It has been a labour of love, a 25-year labour of love. Many years ago I sat on the schoolbench at navigation college in Iceland, along with a bunch of other aspiring ship’s officers. The curriculum was broad, to say the least. As well as navigation, chartwork, stability, maritime law, meteorology and all the rest of it, English and Icelandic were required subjects. So was Danish, but we’ll gloss over that.

Among the required reading was a book called Pelastikk. It means Bowline. You know, that fiendish knot that every scout or seaman should be able to tie with his eyes closed, the one with the snake coming out of the hole, around the tree and back down the hole to produce an eye that won’t slip. This was a novel with a nautical slant and although I wasn’t reading much Icelandic stuff back then, this one caught my imagination and I read it at a single sitting.

It had been written by a local author called Guðlaugur Arason, known as to everyone as Gulli Ara and something of a legend as the author of several books that shocked and surprised when they were published in the 1970s and 80s, as well as having been a fisherman since he was a boy. He had even been a student at the same college in Dalvík a few years before me.

Pelastikk tells the story of a precocious eight-year old boy at the tail-end of the 1950s who gets the opportunity to spend the summer at sea with the crew of a Dalvík herring boat. It paints a picture of a world that disappeared not long afterwards. In the 1950s the herring boats were small. These were 80-90 foot wooden boats that sailed with a crew of a dozen or more men following the migrating herring eastwards along the north of Iceland until the shoals took a turn southwards, providing Iceland’s eastern fishing villages with booming economies while the fish were there. As winter approached, the fish would disappear into deeper water and the following spring it would all start again.

The year after Gulli’s book was set, the first power blocks appeared and the old-fashioned purse boats started to disappear. (Apologies for the technical stuff, but it’s part of the tale). In 1968 the herring disappeared and a way of life went with them. The reasons are still not entirely understood, but a combination of heavy fishing, climatic change and natural fluctuations of pelagic stocks are all part of the mix.

It was catastrophic for Iceland, which saw hard times and large-scale emigration in the following years. But things improved and stabilised. Fishing shifted to groundfish and the fleet went from purse seining to trawling and longlining.

Gulli Ara’s book is a vivid portrait of the herring years when work was plentiful and a season on the herring could put enough in their pockets for a young couple to buy their first flat. Icelanders of a certain age still talk wistfully of the herring years, while those of my age look back at the shrimp years when there was a boom in catching the little pink beasties. That came to an end as well, due to falling prices and rising fuel costs, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, I picked up Pelastikk all those years ago and started translating it, purely for my own amusement, a couple of pages every night, with a pile of paper that grew on the living room table next to a rattling manual typewriter. Yes, it was that long ago.

One day I looked Gulli up in the phone book, gave him a call and asked if he minded if I tried to find a publisher. Mind? Of course he didn’t.

In the meantime I had moved back to England and in between working at sea myself and trying to find my feet as a jobbing hack, I re-typed the manuscript of Pelastikk into a shiny new Amstrad.

Pelastikk had been a hugely popular book in Iceland and was even a set text for years in schools and colleges. English-language publishers weren’t interested. Some were polite. Others were snooty to the point of being downright offensive. One specialist small press showed an interest, but with Arts Council funding slashed, simply couldn’t afford it. It went nowhere and while Gulli and I kept in touch, the English manuscript of Pelastikk, now renamed Bowline moved from one hard drive to another every time I upgraded to a new computer.

The last time this happened I gave Gulli a call and suggested that it was maybe time to go down the self-publishing route, explaining what a Kindle is.

I had to edit the whole thing again, making it less stilted. My original translation had been extremely close to the original text – too close, if the truth be told. So in places sentences have been melded together, idioms have been replicated as faithfully as possible and the untranslatable jokes have been spun around or replaced with something that fits the bill.

Translation is very different from writing your own stuff, calling for a different set of skills that include an element of creativity, while also remaining as faithful to the original as is practical. There is so much that that does not translate well directly and a translator has to be able to interpret as well as translate, but without slipping into the pitfall of ‘improving’ on the original text. A translator is not an editor, but occasionally you have to ask yourself if you need to be thinking of your readers or of the author’s original text, and treading a path between the two isn’t always easy.

So with the text tweaked and polished, I navigated the surprisingly straightforward process of formatting and uploading, and we were ready to go. So Guðlaugur Arason’s Bowline is now available at long last in its English translation on Amazon here (UK), here (US) and here (Germany) for anyone who has a Kindle or an iPad.

It has taken more than twenty years since I started tapping out the translation on that battered typewriter and in spite of the attempts, I suppose I knew that it would never be likely to find a place on even an obscure publisher’s list. So it’s a huge satisfaction to see it at last available for the niche market of readers who take an interest in Icelandic fiction and fishy stuff.

Originally published in 1980 when there were still clear memories of boats queuing to land their fish at the height of the season and the anxiety as the herring made themselves scarce at the end of the 960s, Bowline is unique in providing an account of Iceland during the bustling, smelly, colourful herring years written as fiction.

Or is it fiction? I did ask Gulli how much of this really happened. He wouldn’t be drawn. But my guess is that much all of it’s real, even the part about the giant farmer’s boy on Grímsey who knocked out his great-grandmother’s teeth with a hay rake.

Iceland has a new government, at last. It took a few weeks of wrangling, even though it was largely a foregone conclusion who was going to wind up in charge. It’s a coalition along the usual lines between the two parties at the conservative end of Iceland’s politics, and it has already been branded as a government firmly in the pockets of business.

The fine election promises to make life easier for debt-ridden ordinary people haven’t actually been broken yet, but there has been some hurried backtracking and issues that candidates breezily expected to deal with in a matter of months now appear to be more likely to take years. Committees are being appointed, which means that this all gets kicked deep into the long grass of the middle of the Parliamentary term in a couple of years.

It seems that the fisheries levy that the last government fought tooth and nail to impose will be repealed, possibly as early as this summer. It’s hardly a surprise, although the rapidity of it is breathtaking – but there is huge pressure from the shipowners, and there’s more or less consensus that the badly flawed form the levy finally took was a dog’s breakfast that nobody could be happy with.

What’s also no surprise is that aluminium is back on the agenda in a big way. The new government is set on allowing the construction of a new smelter at Helguvík that has already been quietly taking shape in spite of the fact that the power it will require isn’t there.

To provide enough power, the south-west corner of Iceland will have to be riddled with geothermal power plants and practically every stream along the south coast, including some of the unique tourist attraction waterfalls, will undoubtedly have to be diverted and harnessed for hydro-electric power. It’s as if 2007 never went away. The Kárahnjúkar project in eastern Iceland that was built to power the smelter at Reyðarfjörður has a track record of environmental damage to the region, the promised prosperity in the region certainly hasn’t materialised and the foreign-owned aluminium conglomerate uses the same creative accounting as most multi-nationals to ensure as little as possible of its profits go to the host country in the form of taxes.

You have to ask yourself, after the Kárahnjúkar experience that the same two political parties presided over in a previous administration, why they would be so keen on another dose of the same medicine?

Iceland isn’t the same place it was in those heady pre-Crash days of 2007. Before the Crash, aluminium was the main bone of contention between those who wanted to see everything possible turned into hard cash, especially for themselves and their friends, and those who wanted to see Iceland’s unique natural environment pickled in aspic, and all shades of opinion between the two extremes. The centre-left kept the Bacofoil bandits firmly at bay, but now aluminium is back.

Before the Crash government largely did what it wanted and unpopular legislation would be steamrollered through regardless. The Kárahnjúkar dam was the subject of environmental assessments before it was built that were swept aside in the rush, but which were subsequently shown to have been quite right. The department that had the authority to question government on such plans had that authority taken away and can now only advise.

It’s only relatively recently that it was confirmed, after having been long suspected, that the power from the Kárahnjúkar dam is sold to the smelter in Reyðarfjörður at bargain basement rates that are a fraction of what local consumers and businesses pay for power. The numbers don’t add up. A new smelter at Helguvík means a massive programme of power generation to sell electricity at knockdown prices for years to come to produce metal in a marketplace that is apparently shrinking as the price of aluminium continues to stay low. According to one commentator, the price of aluminium needs to rise by a couple of hundred dollars per tonne before the Helguvík smelter could pay its way, unless it is essentially subsidised by the Icelandic state, which would be an incongruous situation as the amount of employment it is likely to generate once the construction phase is over is minimal.

One of the symptoms of madness is supposed to be doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result. The new government seems keen to repeat the mistakes of a decade ago, although they may not get away with it so easily this time. The elections were a mess, the results more a reflection on the previous government’s shortcomings than the new administration’s promises and dubious past track record. There is no party that reflects the electorate’s broad opinions and aspirations, leaving little choice than the devil you know or the other devil you know.

The first of May, right before the elections, saw a green march take place among the usual union marches celebrating International Labour Day. Not long afterwards a crowd of more than a thousand (trust me, in a country the size of Iceland, that’s a respectable bunch of people) gathered with green flags outside Parliament to hand the brand-new Prime Minister a petition listing their concerns at the speed and scope of the plans for heavy industry.

Will the government take any notice? In the past the concerns of these people would have been contemptuously brushed aside. This time, I’m not so sure. These days Icelanders trust their politicians even less than they did a few years ago and they can hardly be blamed for it, considering the dubious quality of the majority of them. There’s far less of an appetite for leaving the politicians to it, taking into account the headaches and hardships that many Icelanders have to put up with.

So will big business and its friends in government get away with it one more time? The pessimistic view is that yes, they probably will. But this time I’d like to hope they could have a real fight on their hands for a change.

I see from the little counter at the side of the page that last week’s essay was number 99. That makes this week’s my hundredth appearance on the International Crime Writers’ Reality Check. It’s also two years, almost to the day, since I was buttonholed by a smiling Colin Cotterill at Crimefest, where he mentioned that a friend of his was looking for people to contribute to a blog.

A hundred contributions later at around 900 words each is the best part of 100,000 words. That’s a decent chunk of prose, pretty much a book’s worth.

This week is also Crimefest, and the third time I’ve been there. For those of you who aren’t aware of it, it’s a crime fiction festival that takes place in the city of Bristol. It’s not the biggest or the most prestigious one there is, although it’s getting bigger and better every year. It’s a very decent festival and Bristol is a lively city, crowded with pubs, curry houses and apparently overrun with hen parties and stag nights. Last year, taken out to dinner by my publisher with a group of other authors from the same stable, I had a sudden realisation that I was the only man in the restaurant. There was me, my glamorous editor and a bunch of lady crime writers of varying degrees of hardboiledness, surrounded by squawking hen parties, each in their own themed fancy dress and the unblushing brides-to-be bedecked in L-plates. It was unnerving. I’m sure they all thought we were an unusually restrained hen party and that I was there as someone’s exceptionally broadminded uncle.

This year as both Barbara Nadel and blogger emeritus Colin Cotterill will also be there, maybe a wild night out is required so we can toast our absent blogging colleagues in the champagne that flows freely through the streets of Bristol when the crime writers are in town.

Maybe that’s something of an exaggeration, but crime writers really do like a good time and the bar of the hotel where it all happens is a remarkably jolly place. Having said that, there’s no breaking of windows, nobody’s TV set winds up in the pool and I have yet to be mobbed by groupies, although it could just be that I’m not exalted enough a writer to warrant being pursued.

For people who spend their working days hunched over a laptop dreaming up skulduggery and ingenious murder, crime writers are a thoroughly friendly and affable crowd. I’m told that this isn’t the same in other genres. Poets, children’s writers and purveyors of serious fiction are reputed to be much pricklier than the crime bunch, most of whom appreciate a laugh and a drink, and generally have trouble taking themselves too seriously. Even big names, the fortunate few who can make a full-time living from crime, just blend in to the crowd at the bar.

Then there are the panels. Some of us, like Colin, seem to be naturals, holding an audience captive in the palm of one hand as they drop witty anecdotes and wry observations into the conversation while a few hundred spellbound people sit glued to their every word and laugh at the right moments. Others of us sit at that top table as people filter in to the room and hope there won’t be too many of them as we fidget nervously and pray not to make complete idiots of ourselves. Public speaking isn’t my forte and I can only hope not to gabble, mutter unintelligibly or drop an inadvertent ‘fuck’ into the conversation while the audience tuts and exchanges disappointed frowns.

Publicity is part of the business of writing these days. Publishers expect their tender lambs to go out and talk to their fans at every opportunity, whether it’s a packed room at an event like Crimefest (where the real draw is luminaries such as Peter James, who sell books by the ton and with whom I’ll be sharing a panel) or a dozen people in a remote public library, as I’ll be doing a few days later. Some writers will gladly drive hundreds of miles for the opportunity to speak to a small group, working on the principle that you have to keep buying the tickets if you want to win the lottery. A three-hundred mile round trip can result in zero sales and advanced motorway fatigue, or you might come away with a grin that takes days to fade if the audience turned out to be interested and interesting. It’s impossible to tell in advance and so it’s always as well to take up an invitation to speak to a group of crime readers. You can’t tell, but the one you turn down might have had a stray BBC commissioning editor in the audience.

So here’s to Crimefest. By the time you read this, it will all be over. I’ll have recovered from the cold shock of public speaking on a panel and both the crime writers and the crime readers will have hopefully braved the massed hen parties of Bristol and survived a long weekend of talking, books, food, a drink or three and bungee jumping. nb, one of those is not actually part of what goes on at CrimeFest, at least not as far as I’m aware.

I was worried to begin with when I started contributing to this blog in such illustrious company that after a few weeks I’d run out of things to write about. I’ve surprised myself that it hasn’t happened, although there are a few themes that have recurred and I do try to avoid overflogging my personal hobby horses, but surprisingly it’s the stuff that has been dashed off in a hurry with the deadline looming that normally seems to be the entries that people find interesting and comment most on. Note to self; stop overthinking? That regular deadline is both a curse and a wonderful thing, and it does provide a real impetus to get things going, unlike my own web page blog that is updated at distressingly rare intervals.

So here’s to the next hundred and hoping I can still find something interesting to shout about in a couple more years.

This is a little trip down memory lane for me, back to when I was a working trawlerman, or, as we on that particular boat preferred to style ourselves, Roughty-Toughty Hairy-Arsed Fishermen (R-TH-AF). It’s also the tale of how I put man behind bars, so read on…

The boat was a big, old one, a steel-hulled beam trawler built in the 1960s in a Dutch shipyard and sold to its British owner after it had already had something of a hard life. It was a fairly happy ship, most of the time. We’d spend seven or eight days at sea and there’d be a day or maybe two between trips. Most of us spent two or three trips away and then had a week at home to recuperate. No great shakes and it was pretty routine, at least when it wasn’t blowing hard.

It was about the time that I was starting to make a few extra quid writing articles and selling pictures, mostly to trade papers, then along came a bit of a jackpot. A politician, quite a prominent and outspoken one, was undertaking a tour of Britain and spending a week in various places trying out different jobs and getting to know how the great unwashed lived – and he was coming to us to spend a few days with us fishing off Land’s End.

We steamed inshore and the exalted personage was ferried out to us halfway through our trip, put on board from a small day boat that braved the breakers to deliver the man himself, along with his personal photographer, a TV journalist and a cameraman. It was crowded and there was no option but for a bit of hot bunking. The chef was in his element and the boat’s owner, who was also on board to chaperone his eminent friend in politics, ensured that the stores were a cut above the quality we normally had.

After four more days of fishing in some filthy weather, and with us and the eminent character being constantly filmed and photographed, the trip came to an end and we docked. As an aspiring hack, I’d done nicely for myself, taken a bunch of saleable pictures and interviewed the eminent personage (who now sits in the House of Lords) for a trade magazine.

There are no names mentioned here, not those of the crew, or the boat, or its home port, or the renowned boozer (reminiscent on a good night of the bar that Han Solo walks into at the beginning of Star Wars) a stone’s throw from that port’s quayside, or even that of the exalted personage who sailed with us. But anyone who knows his fish should be able to figure all that out.

Anyway, as part of the package, the exalted personage’s photographer took a group shot with my camera, with the politician (now a noble lord), the boat’s owner and the oilskin-clad crew lined up front of the wheelhouse. That photo found its way to the trade paper, along with all the others, and appeared along the top of a page with the crew’s names carefully listed – including me on the end in my greasy orange oilskins. That picture is still on my wall, a momento of my last few months as a genuine R-TH-AF.

But one of the lads – let’s call him Terry – had a guilty, half-forgotten secret. Terry was a tough little chap and could be a barrel of fun when the mood was on him. He wasn’t from the village but had washed up there and hitched up with a local girl who worked behind the bar in one of the pubs, not the famous one, but close. She was a short, magnificently upholstered lass and the eyes of whole trawler crews would stay glued to her vast and legendary bosom as she collected empties. After a week or two at sea, it was a battle to rip your eyes away from them, especially as she would considerately rest them on the bar between serving pints. Terry swore blind that pulling pints had made the right tit larger than the other, but they looked pretty even as far as most of us could make out.

Then one day the police came and collected Terry, and as far as I know, he never came back. It turned out that someone in his home town far to the north had seen the photo, and showed it to his wife. The first wife, that is, the one he’d forgotten to divorce before marrying the colossally-bosomed barmaid. It seems the aggrieved wife number one informed the police, who arranged for Terry to be shipped home to answer some awkward questions.

So that’s the tale of the man I put behind bars. Sorry, Terry (not your real name, obviously), if you happen to be reading this.

There’s a black fluid that keeps the Nordic countries functioning. I don’t mean the stuff that’s pumped out of the depths of the North Sea by bearded roustabouts, but that other black liquid that’s the staple cliché of every Nordic crime drama.

Wallander more or less set the pace, functioning on a diet of coffee and not much else. But it’s not a cliché. Life in the Nordic countries really is lubricated by the ubiquitous oils and essences of the coffee bean and Iceland is no exception.

Years ago there were a couple of brands of coffee in Iceland, the best known being Bragakaffi that most people bought in catering-sized bags and which was percolated into the black fluid that accompanied every aspect of life. Well, not quite. Let’s say every aspect of life that didn’t involve something that had been distilled.

It was easy then. Coffee was made with hot water and a filter, or occasionally with a machine that fizzed and steamed until it produced a jug of black stuff that went into a thermos to be dipped into at intervals. Everyone drank coffee and anyone who didn’t was generally deemed to be slightly odd. Tea was an aberration, something that old ladies might sip, although the strongest, thickest coffee I have ever been served, guaranteed to keep you awake for the best part of a week, is made by a lady now close to her hundredth birthday who has undoubtedly never let a drop of tea pass her lips.

But then, in the years after I left Iceland, things started to change. Icelanders became coffee connoisseurs. Now there are coffee bars everywhere serving mochas, lattes, cappuchinos and a whole bunch of other oddities that have passed me by. It’s all a little 101.

That’s 101 in the sense of the central postal district of Reykjavík 101 where the smartest and trendiest people live and work. When asked what sort of coffee I’d like, I look baffled and ask for old-fashioned coffee-style coffee, which generally elicits a look of pity from the barista and out comes the thermos they keep under the bar for for country bumpkins like me.

The expression ‘lattelepjandi’ (latte-lapping) has even entered the language as an epithet invariably applied to the sensitive liberal types of downtown Reykjavík 101. It’s generally good-natured, but it’s meant to highlight the disconnect between city dwellers and much of the rest of the country. According to (probably wildly inaccurate) local legend, the hipsters of 101 don’t like to even step outside their district, essentially limiting their horizon to an area the size of a few streets on a postage stamp crowded with coffee bars.

But the hardest part to deal with is the office coffee maker. In the past there would be a canteen and a percolator. There was always coffee there, even though it maybe wasn’t always piping hot. Its place has now been taken by a hulking silver-grey machine, all brushed aluminium, buttons, switches and drawers, that glares back at you, daring the faint-hearted user to touch its buttons with their trendy minimal indications of what their functions might be.

Looking at it, I feel as helpless as Arthur Dent confronted by the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser. The only difference being that the coffee machine doesn’t engage you in conversation, yet. But if it could talk, it would undoubtedly be to sneer and pass sarcastic personal comments about the abysmal dress sense of the hapless inferior being in front of it who just wants a cup of ordinary coffee.

The editor of one magazine told me mournfully that he had switched to tea after the new coffee machine had been installed in the canteen and that his assistant editor had been sent on a two-week course to learn how to use it.

Selected coffee beans go in one side of the flashing and humming machine. Milk goes in a secret compartment. If another drawer is full of used beans, then a light flashes and the machine throws a tantrum, refusing to budge an inch until its needs have been pandered to. It may well roll on its back and expect its tummy to be tickled, but I haven’t seen that happen, yet.

There are a dozen different permutations of black fluid depending which buttons are pressed and in which order, making the machine whirr, grind, growl and finally dribble into a paper cup, and it doesn’t seem to matter a great deal which buttons are pressed and in what order as the resulting liquid always seems to be a dark brown soup that is almost like old-fashioned coffee-style coffee, but not quite.

I dread to think what Kurt Wallander or any of the other dour Nordic coffee-swilling sleuths  (my rotund heroine included) would make of it.

I’m writing this on my aunt’s kitchen table on a Thursday morning and I’ve been here in Iceland since Thursday last week. By the time this is being read by the Reality Check’s hardcore fans (gaman að sjá þig um daginn, Óli Eggerts, og takk fyrir síðast) I’ll be safely back within sight of the English Channel.

But in the meantime Iceland is screwing with my head. I arrived a week ago and it was winter. Proper winter with grey skies pregnant with unfallen snow, a bitter wind that cut like a knife and the TV weather forecast loaded with hulking magnetic black clouds. Flights were delayed and there were closed roads. Coats and hats were the order of the day. It wasn’t quite long underwear weather, but it wasn’t far off. One weekend later and the sky is a unique shade of blue that belongs to these latitudes at the height of summer, a pale duck-egg blue over next door’s rooftops fading to the deepest cobalt higher in the sky, courtesy of a blazing sub-Arctic summer sun. There are people on bicycles everywhere, T-shirts and shorts, people basking in the sunshine outside Grandakaffi as they flip through their free copies of Bændablaðið (Farmers’ Weekly), eyes half-closed against the brightness. Some of the tourists walking around Reykjavík even unzipped the vast anoraks they brought with them as defence against the cold rain and snow. There are even locals casually working their way through colossal ice creams in public. And three days ago it was winter, as cold as a witch’s left… you know what I mean.

It’s not just the inexplicable climate that’s difficult to fathom. There were elections here a few weeks ago and there’s still no government. The representatives of the two main parties are negotiating, according to the press that has resorted to reporting which party leader’s summer house they’re meeting at and the fact that they snacked on pancakes during breaks in their tough discussions.

Such is the nature of a weekly blog with a lead-in time of a few days that by the time you read this, Sigmundur Davíð and Bjarni Ben may well have parcelled out who gets which ministries in their new government as they start to dismantle the mess left by the previous administration, which in turn inherited an unholy dog’s breakfast left by the previous bunch.

A lot of election promises have been made that they are going to have trouble keeping, although nobody I’ve spoken to about all this seriously expects them to actually keep those promises. A politician keeping a promise? Come on. Get real. That really would be a surprise. But in short, Icelanders can expect the new government to do its damnedest to reverse the new resource taxes levied on the fishing industry. Big business (aluminium) is looking to start building new smelters and as there isn’t enough power to go around, they’ll be looking to dig holes everywhere they can for geo-thermal power. So a few more of those areas that had been protected will become energy parks, and there are a few question marks over the environmental credentials of this so-called green power. What hurts is also that the power is sold to the Bacofoil Billionaires at knock-down rates that aren’t available to any local businesses.

Will the rich kids with the keys to the toy cupboard help ordinary cash-strapped and debt-ridden Icelanders? Probably not. I’m sure they’d like to, but somehow I don’t reckon it’s a priority now that the voting is over and in any case it’s far from being a simple, clear-cut issue.

Apart from that I’ve seen a lot of old friends, although there wasn’t time to see everyone I had wanted to and a virulent strain of flu kept some of them in self-imposed quarantine. A good few hours went into browsing second-hand bookshops and a few long sought-after gems were obtained to add to the To-Be-Read pile.

But the big news of the last week, which did in fact make it to Iceland’s main daily newspaper Morgunblaðið, is that the Icelandic chapter of the UK Crime Writers’ Association has held its inaugural meeting, aptly held in one of Reykjavík’s best curry houses, Austur-Indíafjelagið. Ragnar Jónasson, one of Iceland’s up-and-coming crime writers, and Peter James, chairman (until recently) of the CWA, cooked the idea up between them at CrimeFest last year and all as I was on the spot, the decision was taken to hold the first meeting. Michael Ridpath also attended, making the trip to Iceland specially for the meeting.

Those at that inaugural dinner (which will now undoubtedly go down in the annals of crime fiction history) were Helgi Ingólfsson, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Michael Ridpath, Quentin Bates, Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Ævar Örn Jósepsson, Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson, Ragnar Jónasson and Solveig Pálsdóttir. Arnaldur Indriðason, the kingpin of Icelandic crime and a very private character, was unable to attend, and Eiríkur Brynjólfsson, head of the Icelandic Crime Confederation, had been laid low by flu.

A good trip. A few bridges have been built and rebuilt, a lot of information has been gathered and scribbled down on the backs of mental and physical envelopes, some new friends made and there have been some fine meals and good times with old friends. Now there are interviews to transcribe, notes to be written up and a few ideas that need roughing out. These holidays can be hard work. It’s time to get back to work for a rest.

This is something of a steal from Barbara and the Snowbound Books post she wrote a few weeks ago, and it set me thinking. If I had to be washed up on a desert island, what books would I want to find on the beach, washed up (preferably in pristine condition) from the ship’s library? Of course the practical option would be copies of ‘Desert Island Survival for the Over-50s’ and ‘Fundamentals of Raftbuilding.’

But if it had to be books that were meant to pass the time, presumably the long years before a passing Taiwanese tuna fisherman passes and decides to drop a rescue boat, eight of the longest, thickest, most demanding books would be ideal. Not that there would be a lot of time for reading during daylight hours with huts to be built, sharks to be caught, filleted and dried, coconuts to be harvested and killer ants to be avoided.

So here are the choice eight I’d like to find on the beach in a waterproof box that happened to float free from the ship’s library. Note, these are today’s choices, scribbled down quickly on the back of an envelope. Eight books chosen next week or even tomorrow could well be a very different bunch.

The Flounder

It’s not a flounder. The fish Günter Grass wrote about is actually a turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) but I suppose the Flounder makes a better title. It traces the history of parts of the Baltic region that have been alternately German or Polish for generations, and have been fought over back and forth for thousands of years. It’s about food, history and so much else, not to mention the Flounder’s wisdom as he allows himself to be caught by a hapless fisherman every few hundred years and carefully guides the course of history. The recipes would make me yearn for dumplings, pork, beer and sauerkraut, all of which on the desert island would be half a world away.

Hornblower

An old favourite, a way of escaping into the Napoleonic era. The stories themselves are rollicking stuff and there’s no shortage of these tales of grapeshot-lashed decks in every library. But nobody did this stuff as well as CS Forester and the key is the character. Hornblower himself is an irascible (in his later years) man who struggles to deal with the setbacks life throws at him, tone-deaf and plagued with self-doubt who hides his better feelings. In spite of his shortcomings, he’s a deeply endearing figure, presented as a child of his own time, not an 18th century character loaded by a modern writer with anachronistic 20th century morals.

Saki

Nothing but the collected works will do, or, at the very least, the collected short stories. Saki is wonderful, a pure escape. HH Munro, to give the man his real name, wrote these brilliant short stories in the years before the First World War, satirising Edwardian society and producing some sharp portraits as well as some deeply macabre stuff that’s as chilling as anything featuring fangs and black cloaks.

The Good Soldier Švejk

Jaroslav Ha‪šek’s rambling and unfinished masterpiece is something that I can dip into almost anywhere and be immersed in that distant and half-forgotten world of the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire. There’s something enormously endearing about the idiot-savant and former dognapper Josef Švejk as he meanders to and fro from one posting to another, with that look of sweet innocence on his face.

The IPCRESS File

Len Deighton’s original spy thriller with his unnamed, working-class hero who became Harry Palmer when played by Michael Caine in the films. I’ve read this one a couple of times at roughly a ten-year intervals and never fail to be charmed and impressed by just how smart this book is. Even fifty years on, and despite the sixties backdrop, this is as fresh as new paint.

Enderby

Anthony Burgess came up with some astounding stuff, but for me Enderby the ruined poet is the finest creation. The way he plays with words is magnificent, to the point of being able to produce a sentence in which the word ‘onions’ is used three times, consecutively, and it still makes perfect sense.

‘His breath smelt startlingly of (startling because few hosts serve, owing to the known redolence of onions, onions) onions.’

I rest my case.

Orwell

There’s so much to choose from. Which of George Orwell’s work to choose to put in that box on the beach? It’s almost an impossible choice. There’s his reportage, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, or the novels, starting with Animal Farm and the terrifying vision of the future that is 1984. So I’ll forego the choice – any piece of Orwell will suit me fine.

I notice there’s no crime fiction in my eight choices, apart from the Ipcress File which is a thriller rather than a whodunnit. But these aren’t the books I’d pick up for a train ride or a flight. These are old favourites that I’d hate to be without, even if they only get dipped into at intervals of years. It’ll be a wrench to not take Simenon, Evelyn Waugh, Maugham, PG Wodehouse, Sjöwall & Wahlöö, Hardy and a few others to the desert island, not to mention the vast spread of the growing To-Be-Read pile. But I’d probably be best to fall back on those old castaway favourite bestsellers ‘101 Seagull Recipes’ and ‘Beer from Coconuts!’

For some reason it’s called the beautiful game. I’m hardly coming to this from an objective position as I can’t help but have a deep-rooted aversion to everything about it. There’s not much has me scrabbling for the remote quicker than the sight of footballers or a football crowd.

The reports splashed across the newspapers and TV of one player biting another on the pitch last week haven’t done anything to improve my appreciation of football – that’s soccer to you good people on the other side of the Atlantic, not what you think of football with all those shoulder pads and helmets.

If I were to attend a meeting of some kind and through the course of my work were to bite someone, say another writer or a publisher, or even (perish the thought) someone who had given me a stinker of a review, I’d find myself being sued from here to next week and generally (and probably rightly) scorned and avoided by my peers. But a footballer who does the same seems to get patted on the back, fined what looks to most of us to be the equivalent of the value of a small village but which to him is probably small change, apologises unconvincingly in a tweet probably keyed into his phone by someone who can spell, and that’s more or less an end to it.

For a bloke, and a heterosexual English bloke at that, it’s sometimes awkward to admit that I can’t get on with football. As a younger man I’d shuffle my feet, mumble and fudge the issue of ‘who do you support?’ when it arose, as if it were unthinkable that someone of my age and background couldn’t have a deep love and an encyclopaedic knowledge of football.

These days there’s just a straightforward ‘I don’t’ instead, normally met with disbelieving stares. Let’s be honest here; it’s not that I’m indifferent to footie. I’m deeply uncomfortable with everything about it, from the overblown punditry to the roars to the bloody evening traffic on match nights.

There’s something about football that is deeply disturbing. The idea of twenty-two grown men chasing a ball is fine with me as long as I don’t have to watch, and I positively enjoy the spectacle of thirty men (or women, for that matter) punting the oval ball up and down a pitch. It’s the following that is so very different. A rugby crowd is a pretty safe, good-natured place to be.

A football crowd in an ugly mood is downright terrifying with pent-up violence simmering below the surface. Riots followed the death sentences handed down not long ago to football fans in Egypt after more than seventy people had been left dead last year after clashes between the home team’s supporters in Port Said and those of the visiting Cairo team.

It’s just a game, surely? It may have been once, a long time ago. I’ve done dangerous and probably foolhardy things, but have rarely been as scared for my little life as during a Pompey-Millwall match in the 1970s when this teenager saw the fans unwinding lengths of chain from around one ankle and filling their pockets with broken bricks, ready for the game to come. That was the last time I went near a football match, and plan to keep it that way.

Football’s following provides stupid people with someone to hate, for no other reason than they might spend their Saturday afternoons wearing an identical shirt, probably made in the same factory in China or Thailand, but in a subtly different set of colours. Is this the tribal primitive emerging? Is this simply the primeval urge to beat the living daylights out of our neighbours that has been part of the human psyche since we were fighting over who got to ambush the migrating mastodons while armed with nothing more sophisticated than sharp sticks?

The roar of a football crowd in full flow is disturbingly reminiscent of the mob mentality that wants to see witches burned and doesn’t take kindly to being questioned. It’s chillingly close to the xenophobic urges that have through the ages driven pogroms, inquisitions and massacres, and the chanting that conjures up – to my mind, at least – visions of brown shirts.

Then there’s the money side of it. Football is mega-business and the amounts of dosh reportedly flowing back and forth between clubs (for ‘clubs’ read ‘companies’) are eye-watering, too large for the average Joe to even comprehend; young men being paid the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP to play a game. Understood, these young men do what they do supremely well, but it’s still only a game, for crying out loud. The obscene amounts of money, corruption, skullduggery, the scandals and the rest of it that the ‘beautiful’ game reeks of are more than I can stomach, and I can’t lose the feeling that fans of Liverpool, Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, et al are being fleeced for all they’re worth, but they’re loyal supporters and just keep coming back for more.

Those of use who use Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social media stuff have seen something odd happening. British users in particular have been changing their avatars, those little thumbnail pictures that are there for you to paste a passport photo of yourself, a picture of a flower or a bird or whatever. Instead of the photos of the bright young things we’re used to (or in my case, the excellent Captain Haddock) people have been using black-and-white pictures of a bald little man with a toothbrush moustache, often wearing an old-fashioned black coat and hat.

For those of you in the rest of the world unfamiliar with British politics, it’s Clement Attlee, Britain’s first post-war Prime Minister. He’s an unlikely-looking icon, a man who ran the country more than fifty years ago.

In 1945 Britain could have been mistaken for a country that had just lost a war, not one that had emerged, narrowly, on the winning side after six years of isolation and privation. The country was flat broke and tired out, and the election in the summer of 1945 swept a brand-new Labour government to power, the first to have a majority, and a very sizeable one, in Parliament.

Attlee has never had the public image that war leaders such as Churchill or Lloyd George had. A rather reticent man who liked to give one-word answers to questions from the press, Attlee would not have lasted five minutes in the showmanship of today’s political soundbite climate.

He had fought and been wounded in the First World War, being the last but one of the Allied troops to be evacuated from the mess that had been Gallipoli. In Parliament between the wars, he opposed appeasing Hitler and reversed the Labour Party’s policies on appeasement. He and Churchill apparently got on well during the term of the Government of National Unity, the coalition under Churchill’s Prime Ministership that ended after VE Day. Churchill ran the war, and Attlee largely ran the committees that maintained the home front.

But it was with the new Labour government that things began to change, not least with a huge groundswell of social change that had come about during the war years and Attlee’s government brought in sweeping changes. This swathe of legislation was based largely on the Beveridge Report, written during the war that formed the basis of the new welfare state that came into being under the Attlee administration. The National Health Service came into being, with Aneurin Bevan overcoming the medical establishment’s misgivings, later claiming that “I stuffed their mouths with gold,” when asked how he had persuaded the medical profession to agree.

The creation of the NHS formed the cornerstone of the welfare state, along with child benefit, the establishment of the right to free secondary education, brought a variety of public services into public ownership, including the loss-making railways, and improved working conditions for the police, fire service and across industry, while also addressing the inequality of property ownership, effectively equalising the rights of wives to own property. All this happened while full employment was maintained. During the same government, India became independent and Britain played a key role in establishing the United Nations. Not that everything in the garden was rosy. Britain was still teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, times were still hard, there were shortages of almost everything and this was the last nation in war-battered Europe to do away with rationing.

But it is hard even at this distance to have a clear vision of just how visionary all these reforms were when Britain was supposedly still in the grip of the landed gentry and the moneyed classes. Even the Conservative opposition, which naturally opposed such reform, accepted that it was necessary and the NHS, social welfare and education became established ideals that remained unchallenged for years.

Even Margaret Thatcher professed to be an admirer of Attlee as a man of “substance and no show,” comparing him favourably against the politicians of the 1990s many of whom we still live with, although many of us now see the Thatcher government as being the one that began chipping away at the fundamentals of the welfare state. Even the Thatcher administration, for all its rottweiler tactics elsewhere, didn’t go so far as to start taking the NHS to pieces.

The portraits of Attlee appearing as people’s online avatars are there against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral taking place last week and the inevitable hagiographies appearing across the media, plus the creeping change that has taken place since the 1980s. Utility companies are again in private ownership, as is most of the rail network. While secondary education is still a right, university education now costs an arm and a leg. Conditions for police officers, firefighters and many others have not been improving. So maybe it’s time to start thinking about reclaiming some of the empire and reversing those ridiculous ideas about female equality that are starting to look so old-fashioned now?

There isn’t a single figure in British politics today with Clement Attlee’s vision, insight and dexterity, sadly. The Labour Party of today is the faintest light blue shadow in a designer suit and a smart haircut of the; while the other side represent virtually the cash-obsessed polar opposite of the compassionate yet robust ideas that Attlee and his contemporaries stood for, and it’s our loss.

There’s only one big story this week, not counting the unfolding civil war in Syria, the deepening recession, and the spectre of Kim Jong-Un threatening to go postal on a global scale. Those are mere sideshows compared to the passing of Margaret Thatcher.

We’re so used to seeing caricatures of and popular myths about Margaret Thatcher that the reality is becoming blurred, and all this will peak on Wednesday when her funeral takes place. The death of any public figure brings about a flood of opinion and reminiscence, but if you believe the eulogies that the media seems to be awash with, she was practically a saint. There’s no doubting her drive; the daughter of a provincial grocer earning a place at Oxford in the 1950s was no mean achievement. There’s no doubting her energy and ambition. It’s the results of that drive, energy and ambition that I’m less ready to admire.

The groans of lamentation in the well-heeled Home Counties of southern England are almost being drowned out by the whoops of celebration in what was Britain’s industrial north until, oh yes, Mrs Thatcher’s years in power. My friends in other countries find it almost impossible to comprehend the extremes of adoration and loathing that Margaret Thatcher inspires in Britain. There have been calls for a state funeral; the last state funeral for a former Prime Minister was for Winston Churchill in 1965. At the opposite extreme, there are parties being organised to celebrate her passing. I’m no fan of hers. It’s instinctive as much as anything else. That laboured use of the majestic plural and those tutored, artificial, condescending tones are fingernails scraped down a blackboard. When she appears on the box, I can’t leave the room fast enough – but I’m not going to hold a party to celebrate the death of an old woman who had lost a good few of her marbles by the end. I didn’t like her, or her vile government, or her successors, but whooping it up to celebrate her death is just tasteless.

Nobody with anything to say about her is ambivalent. She was adored by her middle class Conservative heartland, and loathed unconditionally by those less well off who found themselves even worse off during her time in government. That stark division is her abiding legacy. She was, and will continue to be, a hugely divisive figure who managed to shove British society even further down the road towards greater inequality as the rich become richer and everyone else either becomes poorer or tries to find a second job.

Would industry have fallen apart anyway? Who knows? Shipbuilding was already being undercut by shipyards in the Far East and more than likely the same could be said of other heavy industries. Shipping, shipbuilding, steel, iron, coal, cars and a whole swathe of manufacturing is long gone, along with their accompanying communities and skills. It can be argued endlessly whether or not it needed to happen, but nothing was done to soften the blow as the North Sea oil billions were squandered and Britain went from a country that actually made useful stuff to being a nation of service providers in a merry-go-round of selling each other advertising and insurance.

The argument was, and still is, that this had to be done as Britain was heading straight down the sewer. Oddly, our European neighbours didn’t have anyone of Mrs T’s calibre to haul their cojones out of the fire and they still have manufacturing industries to this day, while managing to not revert to hunter-gatherer societies.

I was a few months short of being able to vote when she won her first general election, and left the country not long after, spending almost all of the Thatcher years abroad. Returning to England at irregular intervals provided me with a series of mental vignettes of the changes taking place in British society during her eleven years in Downing Street.

It was disturbing to see the changes. It was a shock the first time I encountered someone openly begging on the street of the comfortably well-off town where I grew up, something I had only before seen in southern Europe.

A new energy had been unleashed, but this was a raw, opportunistic, selfish energy, unencumbered by any compassion, and the devil take the hindmost. Those city red braces became the symbol of an arrogant greed that had had turned into something to be admired. Everything had a price tag and anything that didn’t was therefore worthless. Brash rule benders who in another time and place would have been vilified as spivs and shysters were given free rein. The pernicious cult of the manager flourished. Much long-term mental health care was dismantled and bewildered people not capable of looking after themselves found themselves having to do just that. Affordable council housing was sold off to swell the ranks of the presumably Tory-voting middle class, and no new housing was built. Power and telecoms were flogged to the highest bidders, who gleefully embarked on new strategies of cutting corners wherever they could and generally charging more for less.

Then there was the Pergau Dam affair, arms supplied to Saddam Hussein’s regime, the support for and friendship with General Pinochet, and much else that left a sour taste.

One Tory MP (and crime writer) who unsurprisingly stayed a back bencher, Julian Critchley, described her as ‘the label on a can of worms.’ It’s an apt description of the party that she led and shaped as they eventually shafted her with the same casual ruthlessness that she had used to deal with her own opponents.

It’s more than twenty years since she left Downing Street and was kicked upstairs to the Lords. Margaret Thatcher has cast a very long shadow and will probably continue to do so as her memory remains adored by the banking class and remembered with a shudder by many of the rest of us. In fact, it’s years since she became an embarrassment to her successors and an increasingly irrelevant figure wheeled out on fine days to give successive subsequent Prime Ministers a stamp of approval.

The deregulation of banking that Brown and Blair continued with such enthusiasm and which has helped land Britain in the neck-deep ordure it’s in today had its kick-start under the Thatcher government. Today’s housing, banking and benefits crises can all be traced back to those eighties policies. Her legacy is to be found among the smooth-talking snake oil salesmen who continue to peddle the same old patter, determined to dismantle and sell off anything that’s not nailed down, including the welfare state that they personally don’t need, so why the hell should anyone else?