Just after Cold Earth came out, in the summer of 2009, I moved to Iceland for a year with my husband and two sons. People always ask why we went and the truth is that I still don’t really know: because it was there, because we could, because we thought it would be interesting (it was), because I’d fallen in love with the place when I was nineteen, because we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives in Kent.

We lived in a newly-built flat in a largely empty development in Gardabaer, a wealthy suburb of Reykjavik which we chose to be close to the International School and the sea. I had a lectureship at the University of Iceland, where I taught Romantic poetry and creative writing. I found the experience of being a foreigner very hard. I didn’t know how to catch a bus or pay a bill, where to buy light-bulbs or calpol. The early days of living abroad are infantilizing, and made harder by a certain kind of Britishness that would rather kill itself (without making a fuss) than make a stupid mistake in public. I talked, one day, to some of my students about this paralyzing sense of idiocy and they, who had almost all lived abroad themselves at some point, told me that the Icelandic word for stupid is ‘heimsku’, one who stays at home. You stop being stupid by embracing your stupidity.