Getting drunk in Iceland: a formal guide
"We have the highest alcohol prices in Europe," he announced gleefully to the arriving throng.
But he was understating things. They have the highest alcohol prices in the world. I have drunk booze for less in countries that are officially teetotal.
"Get it here or you'll regret it," he continued, and I got it there in the form of a litre of scotch. I regretted only that I didn't get more.
At the supermarket round the corner from where we were staying the young man's warning initially seemed superfluous. For there on the shelves was beer. It wasn't cheap but it was readily accessible. Looks, however, were deceivers.
When I unzipped a can at the apartment it tasted thin. I read the side and found that what purported to be beer was little more than flavoured water — 1.5% booze at best.
It bloated you long before it kicked in. It was like drinking a bath for the soap content. We made a big dent in the scotch.
The next day I learned that to get beer deserving of the name you could go to the bars in downtown Reykjavik where a slug of Heineken set you back a mortgage, or else you could go to the rarely open and unpronounceable government monopoly beginning with B.
That night we delved deeper into Scotchland.
Quite why this tiny country should be so puritan about booze I cannot tell you, but it is a Scandinavian habit.
Perhaps it's a prophylactic against nordic gloom. Perhaps, when they descend into winter and the sun barely rises for three months, and for one month doesn't rise at all, it is only too tempting to reach for the top shelf and drink the misery away.
And yet every year some purposeless agency associated with the United Nations puts out an International Happiness League Table.
And it is invariably topped by the Finns, followed, at a short distance, by the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes. So much for Nordic gloom.
But then it could be that they only survey the grinning Finns in summer when the fiords thaw and the edelweiss blooms, and the endless lightless winter seems a distant and barely credible ghost.
Or else the fierce control of booze is a moral matter, preached from a puritan pulpit.
Every hamlet in Iceland has its proud little white wooden church standing strong against the weather, with a red roof and a tiny windswept graveyard.
And Reykjavik has a steepling white stone cathedral that could house half the country's population. So maybe it's all the fault of God.
Whatever the truth of it, we drank our scotch and toured the country in a rental car, dutifully admiring the volcanic wonders, the fissured rocks where Vikings once held parliaments, the ancient lava flows now thick with spongy moss, the recent lava flows still black and menacing, the Rotoruan geysers and the general emptiness.
The island is five times the size of Wales and has the population of Christchurch.
By the last evening of four the scotch had run to next to nothing and I made a dash for the government store only to find it closed.
But by asking around I discovered a store called Extra where more of the good stuff could be acquired if you were willing to jump through some verificatory hoops. I was as willing as a circus dog, but I was also incapable.
The first hoop was the scanning of a QR code, using the phone that is beyond my understanding, and after a couple of minutes in this Icelandic minimart I was close to weeping with frustration.
But from out behind a counter stepped a minute girl from Vietnam whose hands were like a spray of twigs, and she took pity on me in my distress and explained what I needed to do.
But I was still unable, so she took my phone and sat me down and patted the old man on his head and did the whole thing for me and I got wine. I could have kissed her.
We left next day for London where the first thing that I did once we had found where we were staying — well of course.
The pub was the Stanhope Arms, the beer was London Pride, and it was wonderful.
— Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
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