In Iceland

FEBRUARY  18TH 2013

What do you do when there's a sub-zero gale blowing, the air is full of spiky little snow-pellets flying painfully into your eyes, nose and cheeks, snow is tipping down and the pavements are lethally slippery?  Well, if you're visiting your son and his family in Iceland, you – what else? – find the nearest outdoor pool and go swimming.  Iceland is thermal, a constantly living landscape of lava fields, eruptions of steam, sudden geysers leaping out of the ground, so at least the water isn't cold. 

I step off the plane.  "Do you want to go to the pool?" my son asks.

"No," I howl.  "Besides, I didn't bring my—"

"Don't worry if you haven't brought your costume," he says.  "We can hire one for you."

"But I don't want to," I say. 

Fifteen minutes later I'm picking my way across freezing paving stones slippery with wet moss, praying I don't fall and break a hip.  Yes, the water is lovely. Warm.  Hot even.  Full of healthy chemicals and life-restoring nutrients – and much nicer once you're in than, for instance, leaping into Hampstead ponds in the dead of winter, as one of our renowned poets has been doing for decades in the search for eternal youth … a fruitless quest, if the  photos are anything to go by.  It's the getting out again that I dread.

But Icelanders are among the healthiest people in the world.  The pollution is minimal, they smoke less than most, they eat well and they drink even better.  And the outdoor bathing certainly does add a healthy glow and feeling of well-being.  Except that I wasn't feeling all that bad before I went in. 

Back home, my son asks if my grand-daughter if she would like Granny to read to her.     

"No," she says, the vowel as golden and rounded as though she was rehearsing to step into the breach should Her Majesty of England suddenly keel over in the middle of an address to the nation. She would much rather go through the pile of books in front of her – and who can blame her?  She's only three, but reading is definitely the way to go.

Last time I visited, she and I enjoyed so many of the books I'd read to her father and uncles at the same age..  Oh, the joy of once again reading aloud Where the Wild Things Are, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, or Horton Hears a Who.  And as she gets older, how many more revisited pleasures lie ahead?