My Icelandic odyssey

My husband and I had always meant to live ‘abroad’, as if abroad were a place, defined only by not-Englishness. Scotland might have done, France would have been better, Denmark or especially Sweden, headquarters of Nordic social democracy, would have been ideal, but meanwhile I kept an eye on academic jobs in the US, Canada, and Australia. We settled in Kent, less than ten miles from where Anthony had grown up. We owned a house. The children started school. We had interesting jobs at comfortable salaries. It was all perfectly nice, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t continue to be perfectly nice for the next thirty years. Then Anthony lost his job. Max was unhappy at school. Iceland, sang a newspaper feature read late one night while the children slept, was the happiest country in the world, a Nordic paradise of gender equality, fine schooling and public art. It wasn’t landscape that pulled us this time - or not only landscape - but the idea of a better society. According to the website of the National University which I chanced to encounter at work the next day, Iceland needed an expert in nineteenth-century British literature.

Six months later, I stand in Iceland’s National Museum, under the flat-screen television, doesn’t put us off; I think it seems important not to fear poverty. I think it seems likely to be interesting.