It is too late to begin

To the Lit & Phil on Monday to hear Nancy Campbell as part of the Books on Tyne Festival. The event was preceded by a frustrating visit to the Newcastle branch of Majestic; they had sent us a discount voucher as an incentive to resume buying wine from them (we stopped because they closed our local branch), and I wanted to put it towards ordering some wine to be delivered to the Bears, to make mulled wine for the carol evening. But as well as closing my branch, they have changed the tills, says the assistant, and now we have to phone an order through to the Holloway Road branch. So we spent our voucher on the Portuguese red with the wading bird on the label, and we might phone the Holloway Road, or we might phone the Wine Society... The event was followed, more satisfactorily, by dinner with S. We hadn't planned this, but since we were all there, we went to Mario's and S. told us about her recent holiday in Japan.

Nancy Cambell's event was linked to her book, Library of Ice (here's the Guardian's review). I had no idea whether I would like the book: there were things in the description that appealed to me, and things I thought I was likely to find irritating. Having heard her speak, I'm still not sure, but I will find out, because I was sufficiently intrigued to buy a copy. I enjoyed the talk, which started with her residency at the museum on Upernavik, a small island off the coast of Greenland, and went on from there to the scientists who are drilling deep into the ice of Antarctica (the resultant cores are the 'library of ice' of the title). I was going to call it 'beautifully constructed' until I realised that at one point she had realised she was overrunning, and apologised to someone in the audience for skipping a section which particularly interested them...

Rather than attempting to transcribe from memory my own highlights, I commend the author's website, which links to many good things. Here's a sample of her voice:

'Ilissiverupunga,' Grethe muttered. I'd only recently learnt the word. It meant 'Damn! I've put it away in a safe place and now I can't find it.'

Mornings at Upernavik Museum: an endless round of kaffe and conversation as local hunters dropped by to discuss ice conditions. Wishing to make progress in my research into Greenlandic literature, I'd asked Grethe, the museum director, whether she knew of any poetry books. But the bibliographic collections held mainly old black-and-white photographic records of the settlements, and kayaking manuals.

'Illilli!' Grethe called an hour or so later, 'There you are!' She emerged from a doorway almost obscured behind a stack of narwhal tusks and proudly presented me with a 1974 hymnbook, its homemade dust-wrapper culled from an offcut of pink wallpaper.

[From the essay No more words for snow]

And here's the book I really coveted, a Greenlandic alphabet produced as an artist's book, twelve words (because only twelve letters appear in the initial position in Greenlandic) and twelve images:

"How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet" (Watch on YouTube)