Two half-litres of the local brew, Egil’s Ales (named after the Viking hero, pronounced “Eyil”, so it amusingly becomes “Ale’s Ales”) and two tiny shots of the local schnapps come to £20 Bloody hell It’s only 6.05pm If we last until midnight, I’ll be ruined The local stuff is brennivin, or “burnt wine” Distilled from potatoes, it tastes of aniseed and cumin. You probably wouldn’t order it back home in the Pig and Whistle, not even if it had a £20 note Sellotaped to the side. It’s the traditional accompaniment to the Icelandic dish hakarl, which is, to put it bluntly, rotting Greenland shark.Siggi and I go for a traditional Icelandic pizza quattro stagioni instead. It’s what most Reykkies eat on a Thursday evening.Four hours later, we’re still looking for excitement. Darkness has just fallen and first nighthawks are on the prowl Unfortunately, they are children.

In the back room of Gaukur a St? a trashy nightclub with a mirror ball and we’ve-just-been-raided-by-the Taliban decor, four oikish youths of 15 are prowling the stage with microphones, shouting to some minimalist drum’n'bass riff and extending their long, simian arms at the audience, in a gesture pinched from Eminem, Ali G and the Queen Mother.. Icelandic rappers? Now I’ve seen everything. One is a Dickensian Fat Boy in a nasty vest, one is festooned with rapper chains, one – but I can’t stand looking at the little twits The audience, on the other hand, is a picture. While the boys are mostly squat and spotty, with shaving-brush haircuts, hoodies and shell suits, the girls are astounding. A quick head-count reveals that 85 per cent are extraordinarily pretty, poised and elegant, and look 10 years older than their oafish male counterparts.

They observe a strict dress code: slim-fit black trousers and low-cut cotton tops. Britney cleavages and razor-edge cheekbones are also mandatory. The girls kiss each other fondly on the cheeks and stand around, clearly wondering why there’s nothing better to do.”Excuse me,” I say to one streamlined dreamboat. “What are they singing about?”"Da booze,” she shouts back.”You mean Icelandic beer? I didn’t think it was too bad. Or are they complaining about the prices?”"No, you don’t understand Da booze.”The penny dropped “Oh, taboos,” I say. “What about them?”"They are saying that there aren’t any, any more.”We consider this in glum silence, as if we both quite miss the old taboos.It could be worse. You could be in Dubliners, one of Reykjavik’s two “authentic” Irish pubs, where a local chap bashes an acoustic guitar and sings that auld Oirish come-all-ye, “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks.

A sign celebrates the wonder of the well-known Irish football club, “Celtic FC”. The musician greets the regulars in fluent Icelandic between songs, and switches to the classically Hibernian “Hey Jude” and the traditional Scandinavian “Norwegian Wood” Ladies in zip-fronted fleeces decorously clap along. When he swings into the theme from The Muppet Show, we decide to slip away.Leaving the boondocks, we cross the busy Laekjargarta highway: everything west of here is in the 101 postal district, an address made famous by a book, 101 Reykjavik by Hallgrimur Helgason, and the film made from it in 2000, scripted and directed by Baltasar Kormakur. Only nine years after the US slacker phenomenon, the Icelandic version concerns a thirtyish dole-queue visionary, Hlynur Bjorn, who falls into a listless affair with his mother’s new live-in Spanish girlfriend. It put Iceland on the global-cultural map, especially the trendy grid of streets around Laugavegur (and Helgason’s book is published by Faber in June, at the slacker price of £6.99).The commercial centre of this Toytown capital is a narrow thoroughfare of lights, shops, bars and a procession of slow, honking traffic. It’s made less appealing tonight by an acre of churned-up roadworks. After my Kurt Geiger loafers start to disintegrate in the claggy mud, I feel less disposed to believe the area’s reputation as the Notting Hill of the Arctic Circle; but there are still the bars to check out.We try Dillons, a fashionably decrepit bo? whose decor seems based on the more obscure backstreets of New Orleans’s Old Quarter You’d think you were inside a 100-year-old merchant ship.