Best of all, there was no television on Thursdays, or throughout the month of August.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 160.

After a couple of years dealing with Eastern Europe, I was allotted Scandinavia instead. This seemed to me somewhat less romantic, but I soon discovered that there was one important exception—Iceland. It was just as well, because within a short time I found this smallest and most obscure of the Scandinavian countries taking up more of my time than all the other four put together. The reason was what was officially described as the Icelandic Fishing Dispute, but was more generally known as the Cod War. Iceland, whose entire economy was based on the superb fishing around her coasts, had unilaterally declared a vast increase in what she considered to be her territorial waters, declaring a limit of twelve miles out from her shores—a figure she later increased to two hundred; we, on the other hand, who had to protect our own fisheries, stoutly maintained the internationally accepted three. There were further complications too: were the boundaries of these waters to follow every indentation of coastline, or were they to be measured from imaginary lines drawn from the tip of one cape or peninsula to the next? One look at a map of Iceland will show that “the adoption of this second alternative would add thousands of square miles of protected water on the northern and western coasts.

While working on all these problems—and many another equally ticklish—I grew more and more fascinated with all I read about the country itself. Its people, I discovered, was the only one in the western world among whom the vast majority had no surnames; they consequently had to make do with patronymics—Svensson, or Olafsdottir—which by their very nature changed with every generation. Their capital, Reykjavik, which was roughly the size of Salisbury, boasted a university, museums of history and of art, a symphony orchestra, opera and ballet, a national library, and more good bookshops for its size than any other in the world, more books being read per head per year in Iceland than anywhere else. Virtually every Icelander wrote poetry. One of their innumerable writers, Halldor Laxness, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Best of all, there was no television on Thursdays, or throughout the month of August. To Iceland, I resolved, I must one day go.