Iceland ahoy!

It was early Sunday morning in Reykjavík, and peering slightly blearily out of the apartment window, for I had not slept well for over 48 hours,  I was immediately cheered a little by the sight of a beautiful sunrise. I had until early afternoon to explore this pretty little city by myself, before getting the bus back to the airport, and I resolved to get out as soon as possible, to see as much as I could. It is lovely to travel with company, but there is something special about being able to follow one's own whims and just wander about aimlessly, that can be extremely pleasant. I had few places that I definitely wanted to see, and was happy to just look around, but before doing anything I needed a coffee.

Something that struck me about the little bit of Iceland that I visited was the high density of American visitors. Siting in a café on Bankastræti, a little later that morning and having dumped my bags with the nearby tourist information office, I looked around at my fellow patrons. Even at this early hour, there appeared to be one or two native Icelanders, but six or seven Americans. The day before, when visiting the Blue Lagoon, Americans had again made up a vast majority of bathers. Of these, a large number appeared to be too squeamish to follow the hygiene instructions about showering naked, or even at all, before entering the water. I have nothing against Americans (and love New York dearly) but some of the Americans in the café this morning, particular the younger, more excitable ones, were more than a little annoying. Two American girls, for example, appeared to find almost everything extremely funny, a situation that was made worse by the fact that one of the girls had a loud shrill laugh that sounded almost exactly like a swannee whistle.

A little fortified by coffee and a cinnamon bun, and keen t be on my own, I wandered out again into the cold morning. There had recently been a fall of snow, and I turned up the hood of my jacket against the cold, as I walked up a slippy path to visit a great statue of Ingólfur Arnarson, one of the founders of Reykjavík. Down by the waterfront, the glorious Harpa concert hall was looking particularly spectacular in the bright sunlight, and I decided to potter over to have a look, which proved easier said than done, on pavements as slippery as an ice rink. Opened in 2011, Harpa's glass facade reflects the sky and, at night, as I had first seen it a couple of nights before, a light display that dances across the panels resembles the northern lights (which, disappointingly, I had not seen).

Further along the waterfront, I paused at the Sólfarið (Sun Voyager) sculpture, shown above, by Jón Gunnar Árnason, although I found myself getting irritated by people who were standing around the work of art. The Sólfarið sits on a plinth that just out into the water, and was surrounded by visitors who were ignoring it and taking pictures of the view, and seemed not to notice or care that they were getting in everybody else's pictures of the sculpture. I started to wonder whether people were behaving unusually rudely, or if, in my sleep-deprived state, I was just being unreasonably judgmental.

Putting the waterfront behind me, I walked back into the city and up the hill to one of the places that I had been anxious to visit: Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church, and one of the tallest buildings, in Iceland. I arrived just as the doors to the viewing platform were closing, but contented myself with looking at it from outside. Looking both natural and space age (construction began in the 1940s, but was not completed until the 1980s), it is an undeniably iconic structure, and one that towers over the city, being visible from many places.

After this, I wandered back into the city streets and had more coffee. I peered into a few shops, as ever finding myself most happy in a couple of lovely bookshops (in one, I bought a CD by Ólafur Arnalds, an Icelandic composer whose work I have loved for some time; in the other, along with another coffee, I bought a pair of socks). After I while, I began to realise that I was exhausted, but just walking and walking, possibly powered by too much caffeine, and that I would soon have to make my way back to the collection point for the bus to the airport. I had enjoyed my visit, but resolved to return, someday, and hopefully to explore more widely, and on substantially more sleep.

Finding the 100 Acre Wood in the Big Apple

Ever since I was a child, I have loved the stories of Winnie the Pooh, the hapless yet courageous bear of very little brain, and his friends. I grew up reading Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and having them read to me, and like many people, the stories are so familiar to me that I feel a personal attachment to them (although I have never taken to the Disney films of their adventures; to me, they are a pale imitation of the original). I still consider the ending of The House at Pooh Corner to be one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful conclusions to a book ever written.

The true story behind Pooh and Christopher Robin is reasonably well known (and is shortly to be the subject of a new film, Goodbye Christopher Robin); in the 1920s, writer AA Milne wrote the tales based around his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and his toys, and his charming poems and adventures soon became world famous. The real 100 Acre Wood, where the stories are set, is Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, was also somewhere I was taken several times as a child, and have visited again as an adult. Even today, the locations from the books are all accessible, and most are immediately recognisable.

For me, the 100 Acre Wood remains an Enchanted Place, and the characters in the books are so fundamental a part of my childhood, that the realisation that, on my first visit to New York, I had walked within just a few feet of their current home without going to see them was a sad one. Returning to New York last December, however, I rectified this omission, and the experience was as moving and as magical as I could have hoped.

How the New York Public Library come to be the curators of some of English literature's most famous toys has, over the years, been a sometimes acrimonious one, and I have no desire to revisit the debate. When I visited them, in their own glass case in the New York Public Library Children's Center, they had only recently returned, having been beautifully restored. I had seen earlier pictures of the toys, and the patchwork nature of earlier restoration was all too painfully apparent. Now, the toys look like themselves, by which I mean that they look like the illustrations by EH Shepard (with the exception of Pooh, whose fictional likeness was based on Growler, the teddy bear owned by Shepard's own young son Graham), and my heart filled with joy at being in their presence.

My favourite of the animals from the stores was always Eeyore, the eternally pessimistic, gloomy grey donkey. My affection for him might be down to a beautiful audiobook of the stories that I owned as a child, read by Lionel Jeffries. Jeffries gave Eeyore a lugubrious baratone voice of noble desolation, making the donkey sound like a long-suffering yet ultimately self-aware observer of the actions of the other animals. In New York, I was delightfully surprised to discover that Eeyore, the real physical Eeyore, actually has a smile on his face. This is not immediately obvious, because of the downward tilt of his head, which doubtlessly suggests dejection, but if you peek up at him, you will find that, underneath it all, Eeyore is actually happy. This made me happier still.

Before I left New York, I visited the toys one more time, to bid them farewell. I feel pleased that I got to meet them, and that they are in the hands of people who have treated them to the very best of care, bringing them back to life, so they can be adored by more generations of fans.