Welcome to the city that never wakes

GREETINGS once again from the Irish Examiner’s North Atlantic Bureau, a slightly less glamorous posting than, say, Washington, Beijing or Kinnegad.

One bar in Torshavn has a Faroese football jersey the size of a house decorating its gable end, and elsewhere in the town there are a few match posters stuck up in shop windows, but it would still be something of an over-statement to say that the Faroe Islands have been gripped by World Cup fever.

But then in this remote outpost of Europe, a self-governing part of Denmark that feels as distant from Copenhagen as do the Aran Islands, it’s difficult to imagine anybody getting too excited about anything. Even allowing for a certain loss in translation, one of the local English-language tourist brochures manages to locate the essence of the Faroes in a mixture of brutal honesty and wild hyperbole.