The grimmest assessment of the world economic meltdown that I have seen came not from a banker or a politician or a pundit, but from Kristian, a 53-year-old Icelandic fisherman quoted in the Times. ‘The priorities went askew,’ he sighed. ‘We thought we could have jam on our bread every day of the week.’
God. Think about that. Couldn’t the pathos of it just make you weep? Not even toast, you’ll notice. Bread. Toast is a stuff of which the Icelandic fisherman has yet to dream. Had the glacial streams run sluggish with diamonds, had the cod grown golden teeth and scales of silver, ah yes, that would have been a time for toast. In a mere unprecedented economic boom, bread was luxury enough. Bread with jam.
I don’t mean to go on about this, but I had a hunch that Icelandic jam probably wasn’t one of the premier jams around. So I Googled it. ‘Icelandic Jam’. Turns out there only is one Icelandic jam. It’s called rabarbarasulta, and it is rhubarb jam. It has to be rhubarb jam, because no real fruits will grow in Iceland. I found a recipe online. It was very short. ‘Remove the leaves,’ it begins. ‘They are poisonous.’
I don’t know if you have read Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel set thousand of years in the future, long after culture, society and language have broken down. It’s all phonetic, although you aren’t always sure what it is phonetic of. At one point, Riddley, the hero, comes across the vast and crumbling ruins of some sort of 20th-century power station, and it is all too huge, impressive and lost for him to comprehend. ‘O what we ben!’ he raves. ‘And what we come to!’ I mention this because I always thought it the most powerful, woeful lament I would ever read.
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