Lost Colour

In 1974, I retired my trusty old Kodak Brownie Starmite camera, bought a Zenith E single lens reflex and switched from black and white prints to colour slides. The photographs from that time are still good, even after nearly fifty years. For example, here in the summer of 1974 is my friend’s Hillman Minx being unloaded by crane from the (turbine steamship) T S Leda at Bergen, Norway. It was the ship’s last year as a North Sea ferry before Roll-on/Roll-off came into operation on that route. You watched anxiously as your car was lowered to the quayside.

We had sailed from the Tyne Commission Quay at Newcastle. Only last May, I walked the half mile out to the end of the pier at Tynemouth, which I remember passing on the Leda, and gazed awestruck into the mouth of the Tyne, and at the even longer structure on the South Shields side. All still very much in colour, both photographically and in memory.  

Now look at this one, taken at Scarborough in 2004, which I discovered when scanning in.  

It isn’t a one off; we have four boxes like this, a hundred and forty four washed out pictures, all on Agfachrome from 2004. We have other boxes from the same year on Fujichrome, and others on Agfachrome from before and after, all fine. So far as I can remember, they have not been stored any differently; all have been in a drawer in the same cardboard box. On Steve Reed’s Shadows & Light blog, he even has good slides from the nineteen-fifties.

Some of our affected slides are like this one of wild ponies on Dartmoor. They suggest a reaction with the air, because these were from the centres of the slide boxes. They seem to have degraded from the outside in.
 

I found a web site, https://www.scantips.com/color.html, which explained how the slide below on the left had been restored to the two on its right, but despite playing around with Photoshop, I was unable to restore mine to anything like its original self. Some of the detail seems to have been lost. And you would need much better Photoshop skills than I have to correct slides that still retain colour in the centre but have lost it at the edges. 

Thankfully, it’s only four boxes: we have over a hundred and fifty in all. Is it our fault, or did Agfa change something in 1974? I’ll probably never know.

The slides were from my wife’s camera. She changed to digital in 2006, as I had done in 2001. Here is her picture from last year of the iconic lighthouse at the end of Tynemouth pier, which I remembered seeing from the Leda. Underneath is how the piers look from the air. They shelter the mouth of the Tyne. Incredible! 

Lots of things can go wrong with digital images, but loss of colour is unlikely to be one of them.

Jokers Wild

New Month Old Post: Barry Cryer, who died last week, is remembered in this not-so-old post from 18th November, 2018

Leeds 1970. Mondays. Back to work. Accountancy 8.45 to 5.30. I’d better get used to it because it could be for the next forty or fifty years. One of the older guys could find his own handwriting in ledgers from the nineteen-thirties: like in Cat Stevens’ Matthew and Son.

But there was one good thing about Mondays: Jokers Wild. The show had returned for a second series just after we moved into the first of our shared houses in March, 1970. I could be home for 6.15 when it went out on Yorkshire Television.

Jokers Wild (not to be confused with the American series of the same name) was a classic comedy show in which two teams of comedians competed by telling jokes on topics from cards drawn by Barry Cryer. Bonus points could be scored by interrupting a joke part-way through and completing the punchline. It was pretty much the first British example of many similar show formats: the Mock the Week of fifty years ago.

Old copies of that wonderful provincial newspaper The Yorkshire Post, which at parochial odds with almost every other newspaper and magazine in the country listed Yorkshire Television ahead of the B.B.C., name the regular team captains as Ted Ray and Arthur Askey, with team members Les Dawson and Ray Martine. On the 6th April, 1970, the day my wild-joking accountant boss had wished me a happy new fiscal year (I ashamedly still use that joke every year without fail), they were joined by guests Clive Dunn and Stubby Kaye.

Ray Cameron (father of the present day comedian Michael McIntire), who invented the show, appeared in some episodes. Other regulars and guests read like a who’s-who of British comedy from the last days of music hall to the nineteen-seventies. Many of them smoked cigarettes overtly on-screen. Some are now so gone and forgotten they don’t even have Wikipedia pages.

Barry Cryer with the Jokers Wild Trophy (click to play)

A YouTube clip advertising a DVD of some of the shows has guests Joe Baker and Lance Percival, probably from the 13th or 20th April, 1970. In subsequent weeks the Yorkshire Post lists Jack Douglas (in character as the nervous-tic-suffering Alfred Ippititimus), Ray Fell, Ted Rogers, Graham Stark, Kenneth Connor and Arthur Worsley. Other online clips include Michael Aspel, Warren Mitchell, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Sid James. Wikipedia and IMDb also mention that over its five-year, nine-series run, others on the show included Eric Sykes, Jimmy Edwards, Roy Hudd, Alfred Marks, Professor Stanley Unwin, Norman Collier, Bob Monkhouse, Peter Goodwright, Jack Smethurst, Lennie Bennett, David Nixon, Roy Kinnear, John Cleese, Charlie Chester, Freddie Starr, Michael Bentine, Paul Andrews, Lonnie Donegan, Milo O’Shea, Kenneth Earle, Kenny Cantor, Clement Freud, Mike Hope, Albie Keen, Tony Brandon, John Junkin, Mike Burton, Don Maclean, Bobby Pattinson, Tony Stewart, Dick Bentley, Deryck Guyler, Laurence Harvey, Dickie Henderson, Bernard Bresslaw, Rolf Harris, John Pertwee and Fred Emney. As was the spirit of the time, few women appeared on the show, the only ones listed (including hostesses) being Isabella Rye, Diana Dors, Audrey Jeans, ‘the lovely’ Aimi MacDonald and June Whitfield. I can remember most on the list, but by no means all. Some were actually singers, actors or presenters rather than comedians.

They told a lot of sexist, racist, men-in-pub, wife and mother-in-law jokes. I remember Tim-Brooke Taylor being allowed almost to complete a joke about a town in Devon before Barry Cryer interrupted to remind him that the subject was supposed to be painting. “Oh,” he said sounding surprised. “I thought you said Paignton.” The wonderful and much-underrated Ray Martine, a Polari-speaking, camp Jewish comedian with a reputation for witty and effective put-downs, became more and more ill-at-ease and hesitant as the series progressed. He seemed unable to cope with constant teasing and interruptions, especially from Les Dawson. On one programme he looked so fed up he launched into a stream of jokes about Barry Cryer’s wife, which was taking things a bit too far. Barry Cryer took it with good grace and said that after the break they would be back with more jokes and a letter from his solicitor. And it was all done without a single swear word.

One might also reflect on prominent comedians of the time who were not on the show: no Morecambe and Wise; no Ronnies; no Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams, Dick Emery, Harry Worth, Charlie Drake, Benny Hill or Jimmy Tarbuck; only a minority of Carry-Ons, Pythons, Goodies and Goons; and so many, many others. Perhaps they were too busy, or under exclusive contract to the B.B.C., or maybe it was just not their format.

It was at least a last chance to see some of the older generation: the wartime generation and earlier. Arthur Askey and Fred Emney were over 70 when they appeared, with Ted Ray not much younger. From all of these lists it is astonishing to realise just how many brilliant comedians there have been over the years.

It looks terribly dated now and was probably more scripted than improvised, but it still raises a laugh. The DVDs for Series 1 and 2 are tempting [I later bought the series 2 DVD]. A much better review than this of the first DVD appears here.

Paul Theroux: The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux:
The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (5*)

In 1973, Paul Theroux set off alone by train from London to Tokyo, taking numerous side-tracks along the route. But this is not so much a book about the countries he passes through, it is more an account of his experiences and emotional states. He does not seem to have enjoyed it much. Neither would I. It was what walkers call a Type 2 experience: you enjoy the telling of it afterwards. Like my Iceland saga?

He meets lots of strange characters along the way. I knew it was going to be entertaining when he introduces the first, Duffill, who carries his luggage in paper parcels. They board the Orient Express. Duffill takes a top bunk. Theroux struggles to sleep beneath. 

And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.. (p24)

The great thing for a writer of this kind of travelogue is that once they have done with a character they can simply get rid of them. Duffill gets accidentally left behind on an Italian station platform and Theroux hands over his parcels to an official at Venice.

For me, though, the book truly comes alive when Theroux reaches Pakistan. Crossing Iran, he seems depressed by the landscape, the most infertile soil he has ever seen. Afghanistan is “a nuisance”, expensive and barbarous, which even the hippies have begun to find “intolerable”, and where “the food smells of cholera”. He passes over it by plane, with only a brief, joyless stay in Kabul (p87-88). His mood then lifts as he descends through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar on a local train.

From there, he goes south by train to Ceylon, then back to Calcutta, flies to Bangkok, takes the train to Singapore, which he detests, and spends some time in war-ravaged Viet Nam just months after the American withdrawal, where he is astonished by the country’s beauty (I am using place names as they were in 1973). He then flies to Japan (the tracks through Hanoi and China being closed) and takes a prurient interest in the Japanese taste for bloodthirsty eroticism. He returns on the Trans-Siberian Railway without getting off, depressed again because of the Japanese people, the sea-crossing to Vladivostok, the cold and dark, the bleak settlements, the never-ending portraits of Lenin and four months of travel.  

I loved his description of the remote, imagination-catching Gokteik railway viaduct in Northern Burma, built in 1899 to expand the influence of the British Empire in the region: 

... a monster of silver geometry in all the ragged rock and jungle … bizarre, this manmade thing in so remote a place, competing with the grandeur of the enormous gorge and yet seeming more grand than its surroundings … the water rushing through the girder legs and falling on the tops of trees. (p230).

Memories of British dominion are everywhere. One eighty year-old tells his life story of starting as a cook in the Royal Artillery officers’ mess and ending up praised in person by the likes of Field Marshall Slim and Chiang Kai-shek (p215), almost like a Burmese version of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day.

Theroux also encounters the inevitable hippies and commercial travellers in all kinds of unlikely goods: seamless tubes, plastic washers, bleaching agents and rubber casings for lugged sprockets (p158). He sees so much poverty: people crouching by the side of the railway to defecate, children who raid the train at stops to steal water from the toilet compartment, Singhalese living in ramshackle huts with an acute shortage of food.

I am reminded of George Orwell’s point in The Road to Wigan Pier, that our comfortable English lives are the legacy of a hundred million Indians living on the verge of starvation (p148). It has been estimated that, over the course of two hundred years, the British extracted £45 trillion out of India at present day prices.* That’s a million pounds for each person living in Britain at the time. It remains all around in the infrastructure, institutions, artefacts and systems you see, and in the shipwrecks and shrapnel scattered further afield.

I am also reminded of Ted Simon’s books about his trips around the world on motorbikes, the first around the same time Theroux was on the train, in which he fears that when the countless millions see what we have and they don’t, “there probably will be hell to pay”.

They’ve seen it now. 

*George Monbiot, The Guardian, 30th October, 2021.

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

A Fiddle Too Far

This is my parents’ brass carriage clock. It was a touch of luxury, new around nineteen seventy. I seem to remember it ticking in their bedroom, but there it is later on my dad’s mantelpiece around fifteen years ago, just before we sold his bungalow. That picture could be a whole blog post in itself.

On the back it gives the maker’s name as St. James of London. A few clean and shiny ones otherwise the same are for sale for £300 or £400 on ebay, although around £100 seems more the going rate. That is when they are working. This isn’t.

It worked until recently. I assiduously wound it up every Sunday morning, and it kept good time until a few months ago when it began to stop mid-week. A little nudge would start it going again, but gradually became more and more ineffective until it stopped completely.

Could the cause be a simple lack of lubrication? I bought this clockmakers precision oiling tool. 

Four screws under the base of the clock secure the case. I undid them, lifted it off and applied tiny drops of oil to the centres of the large and small cog wheels visible here above and below the hairspring. It worked. The clock started up and ran well for a few minutes.
 

Just before putting it back in its case, I thought it might better disperse the oil around the mechanism if I wiggled the slow-fast lever. Idiot! The hairspring broke. One bit of wiggling and fiddling too far. It doesn’t go at all now.

It would cost at least its value to have it repaired, not really worth it. It has little sentimental value because I was no longer at home when my parents bought it (I wouldn’t have fiddled in the first place if it had). Should I label it “not working” and put it in a charity sack, or just send it to scrap metal recycling?

Iceland 15: Postscript

links to: introduction and index - previous part

In transcribing this saga, I began to wonder what had happened to the people and places I encountered.

Iceland now seems increasingly geared up to the kind of tourist activities that extract money from punters at every twist and turn, such as sitting in warm pools sipping cocktails. And did I mention the penis museum? Staving off boredom! How I detest myself when I do these things. Wild walkers just don’t generate the same revenue.

Despite several distinctive names, there seems to be very little online about the others on the walk. I came across technical publications that may have been written by the landscape architect, one of the chemists and the medical researcher, although they could have been by others of the same name. The index of marriages on Ancestry suggests that the couple on the walk did not stay together, and that they may have married other spouses. That’s about it.

There is, however, quite a bit about the route and the tour organisers.

The Route

In 1977, the walks offered something of the wilderness experience Dick Phillips must have enjoyed in surveying the routes in the nineteen-sixties. Today, there are many more organised trips with motor support. One would have to go to the isolated interior, or to Greenland, to find places where other walkers are rare, where you might be the first to venture as the snow melts. Even so, satnavs and satellite phones remove much of the isolation. 

Julia Bradbury’s hour-long television programme about her 2010 Icelandic adventure (https://youtu.be/YGgWse3iQLA) illustrates the difference. Caught in bad visibility in the mountains, she calls in a support vehicle to take her to the next hut, almost a stately home, and there takes a shower. Neither would not have been possible in 1977.

Most of the huts we used have now been replaced by buildings we would then have considered outrageously luxurious. They have wardens, bunks, showers, chemical toilets, cooking facilities, cutlery and crockery, and are reachable by ordinary car. There are also more of them, although not at Strutslaug where Dick Phillips’ remote hut was swept away by an avalanche around 1999. 

Pictures of the Skaelingar hut (the one with the rock pillars) belonging to the Útivist Icelandic travel association also show the difference (https://www.utivist.is/english/skaelingar-hut). Below, their new hut is in the background, with one of the two we used in the foreground. The other we used has gone, with the new hut, car park and toilet shed in its place. Things can’t possibly be the same without a shovel outside the door.   

Skaelingar now and then. The hut in the foreground on the left is one of the original two. The hut, car park and toilet shed behind it are new. The picture on the right shows how it was.

The Tour Organisers

Dick Phillips’ tours ran until around 2012, for fifty-two years in total. I would guess that more than ten thousand people went on one kind of tour or another over these years. In the winter Dick lived at Nenthead near Alston in Cumbria, where, known to all as ‘Icelandic Dick’, he was active in the local community. Among his many roles he was a Councillor, newsletter editor and helped with the Nenthead mines group. He was invariably to be seen riding a bicycle in one of his distinctive Icelandic jumpers, and was buried in one in 2019. He was in his mid-eighties. There are several tributes on the internet (e.g. here and here).

Paul Stevens, the walk leader, was invited into partnership soon after our trip, and remained with the business, leading walks until it ended. A search reveals that, around 2005, he talked about his experiences for the BBC Radio Stoke ‘Inside Lives’ project. A brief synopsis is archived but the link to the recording no longer seems to work (http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/insidelives/2004/02/paul_stevens.shtml). 

Paul and wife Judi are still involved with the Fljótsdalur hostel, which he talks about in a four-minute facebook video (https://fb.watch/8RA4SOHyWO/ - you may need to switch on the sound using the icon in the bottom right of the picture; the spelling in the subtitles is atrocious). It is good to see him looking well. Is that what a lifetime of walking with a heavy rucksack does for you? What a book he could write! The hostel facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/FljotsdalHostel/. 

I bet they still have our real names in the visitors’ books. I am half-expecting a letter from their solicitor.

Finally, an elderly Dick Phillips appears at the beginning and end of this fifteen-minute video, not in any way the scary perfectionist I perceived in 1977. The scariness was my own inadequacy. 

The main part of the video is about extreme mountain biking in Iceland, and worth watching if you have fifteen minutes. That really is scary. 

Horace and the Rough Stuff Fellowship: click image to play video

(The video URL if the link doesn't work is: https://vimeo.com/98904694?fbclid=IwAR0yW2nRSTfiYKJq7rbYlevwi5j9ISS9SSbCOtrvk4wnXYWEmChrUFA3JRA)

The end.
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Iceland 14: Reykjavik and Home

links to: introduction and index - previous day - postscript

Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th September 1977 

Dick Phillips (in Icelandic jumper) oversees loading the Land Rover at Fljotsdalur

We return the eighty miles from Fljótsdalur to Reykjavik by road. Some travel in the Land Rover but most of us go by service bus. I really should have recorded observations of everyday Icelandic life.

We sit about Reykjavik for the rest of the day, and, to avoid the expensive restaurants, go to the Salvation Army for an evening meal. I must have since paid for it several times because I always put money in their collection tins.

We exchange names and addresses. The little community of walkers and hut dwellers, the cliques, the jokes, the nascent friendships, comes to an end. Other than for Neville, I never see any of them again. I wonder what became of them. 

The next day we are up early to get to Keflavik for the 08.10 flight. Everyone disposes of their króna (devalued since we arrived) in the duty-free shop.  

On the plane I have a window seat and spend all the time looking out at the Icelandic coast, the ice caps, the clouds and later the Scottish mountains. Magnificent! This not being my first flight, I allow myself a few photographs. 

Iceland from the air	Scotland north of Glasgow (possibly Loch Eil)

Glasgow Airport

At Glasgow, Neville’s car is damp and won’t start. We eventually get it going and then it really is back to reality. After two weeks without any news from the outside world, the radio tells us of threatened strikes and power cuts, industrial disputes, economic problems, etc., etc., etc. They should send the lot of them on compulsory Icelandic walking holidays to get things in perspective. They should send all present day politicians too, minus technology of course.  

On the trek, I hardly saw Neville at all. When I was fast, he was slow, and when I was slow, he was fast. I did, however, spend a lot of time with Gavin, so much so that some of the others thought I had come with him. I was constantly amused by his endless stream of inoffensive humour. On returning to England, I found that one of my colour slides had inadvertently caught him having a pee. I labelled it “Icelandic Relief” and posted it to him without any indication of who it was from. In due course a couple of pictures of me came back through the letterbox. 

I dearly would have liked to have gone to Iceland again, but people, jobs and circumstances never came together right. Neville did return twenty months later, in the May, on the North-West Fjords tour led by both Dick Phillips and Paul. He sent me a postcard saying that the temperature was minus fifteen degrees (Fahrenheit, I assume, which would be -26^oC, but does it matter?). 

There ends the Iceland journal, but in putting it here I started wondering about things and googling, which means a postscript...

(link to postscript)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Iceland 13: A Last Walk

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Monday 5th September 1977

Our last day at the Fljotsdalur hostel is a free one. I suppose the tour needs spare days in case of problems or delays. It wouldn’t do to miss the flight home. 

Debbie, Dennis and Ed decide to stay nearby while the rest of us head north up the mountain towards the small Tindfjallajökull glacier. It is a long way, possibly ten miles there and ten back, but at least today we can walk without rucksacks.

Walking uphill usually makes you too warm, but today the icy wind blows straight though the sleeves of my woolly jumper almost putting my arms out of action. Wool is very effective at keeping you warm under a cagoule, but my cagoule is in Mike’s daysack and he has shot off ahead. I get colder and colder, and it begins to feel quite serious. Just in time, we reach a mountain chalet, which, like all the huts, is unlocked. It provides shelter to eat our sandwiches. I resolve never again to allow anyone else to carry my food or equipment unless I trust them absolutely to stay nearby, and never to get too far away from anyone else whose things I am carrying, a resolution I have kept ever since. It is basic mountaincraft.

Despite being reunited with cagoule, I am not keen to go much further. After a while I turn back along with Neville, James and Tony. The others, the four bridge school G.T. boys and Gavin, who they make an honorary member, do reach the glacier and are late back for tea. Some of them are very fit indeed. They take part in International Mountain Marathons sponsored by the Karrimor outdoor equipment manufacturer. One might have expected such mountain supermen to have the sense not to go off ahead with someone else’s warm clothing.

On the way down, the view over the Markarfljótsaurar and out to sea, with the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar) in the distance, is simply breathtaking.

There are around fifteen Vestmannaeyjar, all formed from undersea volcanic eruptions during the past 10,000 to 12,000 years: not at all long in geological terms. The most recent, Surtsey, is only ten years old, having formed during a four-year eruption that began in 1963. The largest, Heimaey, grew by 10% during 1973.

In the evening, Dick Phillips chairs a debriefing session (likes / dislikes / suggestions) and then insists on showing us a slide show of other parts of Iceland followed by a recorder recital played by him and Jenny. Exhausted, we struggle to keep awake.

(next part)

Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Tuning Gadget

This is my old guitar tuner from the nineteen-seventies. It works by resonance: when an in-tune guitar string is played, the matching part of the tuner will vibrate in sympathy. In the photograph the E indicator on the left is vibrating, showing that the lower E-string is tuned to the correct pitch.

I never used it much. I usually found it easier to tune by ear, by tuning one string against a piano or tuning fork and then resonating the other strings against each other at the fifth fret, or by oscillating the harmonics at the fifth and seventh frets (either you’ll know what I’m talking about or you won’t).  

However, I do now use an electronic tuner which works in much the same way as the older one, by sensing the frequency of vibrations in the wood of the guitar, working out what note it makes and displaying it digitally. Here it shows the lower E-string is slightly sharp, vibrating a little more rapidly than it should. The string needs to be slightly less tight. 

The electronic tuner is better in noisy concert settings when everyone else is trying to tune their instruments at the same time and you can’t hear your own. It is more accurate: with the old tuner you had to judge the indicators by eye. It is also chromatic: it detects and indicates any note in the 12-note chromatic scale (including semitones) whereas the old tuner only picks up the six notes of standard guitar tuning. So you can use it to tune a ukulele which has a C-string, or change your guitar to DADGAD tuning. 

It will measure the pitch of almost anything. Our central heater boiler is an A-sharp. My electronically adjustable standing desk motor is between an E and an F. My beard trimmer seems to be a two-note mixture of C and G. And my nose and ear hair trimmer (ugh!) starts off at E and rises to G-sharp as it picks up speed. I haven’t yet measured Phoebe’s purr, though.

You can even measure your own voice. When you sing or speak it causes your whole skull to resonate, so by clipping the tuner to the end of a ruler held at the other end in your teeth, you can see the frequency. For example, you can test how accurately you can sing a musical scale or arpeggio, such as the C-E-G-C of a C-major chord: 

Not very in my case. Sorry about the horrible noise. Well, you try singing with a ruler clamped between your teeth. That’s my excuse, anyway.

Iceland 12: to Fljótsdalur

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Sunday 4th September 1977

Leaving Einhryningur

Our last day of walking, on the move again from Einhryningur to the Fljótsdalur youth hostel. The route drops from the mountains into the Markarfljót valley. Ahead of us, to the south, the ice cap over the Eyjafjallajökull volcano shimmers in the sunlight. The volcano, you may recall, would later erupt in 2010 causing enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe.

As we descend from the mountains, the Markarfljót valley looks like a dry estuary with a stranded island. You expect the tide to come in, but Paul says it has not done so for hundreds of years. The estuary is filled with an outwash ‘sandur‘ plain, the Markarfljótsaurar, consisting of sand, clay and other glaciofluvial deposits from the Mýrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull glaciers.
 

Along the plain is a long flat road to the hostel. I talk to Tony for a while. He is a mature student who used to work in stockbroking. He had to overcome a lot of prejudice on switching to the lower status of trainee design technology teacher. He seems very happy and content. I take encouragement from this, being about to switch from accountant to psychology student. Nearly everyone on the walk has been to university, and all say they would have got more out if it as mature students.

Ed falls further and further behind as the day goes on. He deserves a medal for finishing. As he sits with eyes closed, someone says he looks as if he is trying to escape from reality. “What do you mean?” he replies, opening his eyes. “This is reality.”
 

Fljótsdalur

The youth hostel at Fljótsdalur (meaning: River Valley) is an old farm house converted by Dick Phillips, the tour organiser. It feels as if we have returned to civilisation out of the wilderness. There are tables, chairs, cutlery, crockery, bookshelves with an extensive collection of books about Iceland, hydro-electric power and comfort. Yet it is still isolated. Many years later, interviewed by BBC Radio Stoke, Paul said of Fljótsdalur: “The silence is broken only by the booming call of a Whooper Swan, or the whirring wingbeats of a Red-Necked Phalarope...” 

The hostel lies on the northern side of the Markarfljót plain between the Tindfjallalajökull and Eyjafjallajökull ice caps. Dick said he imagined Icelandic farmers of times past sitting out the dark days of winter, waiting for the first sight of the spring sun above the lowest point of Eyjafjallajökull.   

Eyjafjallajökull from Fljótsdalur 

Here is the map of the second half of the route on which the last five huts are indicated by blue arrows (click here for a greatly enlarged version):

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Caer Rhun Hall

One small aspect of our holiday near Conwy twisted an old thorn in the side: Caer Rhun Hall, a private accountancy college. I seem to remember its name emblazoned in large bold letters along the dry stone wall at the front, but may have imagined that. There are no letters now.

As mentioned in other posts, after leaving school I started to train as a Chartered Accountant but didn’t pass the exams. Well, technically, I did, but you had to pass all the exams of each stage in a single attempt. I managed to fail different ones each time, including ones I’d previously passed.

Only a few years earlier, accountancy had been a profession for the privileged. Trainees, known as articled clerks, did not receive a salary; in fact they paid their employer a ‘premium’ to take them on. A sum of around £500 (£10,000 in today’s money) would have been typical in the late nineteen-fifties. A recently-qualified chap at the firm where I worked told me he had been the first there not to have to pay, and I was one of the first to receive a salary, starting on £360 p.a. (£5,000 today). It covered my board and lodgings. Everything else depended on parental generosity, so in that sense it was still a profession for those with advantages.

You studied for the exams in your own time by correspondence course, for which an outfit called H Foulks Lynch effectively had a monopoly. You were supposed to complete and post off one unit each week, and, for most people, that went on for five years. By heck, it was tedious. No wonder accountants had such a reputation for being dull and boring when five years of their youth had been spent evenings and weekends on their own in their bedrooms studying such riveting subjects as commercial law, company accounts, auditing, income tax, and estate duty, instead of getting out and enjoying themselves like they should have been at that age.

Take a look at this, if you can face it:  

 

And that was one of the most interesting topics because it had a large practical element. For a really good night’s sleep, consider the other titles listed on the back. 

H Foulks Lynch then acquired a competitor. Caer Rhun Hall began to offer residential cramming courses. You could forget about the dreary correspondence course and just spend four weeks at Caer Rhun instead. It was a hard six-day week, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and it was costly, but they were so sure of themselves that if you didn’t pass you could go again for free.

Needless to say, only the rich kids could afford it, i.e. the sons (there were few girls) of wealthy clients who got sports cars for their birthdays. Then, because they had transport and were self-assured around company directors and top businessmen, they got sent out on the best jobs, the public companies and large manufacturers, while we the proletariat were stuck in the office doing shopkeepers and small traders. And they were the ones who pissed about with their correspondence courses, went to Caer Rhun Hall and passed their exams first time. Chartered Accountancy still favoured the privileged.

Chip-on-shoulder, yes, but I suppose in truth my heart wasn’t in it. Things worked out well enough in the end. And it did give me the confidence to deal with relatives’ estates and take on HMIT when they tried to tax me on expenses. 

Nevertheless, I still felt perverse satisfaction last week to see Caer Rhun Hall now out of business and abandoned.  

POSTSCRIPT

Urban Explorer visits the abandoned building: https://youtu.be/kuhuci3GXlI

(you can use the YouTube tools to watch on 2x speed) 

Iceland 11: to Einhrningur

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Saturday 3rd September 1977

At Krókur, it is the first time I have had to get up in the middle of the night for a pee, awoken by the cold. I should have bought a long ‘mummy’ sleeping bag instead of the one I have. The down-filled ones were only £35. Now, three years later, they are nearly £100.

Outside, the night is still and silent, the sky full of stars. No street lighting here. In the morning, those of us in the stable part of the hut are up ages before those in the posh, wood-panelled part. Our breath has condensed and frozen on the underside of the iron roof. When the sun comes up it warms the roof, melts the ice, and it begins to rain inside. There are a couple of warning drips and then all hell is let loose. I have never seen us get out of our sleeping bags so quickly, especially me and the other ‘Rip van Winkles’ who are all in that part of the hut. Neville, however, gets a soaking because he is wearing his down jacket inside his sleeping bag, jammed in so tight he cannot get out. He wriggles helplessly like a butterfly struggling to get out of its chrysalis, only to find it is still a caterpillar. It must have been really cold to be a ‘duck-suit’ night.

Pat, the youngest of us, wears all his clothes all the time, even his two-pointed, tea-cosy hat. He did not bring anything like enough to wear. He never complains about the cold, he just looks it. “Gloves on in the hut?” queries Paul.

Today’s walk is comparatively easy. The countryside above the Markarfljót gorge is astonishing, but the weather deteriorates as the day progresses and after a wintry downpour we are glad to reach the next hut, Einhrningur. Paul coaches our pronunciation. The trick is to stress the ‘h’ and shorten the second syllable, flicking the ‘r’ off your tongue – Ein-Hr-ningur. It means unicorn. Say it right and you sound like one, or at least like a horse.
 

Einhrningur mountain in a wintry downpour

Einhrningur hut

Those who have been walking in shorts have chapped legs. James, the landscape architect, is worst. He borrows Debbie’s Nivea skin cream. “How do you use it?” someone asks. “You have to snort it,” James responds sarcastically as he takes off his shorts and begins to rub the ointment up his thighs and high into his crotch. “I thought snorting went up your nose,” someone else says. “He thinks it’s a suppository,” suggests one of the bridge school G.T. boys. “Suppositories are useless,” James responds, “of no benefit whatsoever. They’re too big to swallow, they taste disgusting, and for all the good they do, you might just as well shove ‘em up your arse.”

With only one more day’s walking to go, the evening has a party atmosphere. The hut is the most enormous and luxurious yet, with proper bunks. James produces a bottle of whisky, no wonder his rucksack was so heavy, and we share out our remaining Mars bars and other treats. Someone sets the challenge of swinging the length of the hut hand-over-hand on the overhead beams, and then swinging back underneath the long table. Only four can do it – the bridge school of course – but Gavin tries and fails about two hundred times. I make a decent attempt but cannot do it either.

The food, already here for us, is plentiful. There is dehydrated chicken supreme, sliced spam, peas, Smash potato, Angel Delight, and apple custard. A kind of yoghurt called Skyr is received with great enthusiasm. In the morning there is Sol Gryn porridge and real eggs, and not only sandwiches to take along during the day but also chocolate bars – Old Jamaica, Three Musketeers (American Milky Way) or just chocolate. I could eat it until I’m sick. It is a big improvement on the Marathon bars we had earlier in the walk, which Paul had carried next to the cooking fuel and tainted with the taste of paraffin. Those, we renamed ‘Parathon’.

(next part) 
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Iceland 10: to Krókur

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Friday 2nd September 1977

Late yesterday evening at Hvanngil, Dick Phillips arrived bringing further provisions. With him were Paul’s wife Judi and another walk leader called Jenny.

Injured Ed, fearing he is holding everybody up, discreetly offers to return with Dick in the Land Rover. He is told he can but there is no compulsion. He decides in that case to continue. I don’t think he realised what he was letting himself in for on the trek, but what tenacity. Dick does take Gavin’s five tons of obsidian, though.

The early risers disappear for a short walk in the morning sun and we are slow getting away. When we eventually do, it is a beautiful day on winding mountain paths with a black desert and more rivers to cross (the Markafljot and the Hvitmaga), and further views of the high rhyolite. Paul’s wife, Judi, is walking with us. She is chatty and spontaneous, the opposite of quiet, considered Paul.

I will let the photographs do most of the talking.

 

Now Neville is not going so well. He has bruised heels, although not blistered. You learn a lot about yourself through walking. It separates mind from body. You are minded to keep going but your body wants to stop. I articulate this philosophy and get the piss taken out of me for the next couple of hours.

 

 

We don’t go as far as the itinerary indicates. Instead of a cave at Lifrarfjöll, we stop an hour early in a hut at Krókur. Its name appears to mean hook. Like the village of Hook in Yorkshire, it is on a sweeping switchback bend in the river.

Hut quality had generally been improving but Krókur is a step back. It has two parts. I choose the roomier stable section in spite of the smell of horse poo. It is preferable to being crammed into the other part, despite its wooden floor, walls and ceiling.

Approaching Krokur - the hut is in the valley just left of the left hand figure

The Krokur hut

After dark we see the Northern Lights: electrically-charged particles from the sun colliding with the gases of the atmosphere in bands of green across the night sky. They appear at a point on the horizon and expand upwards in glowing fluorescent lines that change shape constantly, and then slowly fade as another point begins to appear low down on the horizon. Incredible! 

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.