An unexpected and potentially confusing question

Once we’re settled in our rented wooden house I sit up on the windowsill and call the pizza place down the road. It’s snowing outside, and dark, although it’s not even four o’clock yet. I run through the shoddy Icelandic in my head as the phone rings. Pizza is 'pítsa', right? Luckily, Icelanders aren’t the chattiest of people, so I doubt I’ll have to fend off any unexpected and potentially confusing questions.

“I’d like to order a large pizza with olives and mushrooms,” I say, confidently, to the girl who answers the phone. Conor looks suitably impressed. He had wanted garlic oil, too, but I don’t know the word for it, so I had lied and said garlic? Are you crazy? Garlic hasn’t made it to Iceland yet!

“Can I take your name,” says the girl on the phone.

“It’s Annie,” I say.

“And... your last name?”

An unexpected and potentially confusing question. Icelanders never ask for your last name; there aren’t enough people in the country to justify needing it — even the phone book is listed alphabetically by first names. But I handle it smoothly all the same. “Atkins,” I tell her.

“Annie! I knew it was you!” she screeches, in perfect English. “I could tell by your grammar!”


This is part of a post I wrote for the Icelandic tourist board's new website. The rest of the story is here.

Mountain

My village in Wales sits at the foot of a mountain, thousands of metres high. But that's nothing special: on the other side of the mountain lies an identical village with an identical population of 299 people. There's one of them for every one of us down here on this side. For every Sian there's a Siani, and for every Megan there's a Mary. There's also another redhead, turning thirty, who goes by the name of Annie.

I've never met her but I'm told she's just like me, but fitter, and when she walks she holds her back just that little bit straighter. I've read about her in the local paper. Every day that I spend in my pyjamas, she'll spend the day in the darkroom. I'll sit and dream of rich and of famous; she'll write at least seventy-three pages. She never smoked a cigarette in her life and looks five years younger. I heard she wrestled ten men to the ground last summer! And that sorry day I kicked my bike and cried when I couldn't mend my puncture? That was the day she stood up and roared and led an army of aid trucks to Gaza.