Explosion Day, Seyðisfjörður, 2025

by Lesley Guy

A version of this text was originally read aloud by participants of the LungA School Art Programme, in the Filling Station in Seyðisfjörður on Tuesday 25 February 2025.

In Iceland, the day before Ash Wednesday, i.e. Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, is called Sprengidagur, or Explosion Day. It is a carnival where you get to eat as much meat and beans as you like. Icelanders make a soup of split yellow peas, turnips, potato and salted meat.

This soup is almost identical to the Soup where I come from in the North East of England. I thought it was a family recipe, until I discovered the local pork butchers selling Soup kits with all the ingredients neatly vacuum packed. My grandma passed Soup down to her five daughters who passed it down to us. Like all local or family recipes, we all do it differently. My grandma Jean used a pressure cooker, this helped the peas break down but prevented it from becoming a porridge. I have a cousin who makes hers thick like pease pudding. My mother manages to retain a bit of broth in hers. Usually accompanied with bread and thick butter, a few cans of LCL Pils and a packet of tabs – everyday is Explosion Day in Tyneside.

I was on my way to LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. I was on my way to arrival. That was the prompt Lotte and Lasse sent to us to help us set off. Arrival. How do we arrive? So I was calm, mostly calm. Tom had drawn symbols on my legs with a sharpie to keep me safe: a Northumbrian dragon and a sheep-faced man.

Form was in my mind as I flew. The sun in the west means we must be heading north, north, north-west, the sun ever setting behind my right shoulder. I was thinking about racks and holds and boxes within boxes within the large moving vessels that carried me over land and air and sea. And then I wondered which way the earth was turning as I edged that way. Was it turning with me or against me, and how was time stretching, and was the land closer together up here, and the magnetic pole really pulls, doesn't it?

I'm here to hear the echoes of an ancient journey north, I said, to hear their voices. And from far away the voices in the street sound like English, they really do, when I can't hear the actual words. Like Yorkshire callings in the four farthings. And we, the Yeasterlings, nurse our baby sourdough colony – coo into his jar – Dayveeee I call in whispering breath, spreading my microbes into food for tomorrow morning.

Flying North.