This crunchy melty hooha has got me thinking about the nature of Icelandic jam
The grimmest assessment of the world economic meltdown that I have seen came not from a banker or a politician or a pundit, but from Kristian, a 53-yearold Icelandic fisherman quoted in the Times. ‘The priorities went askew,’ he sighed. ‘We thought we could have jam on our bread every day of the week.’ God. Think about that. Couldn’t the pathos of it just make you weep? Not even toast, you’ll notice. Bread. Toast is a stuff of which the Icelandic fisherman has yet to dream. Had the glacial streams run sluggish with diamonds, had the cod grown golden teeth and scales of silver, ah yes, that would have been a time for toast. In a mere unprecedented economic boom, bread was luxury enough. Bread with jam.
I don’t mean to go on about this, but I had a hunch that Icelandic jam probably wasn’t one of the premier jams around. So I Googled it. ‘Icelandic Jam’. Turns out there only is one Icelandic jam. It’s called rabarbarasulta, and it is rhubarb jam. It has to be rhubarb jam, because no real fruits will grow in Iceland. I found a recipe online. It was very short. ‘Remove the leaves,’ it begins. ‘They are poisonous.’ I don’t know if you have read Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel set thousand of years in the future, long after culture, society and language have broken down. It’s all phonetic, although you aren’t always sure what it is phonetic of. At one point, Riddley, the hero, comes across the vast and crumbling ruins of some sort of 20th-century power station, and it is all too huge, impressive and lost for him to comprehend. ‘O what we ben!’ he raves. ‘And what we come to!’ I mention this because I always thought it the most powerful, woeful lament I would ever read. And then I heard about Kristian, from Iceland.
They had ideas above their station, the Icelanders. They dared to dream. And even then, as the cash flowed in and their banks swelled to 11 times their GDP, the thing they dreamed of was daily access to the nonpoisonous bits of a rhubarb. Sugared and smeared. On bread. Not even on toast. They had it, they took it for granted, and now they’ve lost it. O what they come to! And what they ben!
Even Icelandic bread, as it turns out, was made of crushed dried fish until the late 19th century because they didn’t have any grain. But God, enough of that. Iceland isn’t the point. Iceland is merely an example, the scout who walks into the ambush, the miner’s canary of our changing world. They aren’t going to starve, they’ll just have to give up their dreams. Maybe all of our dreams will look foolish pretty soon. Theirs, yours, mine. Even David Cameron’s.
It’s a weird paradox, I think, but it is always easier to imagine a change at the top when a country is basically in good nick. It’s 1945, the war is finally over, let’s give that Attlee fellow a crack, shall we? It’s 1997, Britain has climbed out of a recession and kept on climbing, ooh, wouldn’t it be fun to have a PM who can play the guitar? There are counter-examples, surely, such as the Lady herself; times when the straits become so dire that there is no stopping the allure of a clean sweep. Knock it all down, and start again. Only, that’s never quite been the way that Cameron’s Conservatives have sold themselves. It’s not easy to see how they would.
Obviously, it’s hard to see Brown clinging on next time, whenever next time is. Although suddenly the Tories seem destined for a grey, stolid sort of mini-victory, devoid of enthusiasm or purpose. More of a Labour loss. How can they recapture their fire? They can’t warn that the world is turning to hell. If you see hell ahead, ‘better the devil you know’ starts to make a lot more sense. And change, in a time of flux, has lost its currency. Or, to indulge in the pun, it’s hard to get excited about big change when you are saving your small change.
People are happiest taking risks when they feel safe or feel desperate. Most likely, this crunchy melty hooha will leave us feeling neither. It’s a grey miasma of a slump to the grim lower middle. We’re not going to starve, we’ll just be giving up on our dreams. We’ve still got the bread, we just won’t have the jam. Or, at least, not every day.
The whole thing about cats is that they can’t move their faces. Their furry, slinky, general huggability is counterbalanced, perfectly, by the way they can stare at you as though you could be an armchair. There’s no snout, no cheeks to speak of, barely any eyebrows or nose. They can’t do anything else. They whole effect wouldn’t work nearly so well if they were facially bald. They would look like Joan Rivers.
Or Joe Biden. Much discussion in Washington right now, I gather, about the way that his face has been changing. ‘It’s a little strange that nothing moves from his eyes on up,’ one body language specialist tells the Washington Post. ‘He clearly has had Botox,’ adds a nameless Republican doctor. ‘The lines are gone on his forehead.’ A degree of paralysis of the eyelids can be another unwanted side-effect. Hence, perhaps, they way the senator from Delaware has also started to look as though he is always almost falling asleep.
Over to camp Biden. ‘Completely unsubstantiated,’ says a spokesman. ‘My goodness! Can’t we actually talk about the economy, the millions of foreclosures and the fact that Americans lost two trillion bucks this month? Seriously?’ This is, of course, brilliant. It could be the perfect example of the non-denial denial. Downing Street, I seem to recall, said something very similar when Tony Blair popped up with fake tan in the run up to the Iraq war. You people! How can anybody even think about things like this when the world is in this state? With catlike insouciance, it completely blanks the fact that if Biden did have Botox, this is the whole point. One wonders if the spokesman blushed or blinked. Or even if he could.
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