EARTH HOUR. (Note the caps.) This is important.

I love looking out from my balcony when the city is as dark as it is possible for it to be. When I lived up north (near-north) for a while (16 years) I really enjoyed a power outage. I had my fireplace for warmth and cooking (I had a special grid on the andirons that enabled me to cook over the coals) and I had candles and kerosene lamps. If the power came on too soon, i.e. before the evening was over, I left the lights off because I was enjoying my cosy arrangements.

But this brief deprivation of light surely illuminates (meaning intended) Marshall McLuhan's statement that electric light is information. When people went to bed in the dark -- oh dear, here comes another tangent: Remember Robert Louis Stevenson's children's poem:

In winter I go to bed at night/And have to dress by candlelight./In summer it's just the other way/I have to go to bed by day....

So, unless you were like Thomas Jefferson, who invented a lovely writing chair with wide arms on both sides, each mounted with a candle-holder so that he could see to write well past dark - as I say - unless you were like him, you probably went to bed. I don't mean You, I mean, less ambitious, less literate people in that time who were content to dream. (That would be nice, actually.)

Anyway, those are thoughts that drift across my mind as I prepare for my #darkmoment, or whatever "they" are calling it this week in preparation. I think we should have a glass of wine and toast the darkness.

Hello darkness, my old friend.

That's the name of the book I read yesterday. It's a debut novel by a young Australian writer (b. 1985), Hannah Kent, who went to Iceland as a teenager on a Rotary E.xchange. That's where she first heard of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a double murderer, the last person to be publicly beheaded in Iceland in 1830. After ten years of research, Kent published Burial Rites in 2013. It's fiction based on real events. Genuine documents, letters and extracts, translated from original sources, begin each chapter. It's geographically accurate as well, set in North Iceland and many of the places (ruins) still exist. Kent consulted scholars, librarians, archivists and "ordinary" people, plus local accounts, legends and 19th century journals by foreign travellers, as well as books and articles about the murders, all the while continuing her education. She completed her PhD at Flinders University in Adelaide in 2011, winning an inaugural contest for best unpublished manuscript, the one that became Burial Rites that garnered a total seven-figure advance from three different publishers in Austraiia, the UK and the USA. Not bad for a 28-year-old writer.

Well, I liked it because of my Icelandic roots. I don't know what other people's reasons are. Maybe the fact that it is well-written, a kind of a mystery, and quite feminist, oh yes, and Scandinavian - very hot these days. The friend who lent it to me was stunned by the depiction of poverty and the hunger and cold people suffered. I reminded her of Independent People by Halldor Laxness (Nobel Laureate, 1955) that also described hunger and deprivation as a given. If people survived there, they had to be tough and they must have passed on tough genes which is probably one of the main reasons I am alive and well at my advanced age. Right now I am also half way through Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (Governor General's Award Winner for 1939) by Lara Goodman Salverson. You can't read much about Iceland without encountering cold, hunger and discomfort, to put it mildly.

SOW, I'm late for my swim. Time to get cold. And I have to wash my hair today