This week’s Daily Life, my last, comes from London. It’s bitingly cold, bright and sunny and the shops are exploding with Christmas spirit. I grew up here but haven’t lived here for five years or so and in all likelihood I’ll be coming back to London in the near future for work, as prospects dim in Iceland.

Being here in the pushy smog of London, always kicks up many feelings – for a start, it’s huge. I used to work in a London theatre before I left and it took me an hour and a half to get to work (it would have been quicker to get to work in Oxford from my parent’s home in West London!).

Secondly, there’s the fateful issue of dealing with Londoners. A professor of mine at grad school asked me where I was from and responded by saying, “Ay yes, London, the land of ‘no’!” Indeed it can be, Londoners are an aggressive bunch, eyes permanently fixed to the sidewalk and emitting growls on the subway if a step in placed too close to their personal space.

Above all, Britain suffers from a the existence of several outmoded hierarchies, class, professional and so forth, making it hard to get things done without hopping through endless hoops of middle management and forelock-pulling.

This ‘land of no’ business is crucial, in fact to how I see Iceland. In that respect, Iceland may be described as the land of yes (orgasmic as that may sound – think the final lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses!).

Even today, as the island seems to collapse on itself and money becomes scarce I find that people all around me in Reykjavík are getting on with projects and making things happen with the usual verve and panache they always have done.

Making zero-budget feature films, or producing music albums for no money whatsoever or starting businesses from their living room. Resourcefulness is a key Icelandic trait and while the excesses of this resourcefulness have left the country shuddering, this indomitable spirit is exactly what will see Iceland through to healthier future incarnations.

When I first came to Iceland to visit friends a couple of years ago, I sent letters home to my scattered friends and family and the thing I most underlined about what I witnessed in Iceland was an unfamiliar cockiness – a ‘why not?’ attitude that seemed to empower people to get on with whatever it was that they intended without the usual hapless sense of barriers so common in the UK.

The other thing was that everyone I met seemed to be an artist or musician of some sort. Perhaps what I noticed was that people I met (certainly from a particular context, many of them did have educations in the liberal arts) were able to make a living doing one thing, and put their creative energy freely into other activities. Work to live, and not the other way round.

Reykjavík has been and is a wonderful home. I handle a metropolis of this size better than the sprawling mass of a London or Paris and the straightforwardness with which things can get done (with the right idea and the right energy) is magical.

I hope that when the removal vans come and the shipping containers are flown home, that packed in with the rest of my belongings is a little part of that intangible Iceland. The Iceland that confronts the present with gusto, opens its arms to the unknown and goes for it.

Indeed, success and adventure come specifically from not knowing your place and the Brits could do well to remember this!

TM – tobias@icelandreview.com