I chose to raise a child in my dream holiday destination – and regretted it

Iceland is one of the most wonderful countries to visit, but living there is another story. Annabel Fenwick Elliott reveals why

Have you ever had such a nice time on holiday that you’ve thought “I could live here”? It’s an easy leap, given that the whole point of a getaway is to move yourself, albeit temporarily, from where you are to somewhere better.

The strength of these yearnings is, of course, directly proportional to the grimness of your situation back home. That is why, in March 2018 – from the back of a tour bus in Iceland, my forehead nodding against the foggy window – I looked out across the volcanic tundra and had that very thought.

We had just passed one of those hobbit-like houses – a cosy red cabin with a moss-covered roof, one tiny smudge on an otherwise empty horizon; in short, the dream of an introvert like me – and how I wished to be stationed there, not where I was, sardined into a tiny flat-share in London, fresh out of a break-up.

So when, four years later, my fiancé was offered a job in Iceland as a helicopter pilot, I needed no persuasion. However, it wasn’t just the staggering scenery and lovely loner cottages that had so captivated me during my prior visit. Iceland, according to the World Happiness Report 2023,is also the third-best place on the planet (just behind Finland and Denmark) when it comes to factors such as health, wealth, freedom, social support and community spirit. The UK, for reference, currently stands at number 19.

Well, reader, we moved there in August 2022 – and lasted one year. It remains among my favourite countries to visit, but why its residents are so satisfied is beyond me (though I have developed a theory on this, of which more later). Our situation didn’t help. We moved a mere 14 days after I gave birth to our son, via caesarean. Although Iceland isn’t a member of the EU, Brexit had turned the logistics into a nightmare – my German fiancé was ushered in with open arms, but I couldn’t even get a bank account, let alone healthcare – to the point where I was constantly shuttling back and forth to the UK, alone with the baby, which was never a barrel of laughs.

Iceland – one of the planet’s newest geological landforms and likely the last to be settled by humans – is a place of extremes. It reminds me of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem my mother used to recite when I was young: “When she was good, / She was very good indeed, / But when she was bad she was horrid.”

Seen from the sky, Iceland boasts the most spectacular scenery you will ever witness – a vast cataclysm of searing geysers and magma-spewing cracks; mercury-hued rivers and emerald valleys; cobalt-blue glaciers and blacksand beaches. Not a lot of it is accessible, however (more than half the population is condensed into the capital, Reykjavik, where rent is exorbitant) and nothing much grows, so the food is dodgy (fermented shark, anyone?) and the rest is all imported at absurd prices.

It’s not just the groceries that are ludicrously expensive, either. Thanks to its unique and complex economy, it is frustratingly hard to source bog-standard items (there is no Amazon, eBay, Starbucks or McDonald’s), and the items you can find cost too much.

The pinnacle of this problem is booze, which is about three times the price of alcohol in the UK and not available to buy in supermarkets, or indeed anywhere other than dedicated liquor stores, which are few and far between, close at 8pm on the dot and aren’t open at all on Sundays or public holidays. We ran out of wine over Christmas and my visiting relatives were horrified to find themselves unwillingly dry for several days until New Year’s Eve.

That’s another thing. There are an awful lot of rules in Iceland. Until the 1980s, beer was straight-up illegal, television was banned on Thursdays and during the month of July, to “promote socialising”. Residents of Reykjavik weren’t allowed to keep pet dogs either. These days, infuriatingly strict policies live on in entities such as the postal service – parcels sent to me by my mother were regularly opened and their contents taxed (including, in all seriousness, pyjamas and a birthday card for her grandson). On the flipside, all systems in Iceland operate with ruthless efficiency, so you won’t find poorly planned roads or bad customer service.

There are, to be fair, many other pros to challenge this nation’s cons. Sky-high prices have kept the island quite exclusive – so the luxury hotels are sublime, it is relatively crowd-free and you will find very few hooligans. Icelandic is a bizarre, amazing and perplexing language, but English is widely spoken. Their sense of humour is deliciously dark. The drinking water is incredibly pure. The public pools are spotless and plentiful (Dalslaug was my favourite; reykjavik.is/dalslaug). The northern lights fire up the sky during winter. It is also one of the only places in the world with no mosquitoes – they don’t like the climate, and who can blame them?

In the end, it was this, the weather, that finished us off. In winter (Iceland endured its coldest in 100 years when we were there), the sun rises for only a handful of hours a day and we were regularly snowed in – but there was something dramatic and novel about that. The real problem was the summer, when the sun didn’t set at all for several months, which I found disconcerting and a insomnia-inducing. And despite all this summer sunlight, it was still too infernally chilly to enjoy the great outdoors adequately.

This may be why Icelanders are so happy, and indeed why Nordic nations always top these lists. You have to be made of strong stuff to withstand such harsh elements. The first time we met our neighbour, Eygló, she was pottering around in a howling snowstorm wearing just a T-shirt and open-toed sandals, with a giant grin on her face. And she wasn’t even drunk – it was a Sunday.

To summarise: everyone should visit this uncrowded, otherworldly fairyland before they die. But very few could hack a lifetime there.

Icelandair (icelandair.com) flies from London to Reykjavik with fares from £135 return. PLAY ( flyplay.com) operates out of Stansted, with fares from £80 return. Volcanic activity in Iceland has increased in recent weeks on the Reykjanes peninsula southwest of Reykjavik, following an eruption there on December 18. “Some roads are closed,” warns the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, “and you are advised to stay away from the area.” Reykjavik itself and the rest of Iceland have not been impacted by the eruption.

hFrom geysers to mercury-hued rivers and emerald valleys, Iceland has it all – so what’s the catch?

iAnnabel with her son in Iceland g‘The northern lights fire up the sky in winter,’ she writes