I have recently had the great joy of mixing IPA business with personal pleasure on a trip to Iceland.
Einar Jonsson, President of the IPA Icelandic Section, had extended an invite for the NEC to attend the National Meeting of Section Iceland on Friday 23 March. We accepted his invite and planned to hold our regular NEC meeting on Saturday 24 March whilst there.
As neither Amanda, my wife, nor I had been to Iceland before, we arranged to travel together and take in a few days to sight see on either side of my IPA duties, as did other members of the NEC.
We arrived in on Thursday and were collected at Keflavik airport by Baldur Olafsson, the Secretary General, who transported us to our hotel in Reykjavík. I never cease to be impressed on arriving at an airport to find someone standing with an IPA sign to greet me. All the more impressive in this instance as Baldur is 6’10” tall and doesn’t really need a sign for you to identify him! Our group assembled at the hotel throughout the day and we later had dinner when we were joined by Einar and a number of our other Icelandic IPA friends, old and new.
On Friday morning, Amanda and I joined Yvonne and David McGregor, who kindly took us with them to go off and tour part of the country in their hire car. With snow still lying on the high hills we travelled through some dramatic countryside with snow storms following our progress at various interludes, David, a keen photographer would stop when the light was kindly to capture images of the wild country scenes. It was a lovely day trip.
Iceland for its size has a small population, so it is no surprise to learn that the IPA Icelandic Section has only 600 members. I learned from our friends there that they run their whole section without Regions or Branches, so everything seems to be very informal in comparison to how Section UK is structured and managed.
The Icelandic Section National Meeting was a refreshing revelation for me. It was planned for Friday evening and held in the bar at a local sports centre. To encourage good attendance, it was themed as a beer and pizza evening. Basically, a generous number of beers were prepaid and an industrial size number of pizzas ordered, all free until they ran out! The whole gathering was a very informal affair.
We the Section UK were introduced as guests and the meeting ran its course. With election of the NEC included, the business of the National Meeting was conducted in well under an hour. I was most impressed.
Clive Wood, our VP Professional, made a presentation to Einar Jonsson on behalf of Section UK. The gift was a “Quaich”, a two handled drinking cup, commonly known as a “Cup of Friendship” and as such it makes a perfect IPA gift. Clive did of course produce a whisky miniature which he and Einar shared from the cup to the delight of our assembled Icelandic friends.
Adding to the party theme, Clive, Fred Boyd and I had each brought a bottle of Irish Whiskey which we shared around the tables to reciprocate the hospitality that our hosts were showing us. The low key and relaxed approach of the beer and pizzas theme worked exceptionally well. We mixed and socialised with our friends and as the evening wore on we learned that we had several members of the Icelandic Police Choir in our midst. Naturally, a singing competition against trained singers seemed the appropriately, foolhardy thing to do. Our hosts enjoyed our enthusiasm and our apparent ability to not hold the same note at the same time. It was in true IPA form, a great evening of craic.
On Saturday morning Baldur collected us again from our hotel and took the NEC members to offices of the Police Union. There we were invited to use the facilities to hold our NEC meeting, in which Mick Luke joined us, chairing the meeting by Skype, from his new workplace on St Helena Island. As it transpired, this turned out to be the best Skype connection we have had in any of our NEC meetings. Having learned something from our Icelandic friends, we worked through a significant agenda of business in what was the shortest full NEC meeting in my time on the NEC. Baldur then gave a tour of his police station. It was a good mix of very modern facility with lots of the service’s history and development recorded in photo images around the building including a large memorial to officers lost in service. We met several of our IPA friends from the previous evening, who were working on Saturday at the station.
I was keen to make the most of the unexpected free time on Saturday afternoon so I called Amanda to find out where she was, then I joined her to wander around parts of Reykjavik, before we joined the rest of the NEC to host some of our local IPA friends for dinner that evening.
Amanda and I had pre-booked bus tours for Sunday and Monday before we travelled to Iceland, so with my IPA duties taken care of I was able to relax and concentrate on being a tourist. It was ever so pleasant to sit back on the bus for the Golden Circle Tour and the South Coast Tour, to chill out, take in the scenery and snooze. We visited lots of locations of interest; stunning waterfalls, epic glaciers, frozen volcano craters, the Black Beach which features a rock formation very similar to the Giants Causeway in my native Northern Ireland. We saw a geyser erupt, we walked behind a waterfall for the first time and most interestingly we walked across the joint of the North American and the European tectonic plates.
We had a thoroughly enjoyable visit and owe a debt of thanks to our hosts who gave so generously of their time to pick us up and days later to transport us back to Keflavik to make sure we got safely and conveniently to the airport.
The IPA is full of opportunity. For me the richest rewards are travelling and meeting friends. Iceland is a wonderful and dramatic country. Our IPA friends there are sincere, warm and welcoming.
Pete Connolly MBE, Secretary General.
