace, quiet, relaxation, space and beauty. And chilled out people - I guess literally, seeing as there was still a real cold bite in the air in June.

I know there's a trap here with this get-away-from-it-all whingeing. I hear it when people say things like, "I'm going to go away and do NUFFINK for 2 weeks." As much as doing NUFFINK appeals after working all year, in my case in a bunker surrounded on all sides by waste recycling plants (yep! Welcome to my life. Wish you were here. And I wasn't ...) nevertheless, I want a bit more reward for going through that than doing nothing for 2 weeks only to return to it all again for another 50 weeks until I can go away somewhere and do nothing again. After all, it's a break from work, not a period of convalescence after a major operation. Right?

So in 36 hours we travelled the length of the fjords, went up and down volcanos, toured around lakes, walked around geysers, weird lava formations and dead and live volcanos, swam in natural springs, and trod the length and breadth of Akureyri.

Of course, it's easy to be this prolific when it doesn't really go dark; its never too late or too early to check out a place of interest. People who I've spoken to about this can't really get their heads around what the 24 hour daylight thing is like. But it's not like the sun is in the middle of the sky all day. It goes from light to less light, and then light again. I'm sitting here typing this in my (I mean, the landlord's) back garden in Surrey at 8.45pm on the longest day of the year, and the light is about the same as it I saw it in Akureyri when I was going to bed after midnight. You might get the umpires consulting about it and they may offer it to the batsmen. And if say, there were a couple of overs left in the final test and the batsmen fancied going for victory, they would play on. In Reykjavik, at least at the beginning of June, it is not quite as bright - it gets a bit dusky for an hour or two and then it's daylight again without really having got dark. Well, I've tried to explain it there, haven't I? For a free blog, I've given it a pretty good go. This photo was taken at about 11.30pm:I had wondered how easy it would be to sleep when there is no real night to speak of (the photo below was taken at about 11.30pm). For me it was easy. This is probably due to my sleeping environment as a child. If I remember correctly, I grew up sleeping in a room with yellow curtains. My memory is vague on the subject, but I think that at one point these were replaced by light green ones, so both sets of drapery were obviously more concerned with guarding privacy than from shutting light out from the room. Well, I can thank those curtains for preparing me to sleep soundly in summer in Northern Iceland. There is an unfortunate after-effect of this side of my upbringing though. If a place has shutters that completely block out the light, I struggle to wake up. I stayed in an aparthotel with these types of shutters with my friend Mark when I first moved to Madrid. I remember he said it was "like living with a corpse." The in-laws have shutters aswell. I tend to crawl out of bed to eat there. And then crawl back into it again until I am summoned for the next meal. But I digress. On to Reykjavik....

Due to the previous over-exertion, doing nothing was beginning to appeal once we got to Reykjavik. Except doing nothing in Reykjavik is impossible. And undesirable anyway. This is due mostly to the noise, as it gets rowdy at the weekend. All travel guides and articles on Reykjavik stress the hardcore dedication the Icelanders have to their pub crawls and partying raucously of a weekend. I can't say I was too keen on getting caught up in all this. I've slowly gotten sick to death of the binge drinking "culture" (or lack of) in the UK, especially now that it consists mostly of kids copying unfunny adverts for alcoholic beverages. Recently I read an interview with Bjork where she defended binge drinking and couldn't understand why it was getting such bad press over here. After a weekend in Reykjavik, I understand why. Drunk people in the UK are boring and charmless. Drunk Icelanders in Reykjavik are ace. Simple.

People really do go for it, and not just the youth. Even so, I only saw this result in a very good-natured, joyful sort of .... carnage. Nothing like a Saturday night in your typical UK town centre. People are more cheerful, more understanding, more accommodating of each other, and perhaps most significantly, they are considerably more drunk.

So Saturday I thought I'd join in.

Sunday was quiet.

Of course, Sunday night it was still light, giving me time to fully recover, swim in the Blue Lagoon, and check out the Golden Circle, part of which is the impressive waterfall at Gulfoss:

I found Icelanders to be cultured, even-tempered and trusting. Iceland is a great and beautiful place. It's been in the news a lot recently. I hope the coming years are kind to it.

Chris Take a Bow

My first post in a good while is a homage to the new Springwatch presenter Chris Packham, standing in for Bill Oddie during this spring's series, specifically for achieving the remarkable feat of surreptitiously slipping in 30 Smiths song titles into his commentary while observing nature over the course of the series.

None of this was let on about, and all of it was delivered deadpan, so at first I was wondering if I was hearing things. But once you hear how a Great Bustard looks like a Vicar in a Tutu, you know there's some kind of mischief going on. This added a surreal hilarity to a show which is great anyway. As Chris spotted the birdlife, insects and small mammals, we were spotting the Smiths song titles as they cropped up in his commentary. In the last couple of episodes it became more blatant as they started coming thick and fast - 16 titles in the last 2! And to finish off the final episode he presented his female colleague Kate Humble with a bunch of gladioli. Genius!

These were the song titles he got in over the series. Now added to my ipod as the Chris Packham Springwatch Smiths Playlist: :)

Hand in Glove
What Difference Does it Make
Handsome Devil
Frankly Mr. Shankly
You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby
Vicar in a Tutu
Bigmouth Strikes Again
The Queen is Dead
Stop Me if You Think You've Heard This One Before
Still Ill
Sweet and Tender Hooligan
Oscillate Wildly
Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
This Charming Man
Ask
Well I Wonder
Asleep
Cemetery Gates
Nowhere Fast
Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
Unloveable
Sheila Take a Bow
I Know Its Over
William It Was Really Nothing
I Started Something I Couldn't Finish
Paint a Vulgar Picture
These Things Take Time
Headmaster Ritual
Is It Really So Strange?
Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

What a guy!

http://www.chrispackham.co.uk/

Greenwich

For years people have been telling me how I should go up to Greenwich Park, to see the view of London. For some reason I forgot this advice as soon as it was given, but found myself there on a day off in mid-November. One of those use-it-or-lose it things. Well they were right. Right where you'd least expect it are acres of parkland, and the Greenwich observatory which looks down on the capital. Here is the view towards Canary Wharf and its gaggle of skyscrapers. This was taken towards the end of the day when the sun started to poke its head through the clouds.

I am aware that these posts are getting fewer and further between. I think I might revert to quarterly round-ups for the poor faithful few who like to check out how I'm doing. So treat this as the Christmas one.

The Madrid skyscrapers I have been following on their way up are now almost done. Here's 2 of them (left). Whether they will be as much of an economic boon as they have been mooted now that Spain joins most of the rest of the West in fighting off a depression remains to be seen. They do look great though. I have to think that a lot of the aesthetic pleasure has to do with the blue-sky backdrop that the Madrid climate guarantees for most of the year.

In contrast, London's Canary Wharf (below), looks far more prosaic, surely due to the grey backdrop:

Risking subjecting you to a sensory overload of pictures, here are some of Brighton, taken on a bright December Saturday. I don't get many Saturdays off, so when you wake up and it's a sunny day, it's screaming out for a trip to Brighton.

We were treated to a sunset show of billions of starlings flying en masse. You know that thing they do. There will be a proper name for it, I'm sure. Billions is probably an exaggeration. Of course. Here they are massing over the ruins of the old pier.

One great thing about going to Brighton in the winter it isn't as overcrowded as it is the rest of the year. Which means strolling into a vegetarian restaurant and getting a table, plus food, with no wait. And 10fers on fairground rides! I even got Mrs. Alan Wright Appreciation Society to go on a few of them. There was also the obligatory stop off at the John Peel bar before the train home, with free seats at the bar. Perfect!

I should have done the lottery that day..........

Paris

I don't think I can add anything to cyberspace by posting predictable pictures of me standing by the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame or the Louvre (all of which I visited, and loved) so here's a nice shiny statue. I'll leave you to make the educated guess at where and what it is. (Not that I've forgotten, of course ..... gulp).

Last time I went to Paris was, I think, in 2001 or 2002 on a training course. On that occasion, I was surprised how I still had the (limited) vocabulary I had gained from studying 'O' level French, which I had taken 16 years previously, and how I could use it to make a pretty good fist of communicating for everyday needs. The frightening thing this time, another 7 years on, was that this bedrock of vocab knowledge had gone. There must be material for a study in the limitations of long-term memory in there somewhere....

Nevertheless my lamentable attempts at communication in French, based on the improvised method of Frenchifying some Spanish expressions, were met with humour and good grace by the Parisians I came across. I was surprised at the friendliness and good humour of the people in Paris. There is a lot of guff talked about how the French are hostile to Britons - in my experience the French were less hostile to this particular Briton than many Britons!

Something that keeps cropping up when I visit other cites are these little space invaders appearing on walls. I think I first cottoned on to this in Melbourne and had seen it again recently in Bilbao.There must be a website dedicated to this phenomenon, but where to start with it?

Well, lo and behold, a search of "space invaders walls cities" in Google reveals all. There is some bloke doing it and this is his website:

http://www.space-invaders.com/faq_uk.html

And he's got to 35 cities so far. On the site, there's a nice map of the world with space invaders marking where he has put up these little murals. Aparently though, these things have started springing up in places where he hasn't actually been. Sort of like Space Invader sleeper cells. I think there might even be one of those in Bath, as I'm sure I've seen one there.


I'm not sure if this one of Oscar the Grouch belongs to the same set...... or maybe it is a rival "invader"-type artist who puts up Sesame Street character murals under cover of darkness.


Hang on....

.....


No. A search on Google for Sesame cities walls and Oscar cities walls finds nothing.


A pleasant thing to see in Paris were the flashing lights on the Eiffel Tower. This seemed to happen on the hour every hour after it got dark. On the last night we made our way along the stretch from the base of the tower to the Trocadero to sit down and watch this, and found that there were dozens of people doing the same thing, most of whom were entrenched in a good spot to see it with sandwiches and drinking wine out of plastic cups. What a great idea! Fun, simple, in beautiful surrroundings, and what's more, free.

The perfect night out - credit crunch style!!

Expo 08 - Zaragoza

I'm spoilt this year, what with Liverpool hosting the Capital City of Culture and Zaragoza hosting the Expo. The theme for the Expo in Zgz was water. Countries from all over the world take up building space in a dedicated compound and, in most cases, show you something interesting about water - engineering projects for its collection, distribution, purification. Talks, films, food... Hang on. I'm making it sound far less interesting than it actually is...

I'll just post some pretty pictures:

Ooh, what's that?

This was taken from inside the water tower, and is a sculpture of falling water suspended from the ceiling. You walk up the tower (about 100m) in slowly ascending concentric circles and marvel at this thing from all angles. It's quite a trek on the way up, so to find a nice glass of Ambar, one of my favourite beers, waiting at the top was a simple but welcome joy. I had a similar thing at the Guinness museum in Dublin. Growing up in Liverpool, I would drink Guinness at about age 17 or 18 - didn't really like the taste of lager or bitter - and people would say "You've not tasted a proper pint of Guinness until you've tasted one in Ireland." They would tell you how much nicer it is over there. Well after several hours following the trek up the Guinness museum to the top where the bar is, the free pint of Guinness certainly was the best one I've ever drunk. It didn't taste any better, it was just so gratefully received after all the exertion. And permit me to scotch the myth. Let it be known - it tastes exactly the same in Ireland as it does in the UK.

But I don't half digress.

I have to admit that before going I had no idea which form the Expo would take, and I was surprised to see that it takes place in a dedicated site; a little like a theme park, but instead of people queueing to go on rides, they queue to go into countries' exhibitions. The at the end of the night there is a performance art-based spectacle with a right-on message about the environment.

I had previously been a bit harsh on the celebrations in Liverpool for being ramshackle, and I had a moan about the failure to finish the construction work in the city centre. The Expo had no such drawbacks, but it is a completely different type of event - easier to navigate, and probably easier to put on. The City of Culture is more a full year-long calendar of different cultural events, whereas Expo is the same event repeated daily over a period of a few months, contained within its own site on the outskirts of town. I still found it impossible to see everything in 2 days though. Some of the queues put Alton Towers to shame. I never will know what was in the Japan, Korea or Kuwait bits - every time I looked at those places there were queues well past the 3-hour wait signs. South America was good - free nibbles and cocktails, the odd musical performance. No representation from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia or Canada. Strange.




I can't get enough of these pictures......

Grey August

It's been a while since the last post - could be a while before the next as I have been doing little of sufficient interest to post about. Having been relieved of both our cameras due to a couple of unfortunate occurences, I've been looking through the pictures most recently taken in case there may be something of passing interest that I had forgotten about.

Here's something. On a trip up to my home town to check out the Capital City of Culture, on the way back to Moorfields station I came across this artefact:


This is a circular chunk of the facade of the now defunct Yates' Wine Lodge, which constantly spins slowly in and out of the building. This place has memories for me of drinking nights while in Sixth Form. We would stop here deliberately as it sold something called "Aussie Whites". I have no idea what Aussie Whites were/are, or why it was decreed a must-have for a night out in town. From memory it was some sort of fortified wine. It wasn't white either, it was more like a dark sherry colour. Knowing what I now know about Australian wines, and about how great they generally are, I'm wondering what the hell it was we were drinking!

Time for a Google search......

Well, there you go. A port/wine mix that they still do in Yates' apparently.

Apart from this last little fascinating distraction, I found the City of Culture thing, whatever that actually is, to be a bit disappointing. They have knocked down Quiggins to replace it with your generic UK/US city high street mall, hence to a certain extent ridding the city of its culture for the sake of the "City of Culture," erm, "event."

Throughout the year, a number of events is put on to attract people to the city. On this weekend it was the Tall Ships (below). Growing up about 5 miles up the coast to the north of the city centre, I had seen the tall ships come and go from the banks of the Mersey Estuary on a few occasions. This is a great sight to see. For this weekend, all the ships were docked in the centre, and available for people to jostle for position to see while being funneled through a one-way system around various docks. Not quite the same. I would loved to have seen the sail-off for Norway on the Monday.

Part of my problem with "08" is that the city looks like it is still only about one-quarter built for its own celebratory event. You would have thought that for the year you're looking to show off your city to the world, it would at least be finished. I could be looking at this all wroing, with my glass half empty, but as I'm only going back for the odd weekend, I worry that my underwhelming experience must be shared by people who visit the city to attend the event.

It's a shame. Living away from the city, you notice how much people tend to have a (mostly unjustified) negative perception of Liverpool, and I don't see this event as helping very much, when surely part of its purpose is exactly that - to help change people's perception of the city for the better?

Up the road in Formby pinewoods, we checked in on the red squirrels. The poor things have almost died out in Merseyside, as I understand it mostly due to a pox that grey squirrels can withstand, but the red ones can catch and die from. The situation hasn't improved in the past year, but there were 3 or 4 feeders out on the Saturday morning. Here's one:


Given the problems that the red squirrels are having in the UK, I was amazed to come across a bunch of them while on holiday in Gijón, tamely appraoching people in a public park. So I take it this is a local problem as opposed to a species-wide problem?

Time for another Google search.......

Well, they are definitely in trouble in the UK, only 140,000 left, with the species being confined further and further North. This is compared to 2.5 million grey squirrels. But why do the greys get so much bad press? I've been noticing recently how more and more people are gleefully disparaging about grey squirrels - how they are vermin, and that they drive the red squirrels out. This is not in fact true. They are not dirty. Nor are they aggressive to native species. They just happen to be strong and adaptable. People actually brought them over to this country. It's not the squirrels' fault. They didn't invade.

Plenty of interesting facts on red squirrels are available from the awesome Red Squirrel Group website www.redquirrels.org. I see they are distributed across the UK and Europe including Northern Spain. Aha!

Summer festivals

First festival of the season for me was the Love Music Hate Racism event in Victoria Park, Hackney, preceeding the local elections in May. Considering the event's heritage, I thought that although its heart was in the right place, the impact was blunted by featuring a poor line-up. Here you can see our bewilderment in trying to find something worth seeing.

Biggest attraction was Damon Albarn's side project who played mostly stuff that sounded like funeral songs. Says something when you're praying for him to throw in something from his Chinese Opera. Having said that, I enjoyed the day. And the BNP got nothing out of the local elections, so maybe it was more effective than I had thought.

Next up was Glastonbury.

It's impossible to explain what Glastonbury festival is like to someone who hasn't been there, and anybody who has gone already knows what it's like, so I won't bother trying to explain why it is so good. It just is. And where else can you see Leonard Cohen, Gilbert O'Sullivan (twice), Alphabeat, Ben Folds, Franz Ferdinand, British Sea Power, The Racontuers, Billy Bragg, Manu Chao, Neil Diamond, We are Scientists, 4 Poofs and a Piano and Shakin' Stevens at the same festival?

I can see how some people would blanch at the prospect of all these oldies but goldies, like the joke was on the audience. But you only realise when you go why you wouldn't want to miss these sets. Example par excellence of this serendipity was Leonard Cohen, whose set was the best of the weekend, and to whom we had turned up initially out of mere curiosity.

Another example of serendipitous fun: The photo above is of the back of a door painted green that some Shaky fans doggedly held up during his entire set. Amusingly, this served the dual purpose of requesting Green Door and protesting against Jay-Z headlining. Shaky, amazingly, didn't play it. He did play This Ole House, though.

I didn't see Jay-Z's inclusion as that much of a controversy. If he's not your cup of tea, you can just go to one of the other 25 acts on at the same time. I did. His biggest hit is a sample of a heavy rock anthem anyway. It's not exactly like having 50 Cent headline. Mind you, there's always next year. As a counter measure to this possible trend, I will spend another year cracking wishbones and wishing for Steely Dan.

Last weekend was the O2 festival in Hyde Park, London. Noone who goes to 02 can be taken by surprise by its corporate nature, but it makes the V festival look like Glastonbury. £3 for a foldaway A4 print out of the line-up. I tramped around until I found someone brandishing a photocopy and wrote the listings down in pen. £3 up! Result! All the times were wrong mind you, but anyway...

You couldn't help but spot the differences with Glastonbury. At Glasto you get all kinds of age groups. O2 seemed to be mostly populated with trust fund students, such as the gaggle of girls sitting cross-legged on the lawn, yards from the stage while Beck was playing Loser. Swaying side to side, fag in one hand, Pimms in the other, they trilled in unison, "So don't let me go..." instead of "Soy un perdedor" which is the actual lyric from the song. Oh dear.

Mind you, despite the abundance of this sort of lameness, I have nothing to complain about O2. It was an enjoyable, well-run festival with a great sound. One particularly pleasing thing was how easy it is to get around. You can breeze around all 4 stages in 5 minutes. None of the stoic endeavour and elaborate planning required to get between stages in Glastonbury. I can't say I noticed any sound interference from the other stages either, despite their proximity. So I got there after work and strolled round to see Siouxsie, Beck, Guillemots and Howling Bells before headliner Morrissey, who played the best set I've ever seen from him. Crystal clear sound and a crowd so enthusiastic I almost thought I was back in Spain for a minute. Ah yes ... that would be me wishful thinking. No Benicassim for us this year... downer.