Listen for a moment. Everything that lives outdoors has a way of shedding water, and the ones that do not have one do not last. A headband is that adaptation, borrowed. This is a stretch-knit sweatband with a printed Babolat logo across the front, worn across the forehead, and its job is to catch perspiration before it reaches your eyes and takes the ball away from you.
Soft, light, absorbent, unisex, and machine washable. It is drainage, and drainage is underrated by everyone except the people who study rivers.
It is not a technical garment and it does not need to be.
You will use it everywhere from a raw wind-blown outdoor court to a hot indoor hall back home in the winter, and by the way, it is also perfect for a long look at the water here — this is a fjord town, and people watch the ice and the whales from the shore the way other places watch traffic.
Nuuk rewards patience, which is the only thing I ask of anybody. The Church of Our Saviour has stood in red-painted timber over the old colonial harbour since 1849, and Hans Egede stands in bronze on the rock above it, turned deliberately out to face the sea.
In the Greenland National Museum the Qilakitsoq mummies lie in sealskin after five hundred years, preserved not by embalming but by cold and dry air moving through a rock overhang — the geology did the work, which is my favourite kind of story.
And Katuaq, the cultural centre, is fronted by a wall of larch curved in imitation of the northern lights, which is a building openly admitting what it wanted to be.
"Cold, dry air moving through rock kept five people intact for five centuries. No technology has improved on it."
Buy on Amazon