pallor of the sky, as if the sun is a rumour like the kreppa or the swine-flu pandemic. I cycle past marshland, where there were geese a few weeks ago and now are none, along the side of the freeway, where I see more accidents requiring ambulances and leaving broken glass and bits of car thrown up the embankment. Up a hill, along a quiet road lined with houses the size of aircraft hangars, each surrounded by a pool of grass and concrete. There are no flowers in the gardens here, no trees, certainly no vegetable plots or currant bushes, although the people in the painted wooden houses in the city have found ways of coaxing most of these through the winter. Each of these houses has three or four cars, each about the size of the sitting room in an ordinary British house, beached on the drive in front of the garage door, and there’s often a pram parked out there as well. Two of these houses, the two white ones with terraced circular patios lapping like waves at the French doors, have tinted windows, which don’t stop me peering in. I glide back down to the shore, the path squeezed between the freeway and the sea. Although the traffic is loud here and exhaust smoke heavy in the air, it’s where the birds congregate. There are always sea gulls, screaming and fighting, but the others come and go as the autumn passes. I greet various kinds of Arctic duck, some with curled feathers on their brown heads, some black and white, visible as navigation buoys against the water on a blue day. I labour up the hill, past a retirement home which has a gym on the ground floor where I often see a nurse helping old ladies to use the machines, and a sitting room with a glassed-in verandah where the residents sit in velvet armchairs, lifting their faces to the sun. I usually get off and push the bike up this hill, trying not to mind when the real cyclists, men with proper Arctic cycling clothes and balaclavas under their helmets, ring their bells at me to get out of the way. I pass through Kópavogur, a cityscape more comfortable than Garðabær, a town with smaller cars and a gathering of shops around a series of car parks, with a church perched high on the end of the peninsula. It’s a church that appears to be inspired by the shells of the Sydney Opera House and it’s floodlit through the dark, making a surreal landmark visible across the city and far out towards Hafnarfjörður. Down the hill on the other side of the church, checking the brakes because the slope is as steep as the slide in the school playground and then I’m on the road again, around drivers who don’t encounter cyclists from one month to the next and use the mirrors only for applying make-up. I cross the road and freewheel back down to the shore, and from here the ride is a reliable pleasure, half an hour of my day stolen from both my employer and my children. The track passes below the graveyard, one of only two burial grounds for the whole city, its stones spreading out along the hillside like suburban sprawl as the population grows. Icelanders don’t do epitaphs, only names and dates. And then I’m in the parkland under Perlan, pine trees rising on one side and the water in the inlet usually placid on the other. It’s always windy here, sometimes a fight to keep going up the hill and to balance the bike against the gusts, and windier as I round the headland and pass the end of the runway at the little airport. Planes come down so low that it feels as if I could touch them if I stood on the sea wall, and the two-seaters are often parked on the other side of the chain-link fence, where I can see men tinkering with them the way dads used to play with their cars at weekends, all boiler suits and oily rags. There’s a hole in the fence and the tarmac is temptingly smooth; I wonder what would happen if a foreign woman cycled along the bit that says ‘Civilian Apron C’.
I ride along the ends of the gardens of houses overlooking the sea. There are no fences here. Anyone could wander off the path and up to the windows. These are older houses than the ones in Garðabær, although still expansive as cruise ships, docked between the city and the shore. Their eccentricities are pleasing: a vaguely Mexican place, with a scattering of blue tiles set in its apricot painted walls, a white house built bunker-like into a slope, with a hot tub, swaddled now in tarpaulin, set at its feet; a glass cube three storeys high which, despite my growing nostalgia for Victorian brick curlicues, I find myself coveting. The króna is still weak enough that if we did decide to move here permanently, we could sell our terrace in Canterbury and buy one of these, put up swings and a trampoline in the garden and let our books spread out along hundreds of metres of concrete walls. It’s open sea on my left now, buffeting the stones, and I slow down and don’t look where I’m going because sometimes I see seals here, hauled out onto inshore rocks. It’s hard to tell in the half-light of mid-morning which dark bulk is a seal and which is weed-covered rock or a huddle of cormorants, and I don’t know exactly why it matters, but seal mornings are better days. Nearly there now, past the wooden fish-drying hut from which I still catch a whiff in an on-shore wind, and round at last to the road. There’s the only few metres of bike-lane in Iceland here, along the side of a dual carriageway that doesn’t go anywhere in particular and isn’t much used. The students
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