Tim Moore á tengdafjölskyldu á Íslandi og hefur komið hingað í tuttugu ár. Hann skrifar um Reykjavík fyrir og eftir hrun – honum fannst borgin orðin dálítið óhugnanleg – og fer svo á fiskidaginn á Dalvík þar sem hann finnur fisk, fjölskyldur og þjóðlagasöng. Greinin birtist í The Observer:

„Reykjavik is home to nearly two-thirds of Iceland’s population, and the city sponged up the gold and the glory in the boom years. But walking between the faceless glass blocks that shot up along the seafront, dwarfing the homely old townhouses behind, you had the strange sense of watching a city sell its soul. Volvo estates were outnumbered by black Range Rovers. The red-cheeked, neighbourly Legoland vibe that had defined the place was giving way to something flash and faintly sinister.

In 1986, my in-laws’ house lay at the capital’s lonely eastern extremity. For two decades it was steadily outflanked by new developments, but a couple of years back the urban sprawl went exponential. I went up to the hills behind their house and looked out at entire new suburbs leaching distantly away into the mossy geological rubble, thinking: I remember this when it was all lava. I drove around them and got lost in a forest of reinforced concrete stumps and construction cranes, wondering how Iceland’s Ealing-sized population could afford it all. And how, even allowing for some of the world’s longest winter nights, they were ever going to make enough new Icelanders to fill these places.

As I drove from Keflavik airport into town earlier this month, the answers were grimly apparent. Vast new shopping malls looked out over empty car parks; every window in the grandiose residential developments encircling them still bore a white-taped glazier’s cross. For years my pound had bought between 90 and 120 krona; at the airport I discovered it was now worth 211. I knew that life savings had been wiped out in the Icelandic meltdown, and that negative equity and unemployment now stalk the tundra. But after all those years of £6 pints, it was still awfully hard not to shatter the arrivals hall with a great yodelling howl of glee. A promotional slogan sprang swiftly to mind: „We broke our banks, so you don’t have to break yours!“ Though I won’t be suggesting it to the in-laws in a hurry.„