Adventures in an igloo

I recommend jump starting the weekend by listening to Mogo Jacket an 80's band that never existed. After that I recommend opening a bottle of bubbly and watching Titanic: The Party goes on .

Finally: Remember to stay away from ghouls, Michael Jackson and Central Bank managers if you are considering going out on fright night.

Just when I thought we had hit rock bottom I read some "genius's" blog where he thinks the solution for our economic crisis is to start hardcore commercial whaling and seal hunting...yeah, because it's not like the rest of the world doesn't hate us enough as it is!

And because it's not like the finbacks that were murdered 2 years ago are still in a huge freezer somewhere because nobody wants to buy their dead carcasses for home consumption!

I'm not even going to post the link to this idiot's blog because I think reading stuff like this joker's brainfarts actually makes people more stupid.

Somebody please create a republic for idiots far far away from the rest of us!

Today is the first day of winter on my rock and the first day of winter is always the first day of the month Gormánuður (this year October 25th- November 23rd). Supposedly it's a sign of a good winter when summer and winter freeze together and they most definately did exactly that last night. As you can see from the pictures from our garden, winter has taken a bite out of our apples and rowan berries, but I think it's an awfully pretty combination and I must say that our first apple pie ever to be made from Icelandic out doors grown apples was darn tasty!

Now on to etymology; Gormánuður means the month of slaughtering animals, pretty gory right? In fact, it seems that my fellow rockers have taken this activity or let's say the fruits of this activity quite seriously since the beginning of the recession. A wave of anti-globalism and a new-found national pride has sprung from the loins of the badly run banks and rockers now run around scratching the hell out of Game Overs I mean Range Rovers.

The return to the old times is quite fascinating for the historian in me but the other day it also left me feeling like an unpatriotic traitor whose car deserved to be scratched...

So, during the recession I, just like everyone else, have starting thinking about how to save money and one way is to eat a lot of parsnips as they are locally grown and thus environmentally friendly, cheap and healthy. I eat them raw as a snack, fried in the oven, boiled with spices and thus turned into a sort of curry and so on and so forth.

However, the other day I got a dreadful craving for aubergines (I found a really nice recipe that required one aubergine and a few button mushrooms so it's not like it was going to be super expensive). So off I went to the grocery store...Little did I know that former bankers and bankers' mums would all be there shopping.

As I stood in the line waiting to pay for the one aubergine I noticed that everyone else had the very big trolleys filled with plastic bottles containing frozen sheep's blood and enormous bags of sheep fat, offal and liver. Yup, everyone and their mum are now chilling in their kitchen, mixing blood and fat (and maybe some raisins for extra flavouring) and stuffing the messy lot into an empty pouch that used to belong to a poor sheep's digestive system. This is then boiled and eaten with parsnip stew and mashed taters. Cheap, messy, tasty and local.


A woman who looked like a former banker's mum (who had 2 full trolleys of innards and blood) looked at my aubergine and I could read from her eyes: Die bourgouisie scum! I started panicking and thought: She's going to follow me out and hit the car I'm driving (a borrowed one btw) with all the weight of her enormous and heavy trolley!

All of a sudden I realized that she wasn't giving me the evil eye because of the blasted eggplant in my hand, no, it was the other item I had just picked up at the register, something so super English that even looking at it made you think of Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, a Toffee Crisp Bar.

Who knows, maybe I deserve my car to be trolleyed for that oversight, if only I had a car available for scratching and trolley attacks, say maybe a Bentley, an Aston Martin or a Land Rover...

The couple naturally had twins, because it was -like so totally- in fashion among the other newly rich.

As soon as the twins could hold a bow, their folks bought wee Stradivarius violins, hired a tutor and made sure that the nanny made sure the kids practised while they were at dinner parties or in St Tropez.

When the crash hit the enormous household, the tutor and the nanny were the first to go.

Unfortunately the twins were diligent little violinists; they played all day long and because the parents could no longer afford somebody to teach them how to play, they found themselves stuck in a neverending suzuki nightmare with no hope of ever hearing a tune played in tune.

It's funny how quickly things change in a globalized world.

It seems like it was only yesterday that you'd see a young and prosperous looking guy in an Armani suit dashing down the street way to fast and his ride was not a white steed, nope it was an enormous silver grey Range Rover. At this sight you thought to yourself: "Oh wow, he must live such an exciting life and his house is probably amazing". You'd feel a bit jealous and wonder what the hell you were thinking: "Why did I go into humanistic stuff at Uni instead of buying a shitload of stocks and bonds and that kind of stuff.

Now, you see the same guy trying to get to social services on his last drops of petrol and you think: "Oh, that poor sod, I really hope he'll be OK".

Which brings me to a little story that according to my sources happened just before the crash.

A friend of mine was out and about the other day and met an old, old friend, someone she hadn't met in ages. This guy was super handsome, wore the most amazing suit, had a lovely tan (the kind you can only get by sailing in the Caribbean on a yacht) and a million dollar smile (compliments of a very good cosmetic surgeon no doubt as she could not recall him being so well teethed on their previous encounters).

Now, females know this but male readers may not realize that many women will create a mental image of desirable men in a split second and our heroine just happens to have a vivid imagination. In the first 10 seconds of the conversation, she'd courted her prince, married him in a fairytale wedding, built a beautiful house with a white picket fence and baked a shitload of birthday cakes for their extremely talented twin girls.

Her dream was shattered by the words: "And this is my wife..."

A split second later the prince and his horrible real life wife had torched the house and impaled the poor twins on the formerly white picket fence while the frosted cakes slowly melted in the heat from the burned remains of the dreamhouse.

What a cruel world it was indeed!

Our heroine's honour was restored yet another split second later when she found out that the prince was an investment banker. She noticed the tan was getting slightly old and looked at his wife with a new-found pity. She then wished the pair all the best for the future and sighed with relief while thinking to herself: "Pheew, now that was a close call!"

Now's definately the time to search for cash in the attic.

Unfortunately there's a bit of a problem: I don't have an attic.

Maybe CERN actually created a black hole the other day when they were messing about with all kinds of particles.

You know, we only have theories about black holes, but nobody's actually seen one let alone fallen into one.

However the Independent seems to have located CERN's black hole on my rock...

Creepy innit?

If I was an economist my head would explode.

"In times of crisis you will find out who your real friends are"
This is a very popular phrase among various Icelandic politicians these days. The scary big brother in the east is once more about to help us out:

The Russians were the first to recognize the independence of Iceland, they traded with us when the British were being mean to us during the Cod Wars and last but not least my first car was an 1982 Lada Niva Jeep straight out of Siberia, god I miss that car!

And here's a few phrases that could come in handy on my rock in the next days:

Мой банковский счет хорош но отскочен банкы = The cheque's good but the bank bounced.

Злейший troll разрушили мой банк, можете вы пожалуйста вызвать полиций? = An evil troll destroyed my bank, can you please call the police?

Какому большому автомату Калашниковаа вы получаете бабушку!= My! That's a big Kalashnikov you've got there grandma!

You see even in times of recession, depression and War of the Austrian Succesion (OK, I just added the last one because it rhymed with the others) one can always find the time to brush up on one's Russian.