Reykjavík

There's something about the grandeur, the isolation and the simplicity of Iceland that reminds me of things I saw in New Zealand. The outdoors is the lifestyle, perhaps. Or maybe the tin rooves are common.

There's also something ironic about having your heating on and the windows open - is it because geothermal energy is so cheap? And water conservation isn't high on the priority list either.

We went to the Perlan revolving restaurant on a water tank but the revolving restaurant was closed because the geothermal hot water storage tank is being upgraded to include a museum. This is a practical nation, people who are finding novel ways to entertain the tourists who outnumber them by 4 or maybe 5:1. And it must have been such pragmatism that guided them to build the bejewelled Harpan Concert Hall during the worst of the 2008 recession.

Overheard at breakfast, an Irish contender for Private Eve's Pseuds Corner - "O'Donnovan Rossa was bourgeois."

Not puffin or minke or foal but tomato juice, carrot juice, double espresso, miso soup, pickled herring and a boiled egg - breakfast buffets are fun, especially after a 6 km sunrise walk on Reykjavik's icy Saebraut seafront pathways, in April snow flurries. I was happy to see a large flock of Eider down on the sea below me and a pair of Whooping Swans flew past, birds I don't normally encounter.

People had placed inukshuks along the coast and the snowy mountains on the other side of the bay dominated the view, just being there, like this sentence. 

"Independent People": how excited and proud were Icelanders when Halldor Laxness won the 1955 Nobel prize for literature, just eleven years after independence from Denmark? Sixty years on, it seems that beating both England and Ireland in soccer have assumed more importance to their daily lives.

PS Here's a tip for managing the expense of Iceland - budget for a seven day trip and stay only three.

Arise

This morning I have woken up to a bright day. There's enough light to facilitate photography. Encouraged,  I look. And I'm in catch-up mode. After a very short walk we did this morning, a day after rugby results went our way.

A dusting of ice runs along the ridgeway of the neighbours house, a line of warm white smoke emerges from their chimney, rising vertical into still cold airs. A hooded crow, maybe two, is hammering something on the flat roof above my head. Or perhaps our neighbour will see there are a couple of crows dancing.

There's finely macerated leaf material wind splattered and rain smeared on the bedroom window. Memories of the fierce storm just a couple of nights ago. Last night's excitement was a police helicopter whose searchlight passed through our garden at 2 AM. Z watched it from beside us as we slept, oblivious.

Below my third story perch, a domed green-grey acacia has budded with an explosion of spring yellow that contrasts with the open nature of the blue Douglas fir and vertical funeral green of the Italian cypress. A small garden that may be too full.

with a crunching sound

the praying mantis devours

the face of a bee

Yamaguchi Seishi

The sea beyond looks calm. The bay appears blue. Calm and blue, cold. Ferries and freighters cut across the bay. The brown trees, leafless, frame the view yet flicker with magpies, jewel like in the low winter sun. Another ephemeral shimmer in the far distance, sunlight reflecting from a glazed surface that I know to be at least 25 km away. Half way there is a friend's house I could see with the right lens.

A photograph might bring any of these things to reality better than the words I have used. The smoke will be frozen, like the ridgeway. The rattle of the magpies, the thrum of the helicopter, the mantis crunch, the hammering of the crows you'd have to imagine.

The air is always still in a photo so you'd need visual clues to imply / sense movement. The temperature of the sea becomes irrelevant unless the image includes something like dinghies crewed by the hardy in wet suits. The dirt on the double glazed window will disappear in the deep depths of image field or emerge pin sharp if it becomes the object in focus.

Such ambiguity of content is in stark contrast with the precision of technique in its portrayal.

The pleasing photograph pleases whom? And how much time will the viewer have? What does the image need to hold the viewer a fraction longer? If the Namibian Himba tribe have five words for the colour green, what do they see so differently to the rest of us?

Depictions and contradictions.