Nik's Saga

I didn't mean to bring my Academy braid to Spain with me. It was in the bottom of my bag after Revel in the Midnight Sun and I had to pack rather hurriedly...

Right now I'm in a hotel in Malaga, about an hour from the conference venue but a) much cheaper than the venue and b) available at short notice. Marbella, being a tourist haven, is rather full, unless I want to spend £250 a night to be in the conference hotel without the conference rate.

It's been a long travelling day after a hectic day yesterday. I came back from Revel on Sunday assuming that I'd go into the office, teach my classes then be on an afternoon/evening flight down to Reykjavik. Of course it wasn't that easy. :) I ended up on an 11:30 flight (in a diddy little 20-seat Fairchild Metro) instead, to be rescued from the airport by the marvellous Matt and Rebecca. We pottered around for the afternoon then went over to Ray and Jen's place (more of the Klakavirki SCAdians) for dinner and games. We played a great card game called 'Plague & Pestilence' that I really must get for SCA events.

My 07:40 flight to Stanstead this morning gave me over 6 hours to wait in the airport, and it was only after 3 of them I found the left luggage place. Next time I'm going to the V&A. The evening flight to Malaga was about half an hour late but made it up on the way in.

The first thing I noticed about Spain was how hot it is. 11pm and it was still 23 degrees Celsius. I dread to think what it'll be like tomorrow, but at least I'll be in a nice air-conditioned conference centre. It's just the bus in in the morning that might be a bit unpleasant. On the other hand, it's early enough in the morning that it might be OK. I'll report in tomorrow evening.

It's been a good weekend. After a rather unexpected phone conversation at Thursday lunchtime I dashed back home and packed, getting on the road before 17:00. The drive down to Keflavik is about 280 miles, comparable to the Liverpool-St. Andrews run. Unlike the UK though, the speed limit here is about 55mph (90 km/h) so it takes a bit longer than you'd expect, something like five and a half hours. On the up side, the fuel economy's much better than it is on the motorway.

I eventally got down to the airport at Keflavik at about 23:00 to meet Rebecca and Matt. It's so much easier to recognise people in garb! :) Then it was back to their flat for an introduction to Sporri, their wonderful easily-excited puppy, cider and banana splits until 02:00.

Friday morning was quite relaxed. I did some calligraphy to finish a couple of scrolls for folks within the shire then we collected Moira from the airport and had a bit to eat on the base before heading off to the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is a wonderful place. It's Iceland's main spa and has a large outdoor pool of naturally heated water surrounded by lava. The erruption that formed the lava plains was sometime around 1230AD. It's quite astonishing to realise just how much lava must have been produced in order to cover the plains. Definitely worth a second visit. And a third. And a fourth. And...

Next morning we started the event in one of the community centres on the base, where a Viceregal Court was held and Matt (Tristan) got his AoA. It turns out that I'm going to be herald for the shire, so I got to see the look on his face when he was called up. Clearly being a court herald has its advantages.

After lunch we all drove off to the Saga Museum in Reykjavik. This is a fascinating place, where one of the city's municipal hot water tanks has been turned into a museum of Iceland's viking history with life-size silicone vikings. We took the CD-guided tour and then had the chance to talk to the chap behind the project. He'd made all of the moulds for the mannequins from casts of members of his own family. Silicone was used because it's more easily painted than wax. It's also flexible - a fact that he demonstrated by flexing the foot of an Icelanic martyr in a most unnatural manner!

We caused something of a stir a the museum because we'd all turned up in garb. This was nothing compared to the reception we got at the Viking resteraunt later. We've been invited to the resteraunt during next summer's Viking Festival as long as we go in garb (not necessarily viking either, although I'll have my viking stuff done by then). The resteraunt is also somewhere you have to visit several times just to take in the decoration.

Back to the community centre agin and time for some games before we cleaned up and headed back to Matt & Rebecca's for strawberry milkshakes (Matt is definitely a good chap to have about the house :) ) before bed.

This morning was given over to visiting the local fleamarket and then a trip to see the original manuscripts of many of the sagas, but unfortunately I had to head off home early as I've got to get organised for the conference this week.

It was a good weekend. I have four gentles who are keen on fencing (which is a good thing) and it looks like I'll be going down to Keflavik on a monthly basis for meetings. I may even be playing D&D again down there (yay!).

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It's been a fairly quiet day today, in effect my first 'real' working day. I actually wrote a lecture. Well no, strictly speaking I planned a lecture course and wrote the introduction, but that's a lecture in its own right.

The reason for this is that my module this term is 'Introductory skills' or 'Introduction to computing'. It's the 'this is the ON switch, this is a mouse' module and mine is the first lecture for the new students. My goal then, is to give them the absolute basics without leaving them bored out of their skulls. Things like the history of computing, simple computer architecture, social issues and common applications. My personal goals are to produce a group of students who can produce a table of contents in a word document automatically and who understand why (on the whole) male students enjoy coding while female students prefer systems analysis.

There is one thing I have to teach that I'm going to have to bone up on again - machine code. I haven't done 68000 assembler for well over ten years. Fortunately it's not something that changes too much (well, not at a basic level anyway). For that matter, it's not as if there isn't a lot of reference material around on the subject either.

This week is Pre-Sesh at HA (Haskolinn a Akureyri) and so the normal parties are being run for the new students. The university itself has about 1,600 students and we as a department have about 50 of them. We're the smallest faculty within HA but we are growing! The other faculties are Social Sciences (huge), Education (even bigger), Business and Management (quite big), Nursing (quite big) and Natural Resources (which is the Big Beast nationally).

Last night there was a Pre-Sesh party in town to which all the staff were invited but I couldn't make it as I'd done an enthusiastic burst of dusting around the house and given myself an asthma attack. One of the things I'm going to have to pick up next week when I pass through the UK is Mr Sheen (or something similar) so I can dust and polish without sending it everywhere. Doug went to the party though and came back bearing a couple of giant sized spare pizzas. Joy! There is a Domino's Pizza in Akureyri!

I plan to have a quiet night tonight as well. I'm not convinced that there's anything worth watching on TV but I am in the middle of my annual viewing of 'Edge of Darkness'. A good opportunity to carry on with Petal's embroidery, as I'm really need to get it finished.
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As I was walking around the building today, marvelling at the clarity of the air and the view across the fjord, I realised where I really was. I was in a Blake's Seven location set. The building itself is very seventies futuristic, with paved internal courtyards on multiple levels and the occasional ornamental shrub. I almost expect to see black-clad troopers coming out from under the upper corridor at any minute. All it needs is the big Federation logo somewhere. I'll take some photos to demonstrate some time. Who knows, I may even take Photoshop to them to show how they really ought to look.

It's actually been a very quiet day today. I've spent it wandering around the office doing set-up-type things like discovering where the coffee room has moved to, finding the post box and the pigeonholes, and locating and acquiring stationery. All that and listening to Radio 4 and BBC 7.

One good piece of news is that upon finding the pigeonholes I found a letter from RGU officially offering me an Honorary Research Fellowship. This means that I get to keep my RGU email and they find me a desk when I go over to visit them. It's one of these international collaboration things that helps foster research and also looks good when the RAE comes around. :) Naturally I'm accepting it. Hmm... it may also look good on funding applications.

It's such a pleasant evening I think I'm going to go out into the conservatory to do some embroidery. That would be a good thing to do.


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It's been another one of those stressful days. One of the major causes of stress in my life is money - whether it be having it, not having it, organising it, moving it... you can guarantee that if money is involved in any way it'll raise my blood pressure. This is one reason I like the SCA barter system. :)

Today the stress was opening a bank account. A simple task, you would think. Well, yes, but it was somewhat complicated by the Bank of Scotland, and I wasn't even opening an account with them. In order to open an account with an Icelandic bank you need a passport photograph for your debit/credit card, so first I had to get the photographs. The machine in the shopping arcade wasn't working so I had to go to the photographer near the bank - who was very nice and has the negatives should I need reprints in future.

By now though, I'm getting very low on cash, so I try my Maestro card in the money machine. Remember all of those adverts with the dancing penguins about how Switch is now Maestro and is usable all over the world? Well that's entirely true unless you have a card from the Bank of Scotland. Theirs won't be usable until September. So I'm now in Iceland with money in my UK account that I can't access and I don't get paid until next Tuesday. I think it's going to be a very quiet week, which means I almost certainly can't make it to Revel in Reykjavik this weekend, which annoys me greatly. I could transfer some, but by the time an international transfer occurs, I'll have been paid. It seems that Scottish banks are strange like that.

More positively though, I now have both a computer and a telephone on my desk in the office, which means I'm all ready to start work for real. This morning we had the introductory meeting with the new students - there are about 15 of them, which is a big change from the 150 at RGU. I'll be able to interact with the class rather than just lecturing to them, which is great.

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I'm sitting out in the conservatory writing this, which is indeed a bright
and beautiful place. This is the home of the hot tub (although i hasten to
add that I'm not writing this in the hot tub!)

The conservatory is, as you would expect, bright and airy, and also has a
wonderful view up the fjord to the south. From here I can see the parallel
bedding of the fjord sides over to the east, beyond the football pitch.

One the pitch right now, Akureyri Thor are having a coaching session.
Passing seems to be the drill of the moment. They're an amateur team, but
with a population of only 283,000 people, you can't expect Iceland to have
the huge numbers of professionals we have in the UK. Nevertheless, I shall
be sitting in front of the telly this afternoon watching Iceland play
Russian in the World Cup Qualifiers. If my reading of the TV schedules is
right, of course.

Another wonderful thing about the conservatory is that it's glass-walled so
it gets lots of natural light. This makes it a wonderful place to do
embroidery. I suspect it might be a spring and autumn place, as in winter
it'll be too cold (although there is a log fire in here for that very
reason) and in the summer it's just a bit too bright and hot. Certainly it
was quite hot and stuffy in the heatwave last week.

For now though, I'm just taking advantage of the light and trying to get my
current work finished so I cen send it home to Petal for framing.

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One of the strange and wonderful things here in the House at Akureyri is the shower. It's not only powerful and has a narrow beam focus setting so that you are almost massaged as you wash, but it also smells of sulphur dioxide. Yes, bad eggs. I'm assuming it's SO2, although it could be H2S instead, I'm not sure. The water itself is from the aquifers underground, although I don't know if it is naturally heated on the way to the shower or if there is a shower heater somewhere. Certainly there's no switch involved - you just turn it on and lots of hot water comes out. It's a little bit surreal; you're standing there in clouds of sulphrous steam purging away the grime of the day.

And I do mean grime. My car looks as if it is orange-grey not blue. With the untarred roads there's an awful lot of dust about, particularly in the university car park as it's part building site. There's a new building going up opposite my current office (we move in on October 1st, I am told) and of course this is generating a certain amount of debris. There is a logic to leaving the roads un-tarred. In winter, when it's covered in snow and ice, it's probably easier to get purchase on a gravel surface than on a smooth one. Down in Reykjavik they don't have the same problem - the entire city has under-floor heating, roads and pavements included.

Here in Akureyri (pronounced 'Akuree', something like 'Acarin' without the 'n' and with the stress on the first syllable), being only the second city and much smaller, we don't have that yet. I don't think it would fit well with the motorcyle ice races in the winter.

Remember on the ferry I said I was paranoid about money? Well it turns out that I had good reason. You see, although I have money in my account I can't get at it. My cashcard, in spite of being a switch card - or nowadays a 'maestro' card - isn't recognised by the machines. So I have approximately £1.50 to get to the end of the month unless I can sort it out. Fortunately now that I've got a kennitala I can open a local bank account and work out of that one. I shall be down to the bank at 10am Monday morning (things start late here). In the meantime, it's cheese sandwiches for the weekend. :)
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If you want to live and work in Iceland, you need a kennitala. You need a kennitala to open a bank account, you need a kennitala to get a telephone, you need a kennitala to join the local library. If you don't have a kennitala, you don't exist.

It's a really useful thing in that instead of filling in lots of forms that demand that you enter your name, address and so forth, you just give your kennitala and they look it up in the national database. Saves time and effort all round.

In order to get my kennitala I had to go down to the town hall with Mark yesterday and register. The town hall is a big white building facing onto the waterfront just outside the town centre (about as far from the main square as the Union is from the town hall in St. Andrews - we're not talking a long distance here) where I filled in the appropriate paperwork. The form was then faxed to Reykjavik and the reply mailed out to me with my new number.

In the office I visited was a fascinating picture of a woman in traditional Icelandic dress. It clearly has a chemise and a skirt over it with either a second shorter dress or an apron on top. The chemise is caught by a corset that laces up the front and is decorated with gold. I'm going to have to investigate this further - is it Period? If so, I see another set of garb being made because it looks very comfortable, particularly as the woman in the painting is no stick-insect.


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Yesterday was a big day - the birthday party of Caitlin, the Boss's daughter. She is 11. As we have a wonderfully collegiate atmosphere here we (the departmental staff) were all invited to the party. It meant that I had a chance to meet more of the 'family' and their families.

It was a great evening. Doug and I drove out the 20km to Mark's house in the middle of nowhere and were first to arrive (other than Caitlin's friends) but one thing about the quiet roads here is that you it's very easy to get an accidental convoy of folks heading in the same direction and so Andy and Liz and then Tony and Linda were just behind us. Jim and Wendy turned up shortly afterwards.

On top of the 10 adults there were about 20 children ranging from 4 months to 11 years, but they were all very civilised and played well away from me. :) Except for three of the very tiny ones who were quite fun in their enthusiasm to play with the various ballons around the place. I suppose 'quite fun' probably translates as 'absolute little darlings' in normal parlance, but you know me, I'm not very happy around most children. These were OK though.

Among the things I learned were that I should stay away from reindeer as if one hit my car then; if you're male, never take a leak over the platform on the London Underground (it leads to burns in unfortunate places); and that there's a bounty on foxes, mink and polar bears.

By the time we drove back the light was fading and the clouds had begun to settle on the mountaintops of the fjord. Tendrils of bright cloud slipped down the mountainside like whipped cream on chocolate cake - quite beautiful.

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The weather here in Iceland continues to be unseasonably warm. Over the last couple of days the national temperature record has been broken, the temperature having passed 30 Celcius for the first time ever. That was in Reykjavik; thankfully it's been a bit cooler here.

I am still covered in mosquito bites from Shetland. I have over a hundred on my right arm (I know, I counted them) and over 50 on my face. I look like I've got some strange and grotesque disease. On top of the unsightly visual aspect they also itch like mad, so I'm still taking the antihistamines to try to calm them down. It doesn't always work.

I still don't have internet access either, so although I'm dutifully taking my iBook to work there's not that much I can do, as I need to download some mail stuff in order to finish the papers I'm working on. It would also be nice to have access to the BBC news page again, as I've no idea what's been going on in the rest of the world, other than that Venezuela has had an election and that George Bush is pulling huge numbers of US service and support personnel out of Europe and Asia. I'm hoping that this won't affect people like Cathryn and Rebecca.

Rebecca is with the US Air Force here in Iceland. I used to think that it was very amusing that the Icelanders didn't bother with a military, they just hired in mercenaries (the US). My appreciation increased to respect, nay, even awe, when I discovered that actually it's the US who pay Iceland, not the other way around.

My mood is currently up and down like a yoyo. I'm told that it's to be expected and it'll probably be much more pronounced because I've moved to a whole new country. That's OK, because when I'm up, I'm really, really up, but when I'm down I'm not as far down as I've been in the past. So it's good. And overall, it is good. I feel a strangely positive sense of purpose in the office, even if I'm not being particularly effective. Hmm... I know how I can be more effective - I'll write a paper!

(Strides boldly from Outlook Express into Word to start working for real...)

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It's very, very beautiful. The landscape is amazing, even if it is a bit short on trees. I shall have to do some exploring once I get the hang of this driving on the right business. I did manage to turn down the wrong side of a road yesterday, but given that Akureyri is not exactly London or Edinburgh - or even Liverpool - it was completely deserted and I managed to recover gracefully.

Another thing I have to get used to is that, being Scandinavia, there is a requirement to have your lights on at all times. I'm either going to have to rewire the lights in my Saxo so I can't forget or buy a Volvo. I think that rewiring would be cheaper for now.

Actually, it's not Volvos that are the common cars, it's 4x4s, particularly Jeeps. Now I've always fancied a Jeep, but I want a MASH style one, not one of these modern things. On the other hand, maybe I can coax Dad into rebuilding another Land Rover, this time for me... Whatever I do, I need a CD player for the car. Or an MP3 player. I just can't get used to radio and television in Icelandic.

My housemate tells me I'll get used to this quite rapidly. I hope so - I'm currently relying on the World Service on short wave for my news fixes, and they keep changing the damned frequency on the hour. I have to try four or five difference frequencies to get one that's a) transmitting and b) clear enough to hear. Some of the TV programmes are in English with subtitles - mainly US imports - but the terrestrial channel selection is limited. I intend to get cable very, very soon so I can get real news again.

Some sports stuff is subtitled, some is in English, some is in Icelandic. For instance, Spurs v. Liverpool was in Icelandic. Sunderland v. Newcastle was in English. The Olympics are in Icelandic. The Hungarian Grand Prix was in Icelandic except for the interview with Mika Hakkonnen (in English), which was subtitled. It was very strange - no pit walk, no over-excited comentators and no real action. Of course, the lack of action wasn't the commentators' fault, and I suppose they may have been wildly wnthusiastic but I just didn't recognise it.

The subtitled programmes are quite handy - I can already recognise some Icelandic words. My current favourite phrase is 'Fru mir' (My Lady), gleaned from the subtitled version of 'Elisabet' (Elizabeth) with Cate Blanchet shown on the channel with the strange ID bug last night. I'm sure I'll pick up something more useful soon. :)

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It's big. It's very big. It's sufficiently big and open plan that it has two living rooms - one upstairs, one downstairs - a dining area with two tables (idea for craft-type things) and lots of floor space for cutting out fabric. Out at the back is a conservatory where lives the hot tub, the exercise machine and another large table. Outside is the patio and the garden, and upstairs there's a small balcony. Oh yes, and the upstairs living room has a bar.

My room is about 4m square, and would be a cube but for the fact that the ceiling slopes at an angle of about 30 degrees so that the wall beside the bed is only about 50cm high. The east-facing window looks out onto the fjord, while the south-facing one looks out over the ground of Akureyri Thor, one of the two local football teams. By ground, I mean playing field rather than Anfield-like stadium, as the town just isn't big enough to support anything that big. I've chosen to support them as a) they're local and b) they play in red. I can watch their home games from the comfort of the conservatory.

The house itself is about a third of a mile from the office on a walking track, so I'll be able to keep up my good intentions of walking to and from work. Shopping is a different matter - it's definitely a car journey to the nearby Netto, which is in a shopping arcade that contains a most wonderful shop. I can't spell (or pronounce!) the name, but it does everything from kitchen implements, bedding, tents and stationery to some really nice garb-level brocades. All this in one shop! The mind boggles.

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"Oh, and I have seen so many things with these eyes..."

Today I have travelled from a typical picture-postcard Scandinavian coastal village, through the red sands of Mars and the rocky plains of the moon, across the rift where the land is tearing itself apart and down into a cloud-filled fjord backed by snow-capped mountains.

It took quite a while to get off the ferry, partly because I had to get a special car registration document and go through customs. No problems, and the customs officer perked up when I thanked her in Icelandic. I've noticed the effect of the simple phrase tak fyrir (thank you kindly - very Canadian!) already - the Icelanders are very pleasant and helpful, but if you thank them in Icelandic they break out into beaming smiles. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Seydisfjordur is a classical Scandinavian village; brightly-coloured wooden houses (imported from Norway, I believe) scattered about a green mountainside. The road out of Seydisfjordur is far less welcoming though, as it's one of the many roads in eastern Iceland that isn't tarmaced. Some of them don't even have gravel, but there are easier to drive on than the gravelled ones as they're quieter. My suspension may never forgive me this trip.

You leave Seydisfjordur and head west towards Egilsstadir, the first large town in the east. 'Large' is a relative term; it can't be much larger than Cupar. From there you get onto road 1, the main ring road around the country. This road is the equivalent of the M1/M6 and links all of the major population centres. I'm told that from Akureyri to Reykjavik it's tarmaced all t he way, but from Egilsstadir to Akureyri it has a number of sections that aren't.

There's a lot of up and down to the main road - you're going from fjord to fjord along the coast and through one of the 'inland desert' areas between Egilsstadir and Myvatn. The desert itself is red, similar to the photos we keep getting back from the rovers. It's quite eerie in a way, and I could easily understand why the Mars Society are building a Mars habitat here. It eventually gives way to the younger grey lavas that surround the Myvatn area and made it such an excellent place to train the Apollo astronauts for their moonwalks. You just have to replace the brilliant blue skies I had for the journey with rose or black. Or assume that it's Mars at sunset, when the sky goes bright blue.

Just outside Myvatn are two outcrops of rock facing each other. Between them is a gap of about 25 m where they have been thrust up on each side of an active section of the North Atlantic Ridge. Nearby you can see the vents where steam arises from the ground - this is blue mud country, although I didn't stop to wonder at the mud again this time. I'll be back.

It's over a few more fjords - and they really are 'crinkly edges' to a country - and then across the pass into Eyjafjordur, Iceland's largest fjord. Akureyri is on its western side, so you have to go down into the fjord and cross the river to get to it. As I came over the pass all I could see was a layer of cloud hanging in the fjord itself like a roll of cotton wool. It turned out to be surprisingly thin and once I dropped though it the air was as clear below as it had been above, but now with grey skies instead of the startling blue they had been previously.

I managed to remember how to get to the university with only one wrong turn - and I recovered quickly from that. After a general natter with some of my new colleagues I unpacked the office stuff (the two and a half boxes) and was led away to the house by Doug, my new colleague and housemate who was kind enough to cook curried shrimp and vegetables for dinner.

I'll describe the house itself next time.

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Current listening to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack

13:45 GMT. I'm coming into Faroe as I type. The Norrona is currently manoeuvring (I tried four times to spell that then gave up and went for the spellchecker) to come alongside at Torshaven, the capital and major port of the Faroe Islands. We just missed an icebreaker, the Ice Queen on the way in, and passed a Danish frigate and the cruise ships Adriana (which sounds terribly familiar for some reason) and Vista Mar before tying up on the main dock. The gangplank is not what I'm used to. For years I've had this memory of joining Dad on...

Oop! Engines finished. The continuous dull rumble I can feel through my feet has stopped.

...on a ship when I was little, at high tide and when the ship itself was light (i.e. empty of cargo). We didn't so much as walk up the gangplank as climb it, the ship was so high in the water. Here the gangplank is much more like those snazzy walkways you get at airports if you're not flying EasyJet (or some other low-cost airline). With everyone now disembarking, the Viking Bar (where I have taken up residence due to the comfy chairs and large windows) has emptied and it's nice and quiet again. It may just be time to go and get another coffee.

It was interesting coming beside - you could see the turbulence in the harbour waters due to the manoeuvring thrusters as pale regions and the silt disturbed from the harbour bed as brown areas, both of them very clearly delineated from the main body of water.

Time to a) go on deck and get some photos and b) get another cup of coffee and maybe something to eat.

***
I've discovered several more things during my recent excursion on deck. First, it's where the smokers hang out, so it's not necessarily a pleasant place. There is an enclosed area called the Sky Bar that I might try later once the Bingo starts up in here.

Secondly, I can't get food or drink while the ship's in port. Which is a bit of a bugger, as I'm quite peckish now and will have to wait until 17:00 before I can get anything. Third, the ship is 138m in length. I did ask at the information desk to see if they had an information sheet on the vessel herself, but they don't have one at present. A shame, as I wanted to know the really nerdy things like how many engines and what type. I do know she was built in Lubek though.

Which brings me onto a totally different subject. I'm having to get to grips with how to do things like ö on my keyboard. You have to do option-e then the letter to get the ones with accents, and option-u plus the letter to get the ones with umlauts. I haven't yet worked out how to get the other staples of the Icelandic alphabet, thorn (the one that looks like a p with an extended vertical) and eth (d with a horizontal bar through the upper section - for the physicists among you, like h-bar but d-bar.). Thorn is the strong 'th' of 'Thor', while eth is the softer 'th' of 'the'.

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12:30 GMT (Icelandic time)

Currently listening to the Master and Commander soundtrack here on my iBook.

Again, I slept like a log last night. Thanks to an 02:00 sailing and the gentle motion of the ship, I didn't wake up until after 10:00 BST this morning. Neither, though, did my Faroese cabinmates, a primary school teacher and a admin assistant who'd been to Bergen and back as a break.

I'm quite taken by the idea of a cruise break. To start with, all I have to do today is sit in the corner I've claimed as my own, write up my blog and do some embroidery. I can't see too far out to sea as it's foggy but we've got a nice calm sea and I'm having a wonderfully relaxing time.. It'd be a great excuse for an all-day rpg session. Anyone fancy a gaming cruise?

The ship is Faroese, hence the Danish Krona is the standard currency aboard. Well, that and the Euro, but on a point of principle I got Krona to spend aboard rather than the unspeakable E-money. I do have the option of a coach-trip around Faroe when we dock, but I'm a bit paranoid about money right now so I'll leave that until next time I do this sailing; probably next July.

One of the really interesting things aboard is the plasma screen that shows the navigational display from the bridge in real time. It's fascinating to watch not only the ships position change, but also the ships heading from minute to minute. There's a big dashed arrow that shows the heading, updated every few seconds, that you can compare to the plotted course (a solid line). The map itself has the local seabed contours as well as land masses and navigational beacon details. There's also a panel down the side that shows the actual navigational data - lat/long. speed, bearing and so forth. I'll try to get a photo of it later.

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I slept like a log last night, not only due to the lack of sleep the night before but also due to the presence of a comfy bed in a little B&B called Cee Aa in Lerwick. Which also provided really good sausages as part of the cooked breakfast. I have made note of the contact details for the next time I'm passing through.

More history today. Emma recommended that I visit a castle in the west of the island (built by the same Earl Patrick Stewart (EPS) who keeps cropping up here). It's one of those 16th Century Scottish L-shaped castles with really cool architectural details. The great hall is open to the elements but it'd be a great place to hold a feast.

Opposite the castle is a fish&chip shop / cafe that does wonderful fish. Moist, tender and almost certainly freshly-caught by local fishermen. Well worth a visit. In the afternoon I headed north to Mavis Grind to see the point where the vikings used to haul their longships over the narrow tongue of land that separates the North Sea from the Atlantic. It's been widened recently in order to widen the road, but it's still not that wide. Even now it's only a spear's flight from one to the other.

Thinking of spear's flight, I also picked up Snorri Sturlesson's Edda in the main bookshop in Lerwick yesterday, so expect me to start composing skaldic verse for A&S competitions in future. I've been tempted by the form for a while, but a full third of the book is given over to verse forms, and another third to poetic language.

But back to the sightseeing. As I was in that part of the island I had a look at Tingwall and the island in Tingwall loch where the original Ting was held (before EPS moved it to his new castle). It's tiny! You probably couldn't get more than a dozen men (women weren't included) onto the island standing up. The viewing point for Tingwall Holm is next to a field in which there were the largest sheep I've ever seen. They were the size of shetland ponies and were most definitely rams. The extent of ...endowment... was quite astonishing. :)

Not far from Tingwall, the historical powerhouse of the islands is Sullom Voe oil terminal, the modern powerhouse. Three of the main oil storage tanks can storr enough oil to keep the UK going for a day. So why is petrol 90p a litre up here?

I had quite a lot of time to kill before my midnight check-in for the ferry, so I paid a visit to the Up Helly Aa exhibition. It's rather fun and has lots of mannequins wearing the costumes of the Guizer Jarl's squads over the years. Sad A&S person that I am, my first thought was 'that's not period!'. Things like purple velvet and laser-etched steel armour. Very pretty all the same.
So that left me with four hours to go. No-one told me about the Sheltand midges. I have been eaten alive by them in the car park, to the extent that I've given in and taken one of my anti-histamines in the hope of stopping the damned itching.

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I learnt a valuable lesson last night: always book a cabin. When I got aboard the Hrossey there were bodies in sleeping bags all over the place. The folks who'd been aboard since Aberdeen had bagged all over the couches and the reclining chairs in the lounge were hellishly uncomfortable. As a result I 'slept' on the floor instead. I use the word 'slept' with reservations, as I woke up every 20 minutes or so in an attempt to get more comfortable. On top of which, just above me was a strange device that went 'ping clunk whirr' every quarter of an hour and sprayed floral air freshener into the room.

I gave up trying to sleep at 06:00 and went off in search of something to drink instead. I did get a strange look from the barman when I asked him if he was 'a purveyor of the heavenly caffeinated beverage' but he did provide me with a cup of coffee so at least he understood what I meant. Once I'd appropriately dosed myself on stimulants I went on deck to watch the Shetland Isles float past. It was a very odd, but good feeling, watching the hills and coastline of the islands and realising that they must have looked much the same to the vikings over a thousand years ago.

Once we'd docked and I disembarked I went into Lerwick tourist information office to book a B&B and get a map. First stop on my whistle-stop tour of the archaeological treasures of the isles was Old Scatness, an iron age broch and subsequent settlement that is being excavated by the university of Bradford. This place is fascinating - it beats the nearby Jarlshof into a cocked hat. To start with, it's an active dig and the tour guide is one of the archaeologists so you get a much more detailed view of the site than you do when you just follow the signposts and read the boards at your normal Historic Scotland site (such as Jarlshof). There were also a couple of living history folks there demonstrating textile creation (I finally got a good look at a warp-weighted loom in use) and the creation of viking jewellery, particularly the silver chains often given by chieftains (see Beowulf for examples :) ). I had a long conversation with him and will be trying it myself - I must drop him a line when I get to Iceland and ask him about source material for documentation purposes. It's great - I am soooo learning new things to put into use in creating viking garb. Expect to see it at an event near you sometime next year complete with chains, beads, brooches and hacksilver.

Next stop: Jarlshof. As you may have gathered, I was a bit disappointed by this. It's the standard Historic Scotland site and just didn't do anything for me after Scatness. The remains of the main house were built by Earl Patrick Stewart, a misunderstood bastard (in both senses of the word) son of James V who also built the Earl's palace in Orkney.

After a long day of historical stuff I had a much more modern evening catching up with Emma in Lerwick, discussing the acting abilities of Orlando Bloom and Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Biehn's general fwoar-ness and the joys of living in the middle of nowhere. It was a good evening.

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I didn't sleep too well last night - still, the packing is over now. Alli has been an absolute angel during the packing phase. She's not only hosting boxes of craft stuff in her workshop but has bullied me into throwing huge amounts of stuff away. Can I nominate her for canonisation, please?

Thanks also go to Roger, for helping out carrying stuff, and to Frank and Nick for installing my roof rack as well as doing some carrying, and to Gordon for coming along and lending morale support. I'd also like to than the planet Saturn... but enough of the Oscar acceptance speech. Thanks folks.

So how's the travelling gone? It started fine; I got onto the road before 11:30, but then got stuck behind a group of vintage cars going to a rally at Castle Doobry (I forget the name but it was on the A96). I eventually arrived at Brora to meet up with Paddy for ice cream only 45 minutes late and in plenty of time to make it up to Scrabster. We convoyed the rest of the way up and had time for coffee and chips before boarding the ferry.

The 90 minute ferry crossing was quite calm, and we amused ourselves with a bit of RPG plotting (Be afraid. Be very afraid.). We then drove up to Kirkwall and the northern abode of the Penguin - Cousin Magnus's house (currently full of archaeologists working at Mine Howe). If you're ever up in Kirkwall, I can recommend the Empire Chinese takeaway - it does the best sweet & sour chicken (Hong Kong style) that I've had in years.


The Lerwick ferry embarked at 22:45 in the strangest manner - you reverse onto it. Which was a bit tricky given the amount of stuff in the car. I really must rearrange things a bit before the Iceland sailing.

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I have completed my final day in the office at Robert Gordon and am now
'between universities', as it were. The change in departure date threw my
plans somewhat, and meant that I had to sort and pack everything today
rather than splitting it over two days. Still, I've managed to pack
everything into three and a half boxes (four really, but one is only half
size) and am taking two and a half of them with me. Two contain books, and
they don't even include the database books I've managed to offload onto a
colleague (thanks Robin!). The half contains the really improtant stuff -
the globe of the planet Mars, my collection of cuddly toys, my stress-Kenny
and my Alfred Bester action figure.

So now I have a car that's half-full of text books, SCA garb, fencing gear,
a sewing machine, a television and a deep-fat-fryer. Somewhere I have to add
room for clothes (one large and one small wheelie suitcase), craft stuff
(still to be pruned down from the three boxes of 'absolute essentials'), a
longbow plus arrows, recurve bow plus arrows, shopping basket (trust me on
this one) and a bag full of DVDs. Oh yes, and my apple and printer.
Tomorrow I plan to go to get a pair of roof bars on the car so I can at
least pack some of it up top.

In spite of the general hassle about changing sailings, it appears that the
universe has a reason for it. it turns out that Paddy is heading up to
Orkney as well and the only sailing he can get is the one I'm on. The plan
is therefore to meet up for ice-cream at Brora and then have dinner in
Kirkwall once we've got off the ferry. While on the ferry itself I foresee
lots of rpg plotting occuring. :)

Alli is due to arrive soon to help with this evening's packing so I'd better
get started. The chap from the Sue Ryder shop is coming over tomorrow
afternoon to take large amounts of stuff away so all being well by tomorrow
evening things will be looking a lot better.

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Today should be I-4. or rather, since it's 02:00, I-3. In fact, it's I-2, as
I've had to change my travel plans. I was going to be leaving from Aberdeen
on Monday evening, but now I've had to change it to leaving from Scrabster
on Sunday evening. now Scrabster is right up on the top edge of Scotland not
far from John O'Groats. This means I have a 6 hour drive to do on Sunday.

My new travel plans are to go from Scrabster to Stromness in Orkney (where
I'm hoping to meet Paddy for dinner in kirkwall), then I'll take the
overnight sailing from Kirkwall to Lerwick, giving me two days in Shetland
rather than one. On the plus side, this means that I have plenty of time to
visit interesting places in Shetland, but it does mean that I lose a day and
a half packing time.

I'm not quite doing the headless chicken thing yet, but I'm coming
perilously close to it.

The last fortnight has been very relaxing in one way but absolutely
exhausting in another. I had a pleasant weekend at the caravan at the end of
July, then went home to see Mum & Dad for a couple of days before going over
to Belfast for Unicorn's Inspiration.

UI was a really great event, and I had a wonderful time. Admittedly I did
spend the first evening making myself a thick linen shirt as part of my
fencing armour, but if I hadn't then I wouldn't have survived Sunday. Sunday
afternoon I played the prize for the rank of Free Scholar in the Drachenwald
Academy of Defence (more SCA stuff :) ) and acted as a pincusion for the UK
& Ireland SCA fencing community. Nonetheless, I have the braid to prove that
I survived. it was quite strange - the Force was definitely with me that
afternoon, as I really don't remember consciously doing anything other than
thinking 'oh shit' any time anyone came towards me with a case of rapier. I
really have to get over that particular problem, together with my offhand
problem - I just don't use it enough as a defensive implement. Still, I'll
put up a pell in the office in Akureyri and practise in my lunch hours. See
how may people I can surprise/worry. :)

The bruises resulting from Sunday are a sight to behold. For anyone who
actually saw the one on my left leg, well that's nothing compared to the one
on my left breast. I'm seriously considering buying a plastron as a result
of this bruise. My shoulder aches and my upper left back still isn't talking
to me. As To said over coffee and cakes at Belfast International, "Your
body's calling in all of those cheques you wrote on it playing the prize".

Budgeting was never my strong point. No-one warned me I'd have to do it
while fencing.



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