Here and There (25 page)

It also taught me that the things that surprise you and move you are most often those that are closest to the familiar. And that Paris's great trick was quality. It did the same as everyone else – it just did it in silk and by hand. It was a city that had invented proletarian revolt, yet made its living out of exclusivity – from frocks to soup to whores.

The Paris I saw in 1969 was already disappearing and when I go now it's almost completely vanished. The cobbles are gone and the pissoires. The art's all been moved and Les Halles – where I ate onion soup at five in the morning with a restorative eau-de-vie and at lunchtime a dish of chicken stewed with crayfish – has been taken over by pizza, cappuccinos and public mimes.

But there is enough Paris in my head to shroud the reality with a purple existentialism until I die. I will continue to see what I want to, which has always been another of Paris's great tricks. She was an ugly old dame who convinced everyone she was really a beautiful young ingénue. She smelled of sewers and sweat and we sniffed pastis and violets. She talked ineffable bollocks and we heard charming romance.

Paris is a confidence trick that was invented in the 19th and early 20th century by a collective act of wishful thinking. An act of auto-hypnotism made by writers, artists, musicians, poets and plain girls in good hats, who levitated the city to be a demi-utopia of brilliance, an arty afternoon humping. Paris was and still is not exactly a lie, but a fantasy, and very little of it has anything to do with the Parisians, who, despite history, culture and cuisine have managed to remain an earth-bound grasping, bad-tempered lot of scowling les misérables. As Hemingway said, Paris is a moveable feast: you take it with you as a picnic in your head. And it's a city that's often best visited from the comfort of your own home.

The end of the world

An island of serenity and awe,
Iceland is experiencing its
economic woes as a footnote in a
history shaped by contrary forces.

Iceland is a singular place, stuck up there, halfway between Europe and a fairytale. A patch of land that wasn't there in a geological yesterday. It's still hot from the oven, bubbling and spitting, lavarous and sulphurous with the fumes of Hades. It has vast glaciers and winter winds that could flay your face, but also ponds that could boil you alive. It's bathed in green Nordic light and eggy gas and is one of the most contrarily rewarding places on earth.

It was only discovered almost a thousand-and-a-half years ago by a lost Viking, and when the first settlers landed in 870, they set up their ridge-poles for their halls, which they had to bring with them, because there weren't any trees. They found, in the rocks, a couple of Irish monks already there. Hermits, who had made what must be one of the most hopeless and hopeful journeys ever, at least until Laika, the Soviet cosmodog.

The Dark Age monks set out in coracles, which are simply buckets made of woven twigs and tarred leather, without maps, trusting only in God, searching for solitude. They travelled up the Hebrides, past Orkney and Shetland, already into some of the most dreadful and difficult seas in the world, then on to the Faroes and, from there, into nothing. A frozen, grey, howling nothing. These were people who believed the earth was flat and the sea full of monsters, but they believed in God more, and either His guiding hand or the most blessed luck brought them to Iceland.

Without wood to build or burn, without any land animals to eat or dress in, just fish and seals and puffins, they had found the mother lode of solitude. If you're in the awe business – and we must assume that monks are – then this is the Tiffany of awe. The Ringlings' four-ring circus of awe. There is enough solitary awe in Iceland to keep a mildly righteous fellow struck dumb for a lifetime. But just to show that God also has a raw and wry sense of humour (or perhaps it was just the damnable luck of the Irish, who can't resist a punchline), having got through this one-way journey of unsurpassable dread, and finally having found this beatific, chilly loneliness of eternal meditation, a package tour of heathen Vikings turns up and, you've got to admit, that's funny. It is the coldest and wettest shaggy dog story in all of the Dark Ages.

From here, Leif Ericson discovered America. The Icelanders invented the first real parliament in Europe, the Althing. And then, after a millennium of hardship and hysterical subjugation by first the Norwegians and then the Danes, they fished for cod and whales and husbanded sheep and rode horses the size of kelpies, drank like plugholes, ate sheep's heads smoked over their own dried excrement, wrote epic poetry, played chess, knitted, believed in fairies and grew to be the most enlightened and liberal people in the world.

What we're talking about here is an island bigger than Portugal, larger than Hungary, but with a population about the same size as Wollongong, Australia. Iceland, the most unpromising piece of new development in the northern hemisphere, has produced a mythic combination of characteristics that are the most enviable oxymoron available to people: poet fishermen. They have also given the world three Miss Worlds and a Nobel Laureate in literature. Plus Björk and Sigur Rós. And no army. And that's not bad for a country where it's dark half the year and that would lose a fight with Canberra.

Iceland also managed to amass a per capita income that made it the richest country on the planet. It did this by … well, actually, no one's quite sure how they did it, but the Iceland bubble makes the Dutch tulip mania seem reasonable and subprime mortgages positively cautious. And then it all went puffin-shaped. The island went from being one of the richest countries to falling back into the Dark Ages, without an intervening period of Enlightenment. The fall wasn't precipitous, it defied quantum physics.

All of which is why I went back. What does a country look like, what does a country feel like, when it can't afford a banana? No, really, they can't afford a banana. Exotic fruit are off the menu. And seeing as there are no trees here and the mean winter temperature is below zero, anything that doesn't grow on a seal is an exotic fruit.

I don't know what I expected, which is rather what the Icelanders feel; they don't know what to expect, either. But they do expect that it will be cold and wet and tough, which is what life is supposed to be like if you're an Icelander. This brief interlude where, for a season, the country became an Ireland of the north, is deeply un-Nordic. They are facing a future without kiwifruit, without Mexican beer, without the updates for
Guitar Hero
and the box set of
30 Rock
. They're facing it with a phlegmatic thirst. They are drinking and reciting poetry and singing, in dirge-like choirs, the old songs, and riding their little stoical horses. And quite looking forward to it all.

We are left with our lives, someone said to me. All the other stuff, the poisonous foreign stuff, the stuff that makes us jealous and empty, is being taken away and, like children when the toys have to go back in the box, we're feeling sorry for ourselves a little. But now we'll fish and cure mutton and make skyr (a particularly fine hybrid of cheese and yoghurt). You British have money, another older man said to me. You like it, you are comfortable with money. We weren't. All our history is the story of poor people surviving. We're good at that. There is a pride in that.

And there is a lesson here. While the rest of the world prints money to stave off the consequences of having spent too much, and borrows more to mitigate the borrowing, so the Icelanders are settling into their penury like men who've come back from a holiday slipping into their old threadbare coats, taking comfort in familiarity and pleasure in being relieved from avarice.

I drove out one night away from the city until all the terrestrial lights had vanished and there was only the great blackness and the pinpricked sky with its fluster of heavy cloud, and the ear-biting air was full of the chuffing wind and the shingly hiss of the shore, and the place was as full of ancient awe and keening sagas and bitter serenity as the end of the world.

There's no place
like home

When it comes to humour
and holidays, familiarity
breeds contempt.

American newspapers have begun to cull comic strips. Readers are being asked whether
Peanuts
or
Love Is …
should get the comic cut. Don't all shout at once. America invented the comic strip (as well as the crossword). In fact, they invented the newsless newspaper. Most rags have accumulated dozens of 'toons, sometimes as many as four pages' worth. The reason for giving them the bullet/ falling piano/exploding cigar/sudden cliff/brick wall – they say – is rising print costs and falling advertising. But anyone who's travelled through the States recently will have caught a sniff of the real reason, heard the warning bark. America is losing its sense of humour.

Now, the American joke is rather like the American car. It's big and comfortable and slow and oversprung. It's probably got wings and it helps if you've drunk a lot. The great American joke and its sister, the great American dream, are confirmations of the greatness of America. The specific content is not important – either of the joke or the dream. It's having one and sharing that's American. And it's gone. Or rather, it's become hard and brittle, bitter and spit-flecked. The huge fraternity of the set-up and the punchline has become the snarl and exhaust of the bumper sticker. America is a fair-weather goodtime joker. It doesn't do what the rest of the world does, and laugh at adversity. America panics at adversity. It panics in slow motion with a straight face.

The airport thing is only the start. That dull, plodding suspicion, the zero-tolerance rigmarole of welcome that make you think that, having invented powered flight, the locals have come to regard it as a mechanism of the devil, dabbled in only by deviants and the combustible. It's not that all visitors are looking for auguries and visible symbols of wartime change in the States, it's that the Americans themselves are not just suspicious – they're superstitious-suspicious. A nation with so much faith, it doesn't know how to stop believing in things. This is not a time to make jokes; a joke can get you arrested, a joke can get you deported. This is a time to go and read your horoscope and look stern.

I've just been travelling through Maryland, a state that is a suburb of Washington, home to professional apparatchiks. It's where you park your porky backside if you have your nose in the trough. It's also got Baltimore, home of Francis Scott Key and the American national anthem, and Annapolis, the naval college, and Chesapeake Bay, and not much else. A border state between north and south siding, after much anguish, with Lincoln and the angels. It feels like the North. It doesn't have that foxy, inbred sense of danger and carnality you get in the South.

Mostly Maryland is a place beside the sea. You drive through the now-ubiquitous fields of corn – when did America decide to grow only one thing? – like a bushy yellow monobrow. At the roadside, farmyard stalls sell garden peaches, goitred, livid tomatoes and huge, husky heaps of sweet corn, but you sense that this is a place that farms backdrops and vistas for the serenity and cosy good nature of the four-wheel drive mums and weekend ruralists.

I was headed for Ocean City, a town on the sea. One of the obliquely good things about America is that outside of New York, nothing is designed, sold or made for foreign tourists. Foreigners aren't a market – they're a threat, or they're busboys. But then most Americans are tourists in their own country, so almost everywhere that has two diners and a local specialty has a big welcome for guests. Ocean City is built on a long spit of sand. These bars and slim islands run like morse code up the east coast, making some of the nicest seaside destinations on the Atlantic. Ocean City isn't one of them.

Ocean City is gaudily hellish. Three broad streets wide, and a hundred or so cross-streets long, it's a strip of economy high-rise hotels and greater-economy motels of the sort that make you think of suicides, underage sex and men who dress up as their mothers. These are interspersed by economy beachwear shops selling towelling shellsuits and novelty T-shirts, and all-you-can-eat restaurants and giveaway churches.

One of the other odd things about Americans is that they take so few holidays – and in such parsimonious increments. Families chug into Ocean City in desert-storming SUVs having driven across three states to spend a short weekend having economy fun. Everything needs to be accessible on an American holiday, so resorts come on naked, like strippers who haven't got time to strip. Americans approach beaches as if for the first time. Ocean City's beach is nothing to write home about, nothing to wish-you-were-here on. A long motorway of sand with a cold, grey aggressive Atlantic in front and the cold, grey passive hotels behind.

The families stagger with armfuls of paraphernalia, like proud Cortés, coming upon the sea with an exhausted yet wary awe. They sit on their fold-out chairs under their fold-out umbrellas and hats and sunblock and suck a litre of latte, eat a Danish or three, read a magazine. And then they stare at the ocean, and the ocean ignores them, so they stare at the lifeguards. There is a lifeguard on a highchair every 20 yards (Ocean City has a museum to lifeguarding). The lifeguards unpack their sunblock and their hats and their rubber rings and their floats-on-ropes and then they do semaphore to each other. Up and down they wave their arms, like train signals in a gale. Who knows what they're saying? ‘Does my bum look big in these?' perhaps.

When the holidaymakers have stopped looking at the lifeguards they look at each other for a bit, and then they stand up and get antsy. Something isn't happening. Something is missing. Is there a show? Is there a band? Is there lunch? A parade? Fireworks? Is there magic? When does the beach do its thing? Americans are not good at doing nothing. America wasn't built by people who could do nothing with ease. It isn't a nation that relaxes, or rewards relaxation. It's a get-up-and-go place, so they get up and they go. They pack up their umbrellas and seats and head back to the strip, where they play novelty golf.