Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North Book

This is a book that made me laugh and cry. I cried because the hardbound edition I owned had glued signatures that apparently used reject adhesive from Russian Post-It notes and dissolved as I turned the pages. It wouldn't have mattered if I hated the book, because I could then hurl it at the wall and watch it explode like a pressure-cooker bomb. But I loved the book, and found in Tim Moore a kindred spirit who could send me into gales of guffaws.

Frost on my Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer is one of those "let's go back and see what it's like to re-visit places covered in a classic travel book of, oh, say, a hundred and fifty years ago" books. The book that Moore revisited was Lord Dufferin's Letters from High Latitudes, about a cruise in 1856 that took in the Northeastern Arctic islands of Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands, Jan Mayen, and finally Spitzbergen. Dufferin's book, which I have read and liked, is a genuine travel classic, and Frost on My Moustache is one too, but in a more humorous vein.

Beginning with a great description of what it's like to be seasick on an Icelandic container ship, the book hits notes of poetry: 'Yes, we must show you how to wear the survivor suits,' said the captain, as I squinted stupidly at the safety poster, a comment I made the terrible error of thinking was a joke. As it transpired, I didn't even see a lifejacket, and even in my darkest hours I was too embarrassed to ask again about the survival suits. Shouting, 'No, no! Come back! Please show me how to live!' as the captain whistled away down the corridor wouldn't have sounded great, and it might easily have cursed the voyage in line with some 'Scottish-play'=type nautical superstition. All I could do was to try and recall from my Bronze Survival Medal course (failed) how you go about making a float by inflating a pair of pyjama bottoms. 'Excuse me, could you blow into my trousers to make them swell up?' was not a question I wanted to ask a sailor.The author was a glutton for punishment. No sooner does he embark in Reykyavik than he goes on a bicycle ride through the dread Kjolur route, some 250 kilometers of uninhabited desolation that marks the center of Iceland. (Some 95% of gthe population of the island live within hailing distance of the coast.)

Then he takes several more gut-wrenching seasickness-inducing cruises to the Faeroes, the Shetlands, and Spitzbergen. Only the leg to Jan Mayen was by air, and the weather there was too windy to permit a safe landing by the Norwegian Hercules cargo aircraft.

I suppose it remains for me to find a copy of the book that won't fall apart as I turn the pages. Sigh!