FIRST, THE UP DATE
Erm, well. Such as it is. [Ahem.] An hour before The Dance was to commence, the girlfriends started arriving chez AAH. Directly to her room, where Serious Undertakings were launched: straightening and blow-drying of hair, application of makeup, borrowing of clothing, preening and examining of self in mirror, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.
A few minutes before the whole entourage was due to leave, I hear AAH shout from the bathroom:
“Can somebody call [insert rightboy’s name] and see if he’s going to meet us on the bus!!?”
YT: …!!?
FAST-FORWARD TO POST-DANCE
AAH barges in at 11 pm, wearing her white-leather high-heeled boots and mid-thigh-length skirt, entourage behind her. [Come to collect their ‘regular self’ guises]. YT and EPI performing couch potato impressions by the blue light of the telly. [Watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth as Mr D (swoon), if you must know.]
YT: [all perky] So… how’d it go??? ?
AAH: [Rolling kohl-lined eyes] He’s too shy for me. I can’t deal with it. Too much of a hassle.
And that, my friends, was that. Although the minor details did emerge in offhand fashion that a) they met up in front of the school, b) when she took out her wallet to buy the ticket, he said in a timid yet gentleman like manner, ‘No no, I’ll pay’. So she let him, c) they got inside and a picture was taken of them together. And then she barely saw him for the rest of the evening.
Ah, well. At least the girl knows what she wants. Or doesn’t want. And certainly postponing First Heartbreak scenario for a while longer can only be a Good Thing.
MAYBE RENAME IT NICELAND?
Amusing little item in today’s Fréttablaðið. Evidently, the CEO of the Iceland food chain in the UK has abandoned his plan to seek an EU-wide patent on the name “Iceland”, having received a written request from Iceland’s [that’s our country’s] Prime Minister Halldór Ásgrímsson [ah, now we know what he’s been up to since he took office last September. We were indeed starting to wonder.]
The paper quotes a section of the CEO’s letter, to wit: “When I founded Iceland in 1970 it was only a small shop in northern England with frozen food products. My wife came up with the idea of naming it Ice Land. It never occurred to us that it would become the large corporation it is today, to say nothing of the use of the name posing difficulties for the country Iceland.”
Bless his northern English heart. However, the question that begs to be answered is, what sorts of problems has this posed for [the real] Iceland? Is there, say, a danger of expat Icelanders wandering into their local Iceland and thinking they are home? Or Brits who pop out to the shop to pick up a few things accidentally buying a ticket to Iceland and arriving all confused-like and then being the responsibility of Halldór Ásgrímsson et al? Just what is the exact nature of the problem?
OK, facetiousness aside, the thought of Iceland owning the Euro-wide patent on Iceland probably isn’t a very attractive prospect. Who knows, one day down the road Iceland [the shop] could slap Iceland [the country] with a grim lawsuit, ordering them to change their name to something less… difficult.
Right. That’s enough blabbering on the matter, how about…
SOME WEATHER
Thankfully it’s a whole lot better than yesterday, although this part of the country is still a “windy ass”, to use a direct translation of the favoured Icelandic phrase rokrassgat. Very little precipitation today, however, and temps are just above freezing [currently 2 °C] so the wind has been bearable. Just. The sun came up at 9.16 and set at 18.09.