Iceland is a totally brilliant country

I cannot tell you how pleased I was that England got knocked out of the European football championships. If ever there was a just result in the peculiar circumstances this country finds itself in, this was it. A nation of 330,000 sends the english overpaid primadonnas packing, and they and their thuggish supporters can now reflect on yet another miserable tournament where events off the pitch sadly once again overshadowed those on it. I don't watch football, it's not my cup of tea at all, but I was thrilled for Iceland and equally thrilled that those who typify the worst that this country has to offer would be incredibly disappointed. Call me small-minded if you will, but there's not a huge amount to take pleasure in at the moment, and I continue to be baffled by what happened a couple of weeks ago. Since then many of the spectacular claims that were totally unimpacted by factual rebuttal have been abandoned by those that made them, and the two main political parties are contentedly destroying themselves. The lies and unthruths leave a sour taste in the mouth, and we can now all look forward to several years of uncertainty and many more of decline. In my line of work uncertainty is bad. I will have to work harder, and I will be on shakier ground. It is possible that I, along with many parts of London, live in a bubble, but I didn't choose this. Oh, and I don't mind foreigners, in fact many of them I positively like. 

In the absence of any recent positives, I've been mentally returning to Iceland, land of heroes and slayers of xenophobic cretins. Specifically I've been thinking about Grebes and Ptarmigans, as they were the two species that I came away feeling the most pleased about. Thanks to the collective brain fail on the 23rd I've been rather busy at work, so I am rather late to these, but I've finally managed to free up a bit of time to go through them and I'm still pleased. 

Shaun and I probably saw about a dozen of these birds over the course of our short visit. They were all male, and tended to be sat on prominent parts of the scenery which made finding them a little bit easier. A few photos got taken from the car, those with more of a landscape feel, but a couple of times we tried the stalking route, and one of those went very well indeed. Here are a selection.