WITH time on my hands last Sunday for the first weekend in months, I spent a few minutes researching Iceland. Not the supermarket, but the island country located in the north Atlantic.

Apart from knowing that it was the birthplace of the legendary Mastermind presenter Magnús Magnússon and that the capital is Reykjavik, and a vague recollection of cod wars with the British in the 1970s, I am ashamed to admit to my ignorance of this largely barren and remote land.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet and the wealth of knowledge gathered by Wikipedia, I now know that Iceland is a European country with a population of 320,000 who rattle around in an impressive 40,000 square miles that largely resemble a lunar landscape.

It was first settled in the ninth century by intrepid Norwegians, and Iceland’s culture today is based on the nation’s Norse heritage and its status as a highly developed and technologically advanced society. Until the Icelandic economy diversified into financial services in the latter part of the 1990s, it was dominated by a fishing industry with a tendency to plunder fish stocks on a greedy scale.

So successful were Icelanders as number-crunching financial wizards that just three years ago, Iceland was ranked by the United Nations Development Index as the most developed in the world and the fourth-most productive country per capita.

But in 2008 Iceland’s cozy little world went belly-up when the banking system failed, with disastrous consequences for investors throughout the world – including our very own islands. Why anyone could be persuaded to invest in a bank with the Pythonesque name of Landbanski, regardless of temptingly high interest rates, is beyond yours truly.

We are now suffering from a very different Icelandic fall-out, yet one with the menacing potential of serious disruption for a long time to come depending on which way the wind blows.
You don’t have to scroll very far down the first Wikipedia page on Iceland to discover that the island is volcanically active on a mega scale.  The volcano with the unpronounceable (by me, anyway) name – Mount Eyjafjallokull – first erupted four weeks ago.

Until the volcanic ash started drifting into the most congested air-lanes in the world, the people of the British Isles and a whole host of European countries were happily going about their daily business looking forward to the joys of spring.

The last time Mount Eyjafjallokull erupted, in 1821, it not only huffed and puffed on and off for three years, it also set off a far larger and more threatening neighbour.  If that happens again, we can forget about the predicted barbecue summer.

If I were an Icelander stuck among other marooned travellers in soulless airports worldwide, I would hide my passport and pretend to be Norwegian. It is fair to say that Iceland was not the most popular nation in the world before the volcano erupted, with its own inept financial advisers ranking alongside employees of the banks whose selfish avarice for fat bonuses ignited the worldwide recession.

Not that the volcanic disaster is Iceland’s fault. Even with the enviable reputation  as one of the most developed and technologically advanced societies in the world, there is nothing any clever Icelanders could have done to prevent Mount Eyjafjallokull making its presence so widely known.
As the sad stories of grounded planes, wrecked holidays and stranded passengers gained momentum, like millions Europe-wide I was cursing Iceland.

Then a strange calm overtook my emotions as the indomitable British resolve kicked in, until by Sunday I was more relaxed than I had been in almost a year.  The papers and the mail were a day late, but so what?  The sense of isolation was also strangely comforting.

Although my heart naturally went out to those castaways in foreign places with no prospect of getting home for days, or without the financial means to pay for unexpected extended stays away from home, my peace of mind largely resulted from the absence of aircraft noise.

Apart from the odd and extremely irritating drone overhead of inter-island traffic and private planes, peace and quiet reigned supreme in rural idylls such as where I reside. If Islanders could not get entirely away from the cacophony of intrusive man-made noise that blights almost every inch of this little rock, everyone who ventured outside could look up and marvel at clear blue skies bereft of vapour tails.

I have been growing tired of late of the increasing hectic pace of Island intent on developing itself at an alarming rate. There is a growing rash tendency to jump into bed with new international partners with dubious human rights track records and an alarming indifference to the environment by doing deals with developers who care only in making a fast buck without a second thought for the lives of ordinary hard-working folk.

The grounding of the aircraft on which our economic prosperity so precariously depends should be a massive wake-up call to remind us all that Jersey is a little island, isolated from the UK mainland and the European continent by stretches of water.

We have all become a little too accustomed to getting off this rock  when we please, with such relative ease that only a couple of hours’ grace is allowed for connections to flights all over the world.  As with everything in the modern convenience culture, we expect to go wherever we want, whenever we please and as cheaply as possible.

Man may cockily assume that he has mastered mother nature by discovering cures for most life-threatening diseases and by inventing pointless technology simply because, as the supposed dominant species, he simply can. Then a volcano erupts, as countless others have done since long before pond life crawled onto dry land, and hey presto – lives are brought to a standstill and man is shown just how powerless he is.

Once Mount Eyjafjallokull goes back to sleep it would be a good idea if we set aside one day a year to ground all aircraft and abandon all technological gadgets just to remind ourselves that we aren’t quite as clever as we think.