An Ecstasy of Crows

Last year when we first moved to Norway, we witnessed many superb sunrises: pinky orange bruises that formed on the horizon above the distant grey mountains, often suffused through wispy, blow-away clouds.

This year, there have been many less of such sunrises - so, clearly the atmospheric chemistry has not been quite right. But this morning there was a nice one that beamed in through the kitchen window around 7.45 just as I was lifting the last spoonful of Fitness and Fruits to my mouth.

And it just got better and better. By the time I was on my way to work at 8.15, the display was at its zenith, or climax or whatever the best moment of a sunrise should be called. Crescendo maybe?

As I drove along the road which circuits the large lake called Mosvatnet, just outside Stavanger, crows were taking off from the trees around the lake like bunches of black confetti hurled by cheerful mourners. They swirled over the road in the way that leaves swirl in the wind, dipping down and then rising up in a chaotic yet vaguely coordinated dance.

Starlings are famous for the way they are able to create great undulating Mobius rings when they flock together en masse. Crows are less sublime, but their dawn riots, ragged and freeform, have their own poetry, more atuned to the wind that has flung them free of their perches and inspired directly by that blistering sky.

October Wind

There's a rare old wind
tossing up the bright red
berries of the rowan tree.

Clean Up the World Weekend

I got up at 8.30 on Saturday (early for me) and got ready quickly, then drove the family to Sola Beach where we picked up litter for an hour as part of Clean Up the World Weekend. Trying to get a black plastic oil bottle out of a stream, my foot slipped in. The stream had a sign saying that it was not fit for children to play in as it contained faecal matter.

While the rest of the family walked up and down the beach, picking up cigarette butts, I cleaned up just around the area where we had parked the car. I filled a large dustbin bag. Several items I found were unknown squidgy parcels in tightly tied plastic bags carelessly flung into bushes. So what did the people who flung these things expect? That their squidgy parcels would simply disappear? Yuk.

At 10.30 we dropped my daughter at the airport which is close to the beach. I waited on the pay parking (without paying) while my wife took her to departures. She has gone to Bordeaux to stay with a French family and practice her French for a week. From e-mails, it sounds like she is getting on well with the family she is staying with.

At 11.30 we arrived at the Lundsvågen naturskole where there was a work day out for families of small children. I helped my younger daughter to catch fish off the end of the jetty and then we had a barbecue before heading out to sea in a powerboat with a Jolly Roger mast to play at pirates. The weather was lovely, the mountains across the fjord a bluish shade of grey.

This morning (Sunday) I had a lie in which is something I need after a general deprivation of sleep during the rest of the week. I had lunch (spaghetti pie) and then cut the lawn at the back which was ever so thick, the grass long and wet. The lawnmower engine kept dying on me.

Then I took my daughter down to the park on her bicycle. We admired the excavation work going on around our neighbour's house on the way down the road. The builders have removed a huge quantity or trees and bushes, several lorry loads of soil, and are now blasting away the bedrock around the house. It is a bit like a scene from a Roald Dahl story. It's easy to imagine that one day the house will be standing all alone on a pinnacle of rock with a chasm on every side.

In the park we discovered a vast bramble bush covered in big blackberries which clearly nobody else could be bothered to pick. So we picked most of them and filled a plastic bag. Deep inside the bush we met some French neighbours, and got scratched scrambling back out of the bush to shake their hands. We also found a wild apple tree and I knocked some fruit down by throwing a stick.

My daughter loves to play at the park by the lake and as I watched her I remembered that intense pleasure from childhood of going to the park to play: so intense that I can remember many of the specific occasions all of these years later.

Reianes

The weather is Norway has not generally been great this summer. Last year it was exceptionally hot until 3rd August, the date we arrived here from France. The next day the temperature jumped off its high plateau and hovered around five degrees lower for the rest of August. This year, the good weather was certainly in the earlier part of the summer with a couple of warm weeks at the tail end of June. The hottest day was the 29th June which is when my parents arrived here for a few days holiday. In the same way that my brother thinks that Norway is always covered in thick snow after visiting in exceptional February conditions, my parents now think that Norway is always bathed in sunshine.

The truth is that the weather is extremely unpredictable. The forecasts seem to be often incorrect. When I took a week off in August, heavy rain was predicted all week, so that we abandoned our plans to go camping. But in the end it rained very little. The picture above shows how things looked last Sunday when we went walking at Reianes, an island to the north of Stavanger: overcast, rain threatening but just about holding off, patches of sunlight on the sea.

The agricultural land here is marginal, close to the wild. The trees are mainly rowan, covered with red berries at this time of year, and the ground is marshy, poorly drained and good only for sheep. On our walk we discovered a few dead ewes in various stages of decomposition, simply left to rot away. The rocky coast is littered with flotsam, but only very high on the shore suggesting that the waves off the North Sea can scour high up the rocky platform. In the bay a lone fisherman patrolled his lobster pots and I caught sight of a martin scampering among the low juniper bushes that grow along the shore. We were all rather soggy when we got back to the car after losing the path, fording the marshes and scrambling with the children over unstable walls of loose stones.

The Hill Behind the House No. 1

When we moved to Norway from France last August, I knew I would have to start a new blog about our new life in a different country. I also knew that it might take me some time to get the measure of that country, as it had taken me some time in France. I think I had been in France for at least a year before I started the Connaissances blog, and it wasn't too soon because in the first year I had many adverse reactions to the culture change which would not have been good to spread around in public.

I later realised that these adverse reactions were not so much to do with short-comings in the French as an inability in myself to adjust. Thus I have been cautious in coming to conclusions about Norway and its people too soon after arriving here and have not posted very often on this blog. When I first arrived I thought about writing a different kind of blog, not about Norway as some vague anthropological entity, but a blog that limited itself to descriptions of the hill behind our house. In this way I thought I might avoid causing any offence in my newly adopted country. I imagined myself up there on the hill most evenings, making observations of this or that minutae and recording them lovingly like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau.

Well, I didn't follow that impulse at the time, but because a blog is a thoroughly untethered form of literature, I am going to indulge myself now and tell you a bit about The Hill Behind the House. In fact, The Hill Behind the House is not in reality so much behind the house as under the house. It is a very solid hill, made out of very ancient rock. Solid that is, except that it has a very large hole drilled through it where the E39 duel carriageway travels south out of Stavanger towards Sandnes, a nearby town. Living on the hill not far from where the tunnel cuts through, we are occasionally aware of the E39 traffic as a distant noise, especially if the wind is blowing the sound of traffic towards us. Which is a strange concept, is it not?

The hill is easily accessible from suburban housing on 3 points of the compass. Well marked paths run up from the houses and converge on a circling trackway that encloses a small nature reserve on the summit. The fourth point of the compass, towards the west, leads out into more open countryside away from houses. It is possible to follow tracks down into a valley closed off from traffic and then reascend onto another twin peak called Ullenhaug which is topped by a towering white building covered in radio antennae. But more about that on another occasion...

Our hill doesn't really seem to have a name, perhaps because it is dwarfed a little by Ullenhaug and its tower. Everyone knows Ullenhaug, and sometimes they drive to the car park and walk up to the summit, but few people make a special visit to walk on our hill. And because of this it is quiet, especially late in the evening.

This evening, at 11 pm, I went for a jog around the summit's circular path as I have started doing lately, now that the summer weather is with us. Here it is still very light at that hour and the fjord and distant grey-blue mountains beyond are still quite visible. I tried to run up the hill from our house in one stretch, but was again beaten by a lack of fitness and the cobbly roughness of the track. And then I set out along the summit circle track which is wide, well looked after and fairly flat.

As I rounded the first corner, I saw one hundred yards ahead in the twilight a graceful animal which I first took for a large brown doberman-type dog, judged partly by its sturdy posture and insolent stare. But as I continued to approach, I saw that it was in fact a red deer. It had been drinking at a small Guinness-coloured pond situated at a cross-road of two paths. Seeing my advance, the deer ambled off the path into the trees and disappeared from view. I continued forwards until I reached the point of disappearance, and then I saw the deer again. It had not moved far, perhaps fifty yards over a stretch of grassland. It was clearly not very concerned about my presence and only flinched and darted away when the distant bang of a car back-firing drifted up from the houses below.

As I continued around the pool of Guinness, I noticed two wild ducks standing out in the shallow water, their heads tucked under their wings. They were completely still, roosting, and made not a motion as I passed only a few feet away. Like the deer, they trusted me. I continued on between the pine trees that cover the summit. Here, where the path is a little darker due to the trees, there are lamp-posts positioned every 30 yards. Their bulbs gleam through the branches of the pine trees in a manner that recalls the famous lamp-post discovered by Lucy when she first entered Narnia.

Once over the summit, which was no effort at all, I came into an open area where a rough, quaggy football pitch has been sited in an approximately flat clearing among the trees. A wooden hut has recently been constructed on the edge of this clearing where anyone can come and build a small fire to sit beside and meditate or grill food.

The path descends past some well constructed wood piles and then disappears again into the forest. Immediately on entering the forest, another animal suddenly sprung out in front of me: a large brown rabbit. It casually gazed at me as I approached, then lolloped a few yards ahead of me before turning off into the trees on the other side of the path. I watched it go unhurriedly on its away among the bronze pine needles. There are quite a lot of rabbits on the hill. Some are black and some are brown and some are browny-black or blacky-brown. Perhaps the domestic rabbits that have escaped onto the hill have brought a little of their docility to the wild, or perhaps the animals that live here on the hills have found they have little to fear from the Norwegians living densely round about. I think it may be more the latter.

Sailing to Orkney

Sailing
Originally uploaded by Famous Frankie

I spent this evening helping to prepare the yacht for our voyage to Orkney on Friday. We had to change the forward sail for a larger, more ocean-going one that would increase our speed in what we expect to be quite light winds. We dumped the dinghy ashore as it won't be needed. We also had to visit the supermarket to buy food for the 2 day crossing, enough for 4 people. This may or may not get eaten, depending on how rough it is... My children sat in the shelter of the cabin as it was raining. I'm thinking hard about protective clothing...

Norwegian National Day

After a win at the Eurovision Song Contest last night, Norway was feeling ready to celebrate its National Day today on the 17th May.

In Stavanger, the day begins with a children's parade in which my family was involved. We were up early, even before the traditional loud bangers went off at 7 am to wake up the town. At 8 am we were ready to leave the house and hung up our flag on the flag pole outside as we left. The timing of flag display is supposed to be promptly adhered to: hung up at 8 am, taken down by 9 pm. Almost every house on our road was flying a flag outside by 8 am.

We drove to my daughter's school and met with a large crowd in the play yard. Everyone was smartly dressed or in traditional costume. We met a French friend from the Provencal region wearing his own traditional costume: a black beret, a patterned silk shirt and a black jacket.

By 9.30 we were walking through the town alongside our chldren. Children of all ages and from all around Stavanger took part, many dressed in costume. Others played in musical bands.



The streets were lined with onlookers, many of whom were wearing traditional costume. I was glad I had put on a tie, but still it didn't seem right that the folk in costumes were the ones watching us parade..



The costumes are distinctly different depending on which part of Norway the wearer's family comes from. The women wear long, heavy woolen skirts covered in embroidery and white embroidered shirts overlain by extravagant silver jewellery decorated with symbols. The men also dress up and look quite 19th Centuryish in knickerbocker-style trousers and court jackets, some with black felt top hats.

At the end of parade we had circled back to the school play yard. Everybody was eating polser (hot dogs) and cake or ice cream, building up energy for the following rounds of parades: firstly for the 'Russ parade' (for students about to take their final school exams), and then for the "folk parade" (for adults) due to begin around 4pm. A full day of flags, hot dogs and parades.