4 posts
Coffee. Reykjavík. Ask me what an occupation looks like on a Tuesday.
There are Royal Marines buying coffee in my shop.
They were polite. One of them apologised for the queue. Iceland has no army and now there are foreign soldiers here being polite about the queue, and everybody is being very normal about it, and nobody is normal at all.
Half of Iceland is proud today and half of Iceland is terrified and I have served coffee to both halves since six this morning.
The proud ones say we finally have a defence. The terrified ones say we finally have a target. They are both right, which is the worst possible outcome.
I have been awake since 02:40. Everyone in this building has been awake since 02:40.
There is no shelter. There is no siren. There is no procedure. We are a country that decided eighty years ago not to have any of that, and this morning we found out what that decision costs.
Somebody asked me today what an occupation is actually like, expecting something dramatic.
It is a queue. It is a slightly different queue, at a slightly different time, with a young man with a rifle at the end of the street who is bored and cold and about the age of my brother. It is the electricity being fine and the coffee being fine and everything being fine.
It is fine and it is completely unbearable and both of those are true every single hour.