"Nine children in this bed, and then she died there."

You don't have to live like they tell you.

This was fascinating, an ancient way of living that died - perhaps appropriately - only in 1965. The man doing this restoration is only a single generation away from a way of life that is thousands of years old, as though the great vast ocean of the past - that for most of us is a long lost memory - is lapping right at his very heels.

Did you notice the picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall? I had no idea Icelanders were Catholics. I would have thought that being essentially offshoots of Norway they would have been lapsed Lutherans.

We don't know how much we have lost until we take a close look at how people lived in the past. This Icelandic homestead was an extension of the way Norwegians and many northern people lived for thousands of years. Possibly since the ice first receded from Europe. We look at the idea of ten or fifteen people all living in essentially one room together and think only of ourselves, our privacy that would vanish, our sense of self, even our personal identity.

We wouldn't last a week in a situation like that. But for them it was natural. It was how you were supposed to live and if they were alone, as we all are, they would have gone mad with loneliness and a loss of the identity that way of life gave them.

But I think while we no longer know this life, even in the reduced form it took in the Anglo nations since the Industrial Revolution, we have a kind of visceral memory of it. Perhaps a cultural memory. It's why at this time of year we all try so frantically to reproduce it in some way, buying turkeys and trying to get what's left of our atomised families to come and eat it, or even our friends to come and play the role of family-replacements.

We are alone and scattered and most of us - even older people - remember no other way of living. But it's still there because we know on some level that this way is not natural to us. That it must be restored somehow or we will simply die out, either culturally or physically.



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