“Icelandic people are very extreme. What's the point in drinking a glass of wine a day? It's a waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of wine. Better to drink a litre of vodka once a week and do it properly, really get out of it.” - Björk

 

It’s fair to say that (in contrast to that shell-suited bloke at Glasgow Airport on the first day of the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud), I love Iceland. This’ll come as no surprise to anyone that’s read my rants against hot weather, or the wholly unnecessary chaos caused in the UK when a handful of snow lands on it. However having just returned from what we think is our twentieth trip to the country, I feel strangely compelled to work out exactly what I find so compelling about this volcanic rock, the size of England but with fewer people than Edinburgh, rubbing up against the Arctic Circle at the high end of the North Atlantic.

 

I’d always wanted to go to Iceland. Genuinely, since the age of five, I can recall being drawn to the north generally and this country specifically, but without ever knowing why, or (on the grounds that I was indeed a five year old) terribly much about the place. A couple of years later, in a geography lesson, I was taught about the Icelandic island of Surtsey, which famously spewed out of the sea as lava in 1963, solidifying to form an entirely new piece of the country, and the 1973 eruption of the nearby island of Heimaey. However, what stuck with me wasn’t the dramatic tale of how islanders there sprayed the flowing lava with seawater to cool it enough that it wouldn’t engulf their harbour - it was that people lived there at all. This was a tiny island off the coast of what I thought was a tiny island, and it had people living on it. Actual people.

 

I’d never previously imagined, as that embarrassingly naive child, that one day I’d visit the country which obsessed me in the oddest and most subconscious way. To do so seemed as remote and unlikely as the prospect of a trip to the moon (although, when I first drove from Keflavík Airport into Reykjavík through the atypically barren Reykjanes peninsula, such a comparison suddenly made a great deal of sense). However, if people lived on Heimaey, I reasoned, then visiting its mother country may not be quite the challenge I’d assumed.

 

Nonetheless, the idea of going to Iceland got filed away in the “one day” box of my teenage brain, along with all manner of other nonsense like studying and sobriety. It wasn’t until I met my other half in the mid-nineties, and a holiday was suggested, that it started to sensibly form. By then, Icelandair were running regular flights from Glasgow, and combining one with accommodation and car-hire in a package (just) took the edge off what  we would soon learn was the country’s quite astonishingly high prices.

 

The minute I landed at Keflavík, Iceland’s then charmingly ramshackle but now sprawling international airport, I felt like I’d come home. Luckily, my partner isn’t really what you’d call a sun-seeker (and even more luckily for me that remains the case to this day), so he wasn’t at all unhappy about the prospect of two weeks very much not in its company. We ventured out into Reykjavík, a city frozen solid at minus 10, and devoured a cheap(ish) pizza at Kaffi Hornið. It’s still there, at the heart of the old downtown, but much, much else has grown around it.

 

The next fortnight was spent driving around Route One - a gigantic ring which encircles almost the entire coast of the island, and which taught me, very quickly, my first two Icelandic phrases: “blindhæð” and “malbik endar”, respectively meaning “blind summit”, and “metalled road coming to an end”. Because it was about to turn, very suddenly, from tarmac to gravel. I learned very quickly that you don’t want to be in fifth gear at 100kph while making that transition.

 

When we left a fortnight later, I knew we would be back. I didn’t realise then however, the extent to which this remarkable country would continue to exert its influence on us. Over the next two decades, I began to understand why.

 

Sitting a few weeks ago with friends in Ölstofa, one of Reykjavík’s most straightforwardly enjoyable bars, we got talking about the extreme nature of the country. Yes, of course, that extreme nature can be summed up in a way which is as elemental as it is cliched, with reference to fire and ice, but the almost binary feel of the nation is everywhere.

 

Iceland wags a taxing finger at alcohol, applying duty four times between the brewery to the glass, but keeps all its bars and clubs open until 5am every weekend night. At its swimming pools, you’ll bathe outdoors in hotpots kept at 42 degrees and walk between them at zero. It claims all kinds of environmental goodliness with its renewable geothermal energy sources and hydrogen powered buses, whilst crisscrossing its capital city with a fantastic motorway network on which locals (and I) zip about in cars ranging from the ubiquitous Toyota Yaris to Grand Cherokee Jeeps on massive pumped-up wheels. It boomed, then crashed, then threw its corrupt bankers in jail, then collectively refused to pay Dutch and British banks for the crimes of those people, then saw its economy start to grow again at a rate which outstrips almost all of Europe. Its second biggest musical export after the aforementioned Björk, Sigur Rós, switch almost at random between producing delicate minimalist piano soundscapes, and dense thunderous orchestral rock that sounds like the last and most beautiful thing you’ll ever hear. It’s a billion, gazillion years old and still forming. It’s ethnically homogenous and so linguistically “pure” that five year olds can read the original Sagas, written a thousand years ago (try that with Chaucer), but a society as liberal, cosmopolitan and welcoming as it’s possible to imagine; the first country, for example, to elect a female head of state and a lesbian prime minister, and one which happily integrates migrants into even its furthest-flung corners. It is intellectual, enlightened and thoroughly rational, yet still designs roads that avoid disturbing the homes of the huldufólk - the elves.

 

It is like no other place on Earth.

 

If I were to design a country that thinks like me, sounds like me, spends like me and lives like me, and cloak it in a climate also designed exactly - exactly - to my specification, I’d be looking at a map of Iceland right now. In fact, I am; willing the days until our next trip to pass faster than an Icelander thundering down the outside lane in his Toyota Land Cruiser. I want to go home again.