If you’re eating, perhaps pause for this one. If you’re drinking alcohol, perhaps consider it a warning. This is not a pleasant story. But it, might, perhaps, be a profound one.

It’s 5 AM, winter. I peer out through the foggy glass of my front window, down into the closed alley I like to think of as mine. 

My apartment, on the top floor of the building, has an excellent view. Over the alley.

I notice eddies of tiny trash fluttering in, thrown off-flow from the busy shopping street one building over. Polluting my sanctuary in the heart of downtown Reykjavík.

Here, people tend to sleep with shops and bars all around them. A tiny hint of big city life, in a city that hardly constitutes as one at all.

I should have been asleep hours ago. 

Instead, I am sitting on the armchair of my sofa, in the dark, wishing everyone outside, everyone making that intolerable noise this early in the morning, was dead. 

Bum-da-bum-da-dum. Since 11 ‘o’clock. My partner, somehow, sleeps through it. 

Reykjavik is a party town. Not a friendly place towards those chasing sleep or sobriety or solace. 

No matter. I’m awake and at guard. I peer closely through the window, just as an inebriated and dishevelled man passes my eye line. 

This sorry casualty of Saturday night is one among thousands, burning out in the slow sunrise. I’ve been there myself.

No feeling more disgusting. The morning is all too quick to reveal one’s sins.  Icelanders even have a name for it.

Djammviskubit. Party guilt

And just as I have been, or even am, this fellow has clearly found himself somewhere he doesn’t belong. 

He squats himself against the wall, talking loudly in local tongue to someone I cannot see—the alley is an L-shape, and thus I am blind to certain sections. 

A moment later, he proceeds to excrete half a gallon of liquid waste from his pale bare anus onto the frosty tarmac. 

I had to admit, even then; the spectacle had been worth seeing on its own merit. 

A veritable Gullfoss of solidless faeces, splashing against the finely-laid brickwork that I had, only a few days before, stripped of weeds. 

He’s groaning, holding his stomach, shaking gently from the chill. Or cramps. Then, he bats a hand at his unseen associate, as if feigning embarrassment.  

I study his face, determined to remember it. Determined to later find him.

(The next day, I would attempt to locate his profile on Facebook based on nothing but a dark memory. A few unlucky lookalikes nearly received some pretty unsavoury messages. )

But, yes, there we go, now he’s laughing, proud, pulling up his trousers. Blissfully unaware that I, the man in the window, bore witness to his terrible bowel movement. 

But I did. I did. You’ve read about it.

Frankly, I’m not sure what this observation says about the state of downtown Reykjavík on a weekend night.

Only, that this sort of thing is not what most expect from Reykvíkingar who are all too often described as living “close to nature.”

An astute observation nonetheless.

And, maybe perhaps, that city folk should take inspiration from the tourists they so readily accuse of emptying themselves willy-nilly in the wild country.

That might actually be preferential to a general consensus among the locals that urban environments are more befitting of toilet time.

Something to consider. Preferably in the lavatory of your home, rather than in my alleyway, which, as I’ve gone to great lengths to make clear, some Icelanders have confused with a litter tray.

Considering it’s Sunday tomorrow, a time for reflection, I suppose one might conclude this entry wasn’t particularly profound after all.

Apologies for that. I’m tired, and those weeds will need doing in a few days.

But let’s end with the possibility that if Reykjavík does have a soul, it’s one that occasionally shits in the street after partying too late into a Saturday night. And that, too, deserves to be seen.

Or at the very least, it could be argued that it deserves to be seen. It probably doesn’t. So then, maybe it’s nothing more than the fact that I saw it, and now you’ve read about it.

Misery loves company, after all.