The Two Hallgrimskirjas

 As I learned to my surprise, my "new" iPhone, which by its version (6) is only one-half behind the current version (12), was automatically assigned the same offbeat name that I had given to the previous one---Hallgrimskirja. 

I gave it that name sometime in the distant past in honor of the church that dominates the skyline of the capital of Iceland. It is effectively the home church of the established Protestant church of Iceland, as much as Iceland is still Christian. It is exactly where I was in 2014 when I started using my old iPhone to start taking photographs, something I had barely considered as part of the reason I bought it. 

My first photographs were bland photographs of the well-lit and relatively featureless interior of the magnificent structure. By the time I left the building I had somehow figured out how cool it would be to photograph as much Icelandic language as possible, in the signs and posters in the church. This is how it all began, the obsession that dominated the next few months as we went through western Europe.

I think I gave the name Hallgrimskirkja to the phone after the trip was over, when I wanted to give it a distinctive name for tethering, which is when you use your phone as a wifi access point for your computer, so you can get the Internet via the phone's data connection over the phone network. It's something I've used when out in the middle of nowhere, or when trying to figure out why our home wifi is not working.

Every time I saw the name Hallgrimskirkja pop up in the list of available wifi points, it gave me a nice feeling of continuity to that moment back in Iceland when I started using the phone as a device to record as much of the local languages as possible in their written public form. It made me feel like I was still on a continuation of that long mission.

When I thought my old phone was dead, I figured I would be forced to give it a new name. It wouldn't be appropriate to assign it the same name.

But again I was wrong. I didn't know how things work. When I restored my files over the Internet to my new phone, it wound up with the same familiar name. In fact there were now two Hallgrimskirkjas on the network, but it was still looking for the old now-dead phone. 

What a small, insignificant thing to feel happy about, that a new phone was automatically assigned the same name as my old one. Even in my own life, I have so many other more significant things to think about, and worry about it.  Yet it is what I felt like writing about, when I sat down to write this blog entry. It is what was on my mind, that I needed to put down in words so I could go onto thinking about other things, even other things about Iceland.