Icebus

No News...

2011-11-26T16:41:00.001-08:00

I walked with my daughters down to the fjord last weekend. It takes about half an hour. We had a fishing rod with us and tried to cross onto the pontoon from which we sometimes try to catch fish, but the ladder had been taken away for some reason. Next to us, sitting on the harbour wall, were two ladies looking out over the unruffled water towards a misty autumn view of rocky mountains and the distant waterside town of Tau. They seemed to be celebrating something, eating sandwiches and drinking a bottle of pink champagne.

I walked with the girls a bit further up the coast to where the shoreline has been built up so that there is less seaweed to tangle the fishing line. Like most of the coast around Stavanger, the rocks at the shore here have been rubbed smooth by glaciation and slip, like the humped backs of whales, into the sea. Beside us, on the railway line that runs along the coast, electric trains zipped past occasionally, grey and sleek.

At the point where the shore becomes suitable for fishing, we met two quite haggard looking men. They were both tall and thin, their faces creased and worn in a way that suggests a life of survival and hard labour. Their bicyles lay on the grass, very rough and weather beaten objects. I greeted them as I passed and they shyly said hello to us.We fished for a little while, casting the lure far out. But as always, we caught nothing. It was getting cold and so we did not stay long.

Passing the men again on our way home, we stopped to watch one of them gutting a fish he had caught. I think it may have been a wrasse, it was quite bright on the belly slightly orange and blue speckled. As he cut it open it made an unpleasant burping noise. In his bucket he had three more.When the other man caught a fish, he took it off the hook and dropped it into my daughter's net. My daughter looked at it, then shook her head. The man laughed and threw it back into the sea. We spoke a little with them. They were Polish, with only broken Norwegian and no English. I thought they were like a pair of boys that had grown old while fishing and playing outdoors on their bicycles together.

We walked back to where my wife was waiting to pick us up in the car. The two ladies were still there, huddled a little more closely in their fur-hooded parkas, the pink champagne nearly finished. The sky was also just beginning to turn pink, and they had not moved, despite the chill in the air.

The Hill Behind the House No. 3

2011-02-04T14:20:00.001-08:00

I wanted to write so much more about the hill behind the house than I have written. Here is a day last June that I should have written about. Everything was yellow on that day. There were yellow flowers blooming in all the meadows, the evening sun was suffusing all the trees with yellow light, and someone had been out tying yellow strips of cloth on branches to make a course for orienteering along the forest tracks.

Now, deep in the heart of winter, when every morning on the way to work is black, and every evening on the way home is the same, I think about these summer days and long for them to be back. Last weekend, I walked with my daughter across the hill taking photographs of bare trees and the stalks of dried flowers. I got her to count how many types of tree she could identify. We saw about ten different varieties of pine and about the same number of deciduous types. Silver birch are the most common, and the most wintry looking.

As we turned towards home, the dusk started to fall. The darkness descends quickly at this time of year. At the foot of the far side of the hill, we examined the roots of two trees that had entwined about each other. One of the trees had been cut down, and we thought that rather sad. By the time we had got to the top of the hill, the trees were standing out in silhouette against the fading sky, looming above us. Then we watched the overhead lights along the path come on, glowing orange at first like coals, then slowly gleaming into phosphorecent brightness, as if someone had blown on them.

The Troll Hunter

2011-02-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

Binärpilot - Underground

2010-12-06T13:56:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to Binaerpilot's web site with loads of incredible downloadable tracks.

Northern Lights

2010-10-25T15:46:00.001-07:00

Tar

2010-09-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

Workers have been repairing the road outside for the past week. First they bulldozed away the sleeping policemen, then they chipped out the manhole covers like fossils from bedrock. Now, finally, they are laying the tarmac. Yesterday they upgraded one side of the road, today the other, starting their machinery at around six o'clock this morning.

Tonight, I jogged around the block, watching how the new black tarmac gleamed under an almost full moon. If it weren't for so many yellow porch lights, I think I might have been able to conjure a romantic vision from it.

Discovered earlier today, a set of footprints can now be seen on the grey slate steps in front of our house. They are permanent ones, printed in tar. Oddly enough, they are quite neat, rising in confident strides towards our front door before suddenly disappearing.

Clear Skies

2010-09-11T04:21:00.001-07:00

Perhaps once a year we get a day when the sky is completely empty of clouds. Usually when we look out of our window, we are very aware of the clouds, sitting like a lid on a saucepan. But sometimes when the lid comes off, there is an amazing feeling of buoyancy, as if one might just float away into space like a puff of steam.

Snipp, snapp, snut, nu är sagan slut

2010-06-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

In Norway and Sweden one usually finishes children’s tales with the phrase “Snipp, snapp, snut, nu är sagan slut” - (Snipp, snapp, snut, now the story is ended).

Summer Nights

2010-06-20T13:46:00.001-07:00

Like altered consciousness
the clouds have different shapes at night

we wouldn't normally see
but here we do

because it is always light.

Learn Norwegian

2010-06-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

It's not easy to hear Norwegians speaking Norwegian, and that makes it difficult to learn. But this girl is helping out.

Prices beyond compare

2010-06-01T10:17:00.001-07:00

At current exchange rates, these cans of condensed milk cost close to 6 pounds each. They were photographed in an ordinary mid-size Norwegian supermarket with no special opening hours etc. In the UK, Tesco and Asda are selling the same product for 1 pound.

Sadly this is not untypical of the cost of food purchasing in Norway. A friend suggested to me the other day that supermarkets in Norway operate a sort of cartel where prices are fixed and incomers like Lidl are forced out of the market.

This article from the Aftenposten newspaper published back in 2008 suggests that : "Local retailers who feared Lidl would give them tough competition did all they could to thwart the German giant's entry into Norway. Local politicians often seemed to help make things difficult for Lidl, such as refusing to grant zoning requests or allowing the chain's free-standing stores to be built."

Not only are prices highly uncompetitive, but perishable foods are often poorly stock-managed and we frequently find ourselves with products that have gone out of date. Little has changed since I was here as a student twenty years ago, scraping along on a student grant and living off baked beans and digestive biscuits that had cost me the same as a meal in a UK restaurant.

The Hill Behind the House No. 2

2010-06-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

After a somewhat longer interval than I anticipated (it's almost a year since I posted the first Hill Behind the House post here), I've finally got around to thinking again about the hill.

Not that I haven't been there of course. All through the past year I've been visiting the woodland tracks that cross the summit, occasionally taking photographs, sometimes diverting through thick undergrowth to see what I might find.

It's been clear to me for some time that there is a half-buried archaeology up there on the hill. One group of remains consists of a series of very large concrete blocks set into the ground. They are about 2 metres high and four metres across. One of the long sides is sheer and the other is steeply sloping. the sloping side has a set of steel or iron loops embedded in a line down the centre. According to a guidebook called "Out and About Stavanger's Green Belts" by Erik Thoring, these concrete blocks are the remains of a radio tower built on the hill in 1914.

Thoring says that the blocks are situated on Auglendshøyden (Augland Heights) which I suppose identifies the western side of the Hinnaberget hill. According to Thoring, the blocks are nearly one hundred years old, and represent the foundations of radio masts which locals once referred to as "Ullandhaug's Howler". The masts existed for around twenty years before being torn down in 1935.

I found the photograph above of Ullandhaug (Hinna) on the internet. The location seems correct, but I didn't recognise the area at all. After looking up the location on Google maps, I found that the building in the photograph still exists, and I went to take a photograph of it. The building is still complete, however you can only see half of it because the view is blocked by trees.

The hill is now covered by woodland, some of which is very mature and must have been planted with pines at least fifty years ago. But if the photograph was taken before 1939, I suppose the landscape could have considerably changed over the past 70 years.

Here's another picture which shows how completely naked of vegetation the hill was at that time. The photograph is a more expansive view looking in the same direction and indicates that further radio masts were added to the first one through time. The masts appear as tall poles, but in fact they were held up with a cobweb of guy lines that were attached to the concrete blocks I described earlier. The aerial itself consisted of 24 bronze wires, each approximately 1070 m long, hung between 10 steel masts which were 122 metres high. Each mast was in turn held by six guy lines and weighed 62 tons.

According to one of the web sites from which these pictures are sourced, the radio mast was an example of Marconi's directive antenna type and was constructed in 1914. The radio waves were beamed directly towards Boston, Massachusettes and for this reason the Stavanger radio station was referred to as the America Exchange.

The architect of the Stavanger radio station was Ole Sverre. The transmitter at Ullandhaug is said to have been one of the noisiest workplaces in the country. Farmers in the neighborhood complained about the noise pollution. The noise was produced by the radio signal creation process. The signals were generated by huge turning wheels inside the transmitting station. The technicians had to use artillery gun ear protection, and the ground shook when the broadcast was in progress. I had imagined that the radio masts were called "Ullandhaug's Howler" because of the noise of the wind in the wires, but it seems that the noise of the radio signals might be a more likely explanation.

Below is another photograph of the tall radio antenna constructed at Tryvasshøgda which was once a famous feature of the Kristiana region. I think they make a rather beautiful construction.

What this shows is that, only seventy years ago, the Hinnaberget looked extremely different to how it appears today. Over that time, it has been transformed from a bare mountain with hardly any soil or vegetation into a forest covered by tracks and paths. The old landscape is still there, just below the surface, and is revealed by occasional large patches of bare rock. It is the reason many of the tracks through the forest pass over a shining web of trees roots, these roots being unable to penetrate the rock below.

Radka Toneff - Lost in the Stars (live, 1979)

2010-06-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

Radka Toneff was born in 1952 in Oslo, Norway. Her father was a Bulgarian folk singer and her mother was Norwegian. She is one of Norway's greatest jazz singers, her album "Fairytales" (1982) being Norway's best selling jazz record. She died at a tragically young age in 1982.

Kongeparken

2010-05-23T12:13:00.001-07:00

Saturday saw me getting sunburnt and turning green at Kongeparken, southern Norway's answer to Disneyland. Prior to May 17th, the park is overrun with Russ, but after the celebrations of Norway's national day are over, it is once more safe for little kids (and big ones).

The park has the obligatory set of amusements, some clearly intended to make you feel as queasy as possible, notably a special sea-sickness ride situated in the middle of a lake. But then there are also some more unusual entertainments such as a huge tied-down Gulliver sculpture into which children can climb like Lilliputians and stare out through the nostrils. There is also the character above, a Norwegian farmer who sits on the toilet keeping small children amused for minutes at a time. He has a range of speeches, punctuated by openings and closings of the lavatory door. His repartee is all Norwegian, but clearly fascinating for the kids, and he punctuates some of his guttural announcements by farting or spitting at the audience.

Another fun thing for the kids is collecting gold coins that can be exchanged for prizes. One way of winning a gold coin is by going up to a kiosk (of which there are many) and offering to drink a glass of cod liver oil. The girl at the kiosk then reaches behind her to where a long shelf of cod liver oil bottles awaits. The child downs a large swig, wrinkles up their poor little face and goes "yeurk", then walks away with a gold coin in his or her sweaty little palm.

Silje Nergaard - Nattsang

2010-04-11T14:13:00.000-07:00

Silje Nergaard is a Norwegian singer, born in 1966 in Steinkjer. She has quite a bewitching voice... Silje is one of very few Norwegian artists to have been commercially released all around the globe. Her most recent albums are: At First Light (2001), Nightwatch (2003), Darkness Out Of Blue (2007) and A Thousand True Stories (2009).

Norway Underground

2010-03-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

At one point in the recent television series presented by Ian Stewart called "How the Earth Made Us", he visited an underground seed store on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. It looked a very cold place, the concrete walls caked with ice. If I remember corrctly I think he said it is maintained at a constant temperature of -18 degrees Celsius. Or perhaps that temperature doesn't have to be maintained. Perhaps it is just simply like that on snowy Svalbard.

Norwegians are very good at blasting and digging their way into the hardest ground. They have a passion for deep, long tunnels and many exist all the way along the coast of Norway, cut down into the most ancient and hardest rocks, diving far beneath the deep fjords that bisect Norway's rocky coast. Just north of Stavanger there are two, the first of which descends around 250m into the earth. It is so deep, the exhaust fumes of the cars which pass through it are difficult to extract by the overhead fans, making it a rather unpleasant journey. With the smell, the dim lighting and the steep descent, you feel distinctly as if you are descending into the bowels of the earth.

We ourselves live above a tunnel which contains the main E39 autoroute towards the south. It passes right underneath the hill on which we live, but we hear nothing of it. This will not be the case for some friends who have just discovered that a new tunnel is being constructed directly underneath their house this summer. They live on a somewhat smaller hill than us and they dread the thought of constant dynamiting. Some of the neighbours have already moved away and one old couple have become a local cause celebre due to the fact that the houses they built for their children have been forcibly purchased to make way for the tunnel and the children have had to move away from their parents in their dotage.

Another of Norway's undeground constructions are the mountain halls or "fjellhallen", which appear to have been, in some cases, constructed as refuges in the case of nuclear war, presumably during the cold war period. Today they serve as gyms and meeting halls. There is one near my office which has big blast shield metal doors on the front. Some of these halls are amongst the largest man-made caverns in the world, such as the Gjøvik Fjellhallen which was built inside the Hovdetoppen mountain near the centre Gjøvik at a cost of around 13 million pounds in the early 1990s to be used as an ice hockey stadium during the Lillehammer Winter Olympic games. It can seat more than 5000 spectators. The reason for building a cavern rather than a stadium was said to be in order to avoid the construction of a large and unsightly building.

The web site of the NFF, or Norwegian Tunnelling Society, gives more insight into the scale of Norwegian tunnelling activity, but sadly its "For the Public" web pages are only available in Norwegian. In the Norwegian section, however, I did discover what I hoped to find, which were references to the myths of goblins and dwarves digging their mountain halls. The following song by Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845) is sung at the annual Rock Blasting conference. It was written before the independence of Norway from Denmark, and so there are a number of old fashioned Danish words. I asked a friend to help me translate it, and as soon as I mentioned the first line about "Nisser og Dverge" (Gnomes and Dwarves), he began singing it and could remember practically the whole song. This was because he had learnt it by heart as a child from a song book which all the children in his class possessed. He said he wished he still had a copy of the song book, and that today they were difficult to obtain, being rather collectable.

He also told me that Wergeland is an important figure for Norwegians, one of the campaigners for an independent Norwegian language and culture at the time when Norway was united with Sweden. Wergeland's face has previously been represented on Norwegian bank notes and he is still celebrated today as a friend of the downtrodden Norwegian working class in the 19th Century.

Steinbrytervisen

Nisser og Dverge
bygge i Bjerge;
mem vi skal mine dem alle herud.
Thi mens vi synge
muntre i Klynge
sprænge vi Bjerget i Luften med Krut

Ja lad oss bore
Dybe og stor
Huller i Gråstein og Blåstein og Flint!
Da, mens vi synge
muntre i Klynge,
sprenge vi Bjerget i Stykker og Splint.

Hurra! Det knalder!
Satans Rabalder!
Hurra, Minerer! Du vinder tilsidst.
Thi, mens vi synge
muntre i Klynge,
sprenge vi Bjerget ved Makt og ved List.

Fjeldet skal bæve
under vor Næve,
Hurra, Minerer! Nu knalder dit Skud.
Nisser og Dverge
bygge i Bjerge,
Hurra, nu mine vi Nisserne ud.

Stone Breaking Song

Gnomes and dwarves
build in the mountain;
but we will mine them out of there.
Because while we sing
merry in the band,
our powder blows mountains in the air.

Yes let us drill
deep and wide
holes in greystone and bluestone and flint!
Then, while we sing,
merry in the band,
we'll turn hills into lumps and splinters.

Hurrah! It explodes!
Satan's racket!
Hurrah, miners! Finally you win.
Because while we sang
merry in the band,
we crushed mountains with brute force and cunning.

Mountains shall tremble
under our fists
Hurrah, miners! Now your charges blast.
Gnomes and dwarves
build in the mountain,
Hurrah, we've mined them out at last.

(translation by Jonathan Wonham)

The Joy of Rolling onto Your Side and Going to Sleep

2010-02-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

I have always slept on my left side. When I was young I used to worry that it was bad for me after reading in some short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that his principal character, who was depressed, wanted to kill himself by sleeping on his heart, thereby causing it to work harder and wear itself out.

Later, I convinced myself that sleeping on one's heart is not necessarily a bad thing. Possibly it gives the heart more exercise during the night and might even make it stronger. Now I can only feel sorry for those who sleep on their right side, such as my wife. What harm might she be doing to herself as she sleeps?

Last night I discovered how deep is my need to roll onto my left side before going to sleep. Simply because I was not able to do it. After thirty years of skiing without injury more substantial than a bruised thumb ligament, I have finally done myself a more substantial piece of damage.

Yesterday, I took my daughter skiing at Sirdal, and half way through the afternoon, decided on an over-risky manoeuvre which took me at high speed over some horribly bumpy ground. My skis found a hole and stuck there, ejecting me helplessly forwards with a resounding thump onto packed snow. I immediately knew I had done myself harm by a wave of nausea and a desire to lie completely still on my back.

My shoulder had taken the impact and I had the feeling that something had been brutally jarred out of place. I sat up and tried to move my right arm. I could move it, but it was painful. And there was a peculiar sensation in my shoulder, a sort of gristly clicking.

I got up and then immediately wanted to sit down again, which I did, sitting next to my daughter and looking out over the snowy slopes where skiiers swished back and forth. The day was difinitely over.

I skiied gingerly down the mountain and slung my kit into the car. My shoulder was throbbing and I had to get my daughter to load the roof box. Then we began the long drive back to Stavanger, me with my arm resting on the coffee cup holder which Subaru engineers had kindly thought to add to the car in case of exactly such a situation.

Back home, I wondered if I had maybe over-exaggerated the injury to myself. The arm did not seem to be dislocated. I got into bed in my thermals and dozed for a while. But when I woke up, it felt worse, and I decided to go to the hospital.

Norwegians hospitals are incredibly slow and deliberate in their actions. Tasks are carried out one after the other with long periods of waiting in between. My first appointment was with the registrar. I had to take a number from a machine and fill in a pink form. Every so often, the digital number on the wall clicked on by one digit, but nobody got up to go into the registrar's room. Surprisingly, even though nobody got up, the number did not move swiftly on to the next. Instead, the registrar gazed a little more into space, put his hands behind his head, and waited for a further five minutes before eventually clicking the number on again. this happened a couple of times before my number eventually came up. Where the other ticket holders went I have no idea.

I got myself registered. My Norwegian State personal identity number was recorded from the back of my credit card. And then it was back to waiting, surrounded by anxious mothers holding croopy babies. An hour or so later, I was called into the doctor, a tall, blonde young woman. She was very nice, shook my hand, diagnosed that I had injured my shoulder, told me I needed an x-ray and then charged me 25 pounds, for which she took payment on the spot. After living in France for several years, the idea of paying doctors for not much is now quite familiar to me. Though it was shocking the first time a doctor handed over the cough medicine prescription and then pulled open a draw lined with paper money and asked me to further decorate it. To the British, medicine is something which always seems to come for free. To the French, medicine is something you have to pay for, and that is why they always demand a handout of "medicaments".

So, I trooped off round the hospital in the snow and ice, trying several doors until I came to the right one marked "Rontgen". There are a couple of peculiarities about Norwegian hospitals that I noticed. Firstly, chains hang from the ceiling beside every sliding door which have to be pulled to operate the door. Secondly, registrars at every turn, sit behind mechanised sliding windows which they officiously open and close like the doors on the front of cuckoo clocks. The lady at the Rontgen office immediately asked me to pay again. "But I've just paid the doctor" I said. "Yes, but now you have to pay for the X-Ray". I paid and asked for a receipt. "That will take me a little time" said the registrar. "Please go and wait."

I began another wait outside the registrar's office. The receipt came out of the sliding hatch. I continued waiting. By now I was getting quite far on with the book about the Kings and Queens of England I was reading. No longer was I reading about Edward III and the start of the Hundred Years War, but I was well into the career of Henry VIII and his treatment of Anne Boleyn. Then I was called by loudspeaker and directed to Rontgen (X-Ray) laboratory No. 8 where I waited a bit more. The X-Ray technican was also a lady, one of many - I noticed - who worked in the hospital, and she got me to stand holding a 4 kg plastic milk container full of water in each hand while I was having my x-ray taken.

I wish I could have seen myself. I think I must have looked like one of those portraits by Richard Avedon in his book "In the American West": a white background, my arms dangling down, hair in a mess due to the skiing, a look of general pain and despair on my face.

Then another long wait for a ticket which told me to go to the Akkutklinik. By this time I realised that I was part of a disparate group of people all trailing through the same system of waiting, paying, measuring, diagnosis and treatment. I was called through to the next doctor quite quickly, but soon realised that this was only because there was a possibility to have me wait in the treatment room.

Finally two doctors came, a young man and woman. They watched as I painfully pulled off my t-shirt, then poked at my shoulder. "You've disconnected your clavicle from your shoulder," said the doctor, "broken the ligaments which connect the two bones. that's why you have this lump where the clavicle is sticking up." "Will it always be like that?" I asked. "Yes, I'm afraid so. We could operate, but there really isn't any point. Better that you let your arm move around and let your shoulder recover and adapt on its own. It should take about five to six weeks. Would you like a sick note?"

And that was it. Case closed. I declined the sick note, knowing that it would be a luxury I couldn't afford. My wife came and picked me up. The whole process took three hours from start to finish.

But last night was horrible. I discovered that the only position I could lie without being in agony was on my back. Consequently, my feet stuck out of the end of the bed and I couldn't get to sleep through being denied the possibility of rolling onto my left side.

Eventually, I did go to sleep, on my back, and woke up a few hours later in the same position. It seems a little thing to be able to roll onto your side and go to sleep, but in reality it is a crucial comfort in life. Or at least, in my life. One I had never really considered before.

Oslo Airport

2010-02-25T16:25:00.001-08:00

There is something eerily beautiful about airports under snow. This is how Oslo Airport looked earlier this evening when I passed through on the way from Paris to Stavanger. Oslo Airport appears strikingly modern, a cathedral of glass and steel, surrounded by a splendid white expanse of snow.

The light you can see in the dark distance of this photograph are a squadron of massive snow clearing vehicles which were parading around the runway just as I took the photograph at around 11 pm. I counted about fifteen of these vehicles, all chasing one after the other, travelling quite fast with big plumes of snow rising around them. I presume these vehicles are the source of a great pile of snow some 6 or 7 metres high and hundreds of metres long that I spotted from the aircraft as we taxied to our dock on arrival.

On taking off again, the aircraft was sprayed with hot water to remove ice from the wings, engulfing us in a thick plume of steam.

The oil wealth of Norway is well represented by Oslo Airport. It is certainly one of the most ostentatious buildings I have seen since living here in Norway. By comparison, Copenhagen airport (which I passed through on the way to Paris) appears sombre and dreary, its fixtures and fittings outdated, its refreshment stalls like tired railway buffets.

The Long Cold Snap

2010-02-17T15:05:00.001-08:00

It was exactly 2 months ago that we parked our car at the airport and went back to the UK for Christmas. That night, it snowed heavily and when we came back to Norway three weeks later, we found the car encased in a thick layer of icy snow that took about an hour to clear before we could drive away.

The chart above from the Norwegian weather site www.yr.no shows that the temperature has been around 2 degrees cooler than normal throughout the last 2 months, hovering mainly somewhere below freezing. Lakes have frozen and the snow that fell on 17th December has been with us now for 2 months, occasionally augmented by further light falls. Mainly it has been very dry and cold, which is unusual for an area that is close to the sea and which has been often wet and cloudy in recent years. Back on the 1st Feb the Stavanger Aftenblad was already announcing a record winter with the longest spell of snow since 1952.

At the weekend, we went up into the hills to go skiing. It was very dramatic. The waterfalls on either side of the valley up which we travelled to Sirdal are frozen solid, white cataracts, mysteriously petrified. The rocks on either side of the valley are rather black against the snow and sometimes there are curtains of long icicles glittering by the roadside. In places the valleys we drive through are incredibly steep-sided U-shaped valleys formed by glaciers. They rise up so high that you feel as if the mountains are trying to curl their craggy fingers over the top of you.

Earthquake in Haiti

2010-01-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

Donate now: UNICEF.
Donate now: Disasters Emergency Committee

Ice

2010-01-11T14:59:00.001-08:00

Lying on the ground now for nearly a month, the snow starts to recrystallise through cold, clear nights. In the morning, giant sparkling facets have formed that glitter in the sunlight. Water and ice congeal and are smooth like new skin.

Skating on the lake, every inch of the surface is criss-crossed by the skaters boots like a giant web. The deep black ice shows its shining fractures and sometimes cracks into life with an unearthly echoing boom.

My daughter spins on her skates. "Look" she says, "I've made an eye."

The eye looks up into the cloudless blue sky that is the colour of glacier ice or meltwater. There are hundreds or even thousands of people on the lake. Their hard steel blades flash past. And the eye cannot blink.

On the edge of the frozen expanse, the people light fires and boil kettles for coffee. Steam and warm breath drift together against the frosted trees.

I take my daughter's hand, palpably somewhere between steam and ice.

Sondre Lerche - My Hands are Shaking

2009-12-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

Sondre Lerche was born in Bergen, Norway in 1982. his music is influenced by the shiny guitar music of '80s pop bands such as Prefab Sprout and Elvis Costello. In 2000 he recorded his debut album, Faces Down and has had several more albums since then. His musical score of the movie Dan in Real Life was very well received and he recently released Heartbeat Radio to good reviews in 2009.

An Ecstasy of Crows

2009-10-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

Clean Up the World Weekend

2009-09-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-08T14:47:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-27T15:20:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-17T12:49:00.001-07:00

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.

Rainsack

2009-03-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

A lot of children in Stavanger can be seen walking to school in the morning with fluorescent waterproof covers on their book satchels. This keeps their books dry and helps to stop the children getting run over in the dark.

My daughter is seen here striding purposefully towards the school door, trying to keep out of the rain. The cars have their lights on, not because it isn't fully daylight, but because in Norway everyone drives with their headlights on all the time. Even in the middle of a summer's day, oncoming drivers will flash you as a warning if you aren't using them.

Heavy Snow

2009-02-20T14:05:00.000-08:00

Snow, on Monday night, was heavy. It fell as tiny flakes, but continuously, all night. And in the morning everything was white, the young trees bowed, unable to shrug off the thick heavy piles of frozen whiteness that had descended onto them. Tiny twigs barely thick as knitting needles supported great tranches of snow, rounded on top like freshly-baked loaves. The conifer outside our kitchen window stood there like a sad teenager with the weight of the world on its shoulders.

Then, through the day, settling. The snow compacted, its weight no longer perfectly evenly distributed, developing a certain brittleness. One by one, leaves, twigs, stems, began, by constant exertion, to shrug off their loads. Out of the corner of an eye: a flurry of falling wet snow and a branch still quivering almost imperceptibly after springing back into its accustomed position. A green sign or a spiky bare finger. An almost audible sigh of relief.

Sledging to School

2009-02-13T15:52:00.001-08:00

When it snows in Norway, children are sometimes taken sledging by their teachers. Here sledges are left lined up outside a school while the children go to class.

Until the Wraps Come Off

2009-01-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

I bought an old print and wanted to get it framed so I went down to a little framing shop I pass on my way to work. The shop should have been open when I got there. There was a opening hours notice on the door saying they closed at 4pm, and it was only 3pm, but the door was locked.

Then, through the dusty window, I noticed a young woman inside moving boxes around behind a desk, so I knocked. She looked up and slowly came to the door. Can I help you? she said in Norwegian. Do you speak English, I asked? Yes, she said. Would you be able to frame a picture for me? I asked, feeling as if I might be imposing on her.

She invited me inside and we chose some card and a frame. I wanted a frame that would match another picture, so she said she would order it for me. Very good, she said. And your telephone number? It's written on the back of the picture, I said. Okay, I'll ring you when it's ready. Fine, I said, and I left.

After walking a few yards away from the shop, I stopped and said to myself: is this normal? No receipt. No costing. I don't have their address or telephone number. Why there isn't even a name over the window of the shop...

I thought about going back and asking for a receipt, some information about likely cost, but then I decided against it. This was Norway. Everyone is trustworthy. Nobody steals. It would be embarassing to even ask.

Three weeks later, and I had begun to wonder when she was going to call. Each day I passed the shop and it looked dark inside. I thought back and remembered how the woman had asked me if I was in a hurry. What did that mean? Was this going to take two weeks, one month, three months? I had no idea.

Then, the other day I was driving past the shop and I noticed that the windows were covered with brown paper. Immediately I pulled over to the side of the road, did a U-turn, and went back. I parked the car and walked around the shop. There was bric-a-brac piled at the side. On the inside of the windows, brown paper had been stuck, hiding all but the presence of shadows inside. On the window was a hand-written notice: "Vi PUSSER OPP" and below, a telephone number.

Immediately, I feared the worse. What did it mean? Could it possibly mean: We've pissed off? No, surely it couldn't. If that was the case, they wouldn't have left a telephone number. When I got to work, I asked my colleague what the sign meant. Oh, he said, they're just, hmm, what's the word, renovating.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I rang the number. A gruff old voice replied at the other end. "Do you speak English?" I asked. "No." said the gruff old voice. I tried to communicate that I had seen a lady about framing a picture and asked how long it would take, but the message didn't seem to get through.

Now I guess I'll just have to wait until the brown paper comes down. I think it could be a while.

Danish Neighbours

2009-01-24T01:50:00.000-08:00

These are a couple of funny videos about Danish people having trouble with their language. The second video suggests that the only common commmunication medium which exists in Denmark is Norwegian television. But listen to that accent, isn't there something very Welsh about it? Listening to Norwegian radio, I am always expecting the word "boyo" to crop up, but it never does...

Ladies Who Dine

2009-01-24T00:46:00.000-08:00

View from Mount Floyen over Bergen
Originally uploaded by photojenni

This week I flew up to Bergen for the day. I had a meeting at the university, a modern carbuncle of grey concrete in a city which is mainly an attractive collage of colourful houses, patched around an expansive harbour and surrounding grey, rocky mountains, their peaks lightly covered with snow.

Bergen has a more cultivated feel than Stavanger. I was able to buy a copy of the TLS in the airport and, on a short walk through the town, passed a large natural history museum and a theatre which dominates the main square. Bergen is famous for its high precipitation rates, which result in an average of 20 rainy days a month. Despite this pluviosity, a recent attempt to introduce umbrella vending machines was not a success. Of course, nobody in Bergen ever leaves home without an umberella. There is a joke about a visitor to Bergen who asks a little boy whether it always rains in Bergen. I don't know, says the little boy, I'm only eight years old.

After the meeting at the university, I walked with two colleagues down to the centre and had a cup of coffee in a cafe restaurant. It was 4.00 pm when we sat down at a table and ordered a coffee, so we were surprised to be told by the waitress that we would have to move to the bar because these tables were for the use of diners.

Sure enough, by 4.30 pm, the restaurant was full of diners and we sat on high stools sipping beer or coffee at the bar. I would love to have had a beer, but knowing I had driven to the airport in Stavanger, I was unable to. There is a zero alcohol limit for anyone driving in Norway. Even a small amount of alcohol in the blood can result in a jail sentence.

As we left the restaurant, I noticed that apart from us, there was only one other man in the whole establishment, about fifteen or so tables being taken up by lady diners of all ages, some in pairs, others in small groups. It was 5 pm, and they had all nearly finished dinner.

As we drove back through the dusk towards the airport, not a drop of rain all day long. But the weather forecast announces storms on the way.

Tiddeli bom

2009-01-07T15:40:00.000-08:00

I've just been for a late night jog and found when I went outside that it had been snowing. As I jogged around the block, I refound my footprints in the snow, not quite fresh as they began to be buried in the still falling snow.

These fresh footprints, my own, made only minutes before, slowly fading are like a slow-motion reality. They put me in touch with the passing moment in a way no other repetition can. And the more times I run around the block, the denser the footprints become, until it seems a small army has passed.

It is a concept made famous by a bear who is known as Ole Brumm in Norwegian, and Winnie-the-Pooh in English. 'Pooh' is the noise that Winnie makes when he blows bees or snow off his nose, and 'Brumm', according to my Norwegian teacher, is the noise Norwegian bears make. Ole is a popular Norwegian name.

I know this because we were studying an Ole Brumm song today in Norwegian class. It goes like this:

Det snør, det snør, tiddeli bom.
Det er det det gjør, tiddeli bom.
Nå snor det mye mer enn før,
Tiddeli bom og huttemegtul!

Så kaldt det er, tiddeli bom.
Jeg kjenner det her, tiddeli bom.
Jeg kjenner det på mine knær,
Tiddeli bom og huttemegtul!

I'll translate:

It's snowing, it's snowing, tiddeli bom.
That's what it does, tiddeli boom.
Now it's snowing a lot more than before,
Tiddeli bom and it's so cold!

So cold it is, tiddeli bom.
I know it here, tiddeli bom.
I know it through my knees,
Tiddeli bom and it's so cold!

Pursuing the winter theme, we also learnt about the seasons today in language class. Here is what the books says about winter in Norway:

"Noen sier: Vi har bare to årstider i Norge - en hvit vinter og en grønn vinter!"

Which translated means:

"Some say: We have only two seasons in Norway - a white winter and a green winter!"

Sledging

2008-12-05T16:19:00.001-08:00

The patch of cold weather during the last couple of weeks appears to be behind us. This evening is very mild here in Stavanger. However the photograph of our neighbourhood kids racing down the long hill where we live shows how superbly snowy it was two weeks ago. We rushed out and bought a sledge, a really super-duper one for two people that has skis on the bottom, brakes and a steering wheel (really!)

Unfortunately it took me an evening to bolt it together and so we missed one day of sledging. When I tested it with my younger daughter the next day, I discovered too late that I had not bolted the steering wheel on correctly. It came off in my hands rather like something out of a slapstick movie. Fortunately, I was able to direct the fast moving, uncontrolled vehicle into a hedge and nobody was hurt.

After the snow came the ice, the blackest I have ever seen. Fortunately we had already switched the car to winter tyres at the end of October and so were prepared for it. It is highly recommended to drive gingerly at this time of year, especially since pedestrians have an unhappy tendancy to wear dark clothes. The other evening, in the pitch black of 6pm, my headlights picked out a pair of white shoes waltzing across a zebra crossing with no visible body attached. The person was almost completely dressed in black. Lucky for both of us they had those shoes on.

Trotting

2008-11-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

trotting
Originally uploaded by Paul J Everett

I spoke with a retired Norwegian oilman this evening. He was sturdily built with a grey scrubbing-brush moustache, a broad face and wide apart eyes. He had quit his job a few years ago after a company merger, leaving with a good redundancy payment and intending to go back to work after a short time off. Eight years later he now considers himself retired. His home is Norway, but he spends many months away, either in the Far East or at sea, sailing with friends. His preferred occupation these days is following the horses. A couple of months ago he placed a 105 kroner bet on a combination stake and won 640,000 kroner. Divide by ten and you have the value of this win in pounds sterling.

Most horse racing in Norway is not the traditional British-style horse-back riding, but what my Norwegian referred to as "trotting". The "trotting" horse pulls a light-weight carriage in which the driver sits. Many cities in Norway have "trotting" tracks and take it in turn to stage races on different days of the week. Bets are placed either in high street betting shops or on the internet. The typical bet is to predict the winner of a sequence of five races. If you're certain the winner will be one particular horse in each race, you bet on only one horse and your bet will be 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 kroner, or 1 kroner. But of course, you'll be very unlikely to win. More usually there will be some races you feel confident about the winner and others not so confident, so you'll bet that one of several horses in a particular race will win, then your bet depends on how many horses you fancy like this: 1 x 3 x 1 x 5 x 7 = 105 kroner.

This is the bet my Norwegian made when he had his big win. One of the horses he was certain would win belonged to an associate of his, a wealthy Norwegian race horse owner from Stavanger. When my Norwegian rang his friend to let him know the good news, and tell him that he had won by betting on his horse, the friend said: "Since when have I owned that horse?"

Footprints

2008-11-20T15:28:00.001-08:00

Would you do differently
seeing your footprints left behind?

Or would you do differently
just to leave footprints?

Two inches of snow on Stavanger today. And here's how Stavanger weather looks on my Mac's dashboard weather predictor, showing the week ahead:

Husafjell

2008-11-02T14:57:00.001-08:00

Of course, the distant snow got the better of our curiosity and we drove to the hills today. It was perfect: blue sky, sunshine, hardly a breeze. We parked near a farm and followed the way-marked path (marked with flashes of red paint) up across the fields, past a reedy, frozen lake and into a small valley where sheep bells clattered. Husafjell proved an easy conquest even for our six year old, but the views from the top were spectacular. In one direction, high, snow-clad mountains of the interior. In the other direction: hills, lakes and distant islands of the North Sea. As we descended, late afternoon sunlight caused the dry grasses of the summit to blaze like orange fire.

A Cold Wind

2008-10-31T13:39:00.001-07:00

* * * *

Snow on the far hills,
ice on the step.

* * * *

Norwegian and English

2008-10-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen in a bilingual edition of his Selected Poems called "The Silence Afterwards". It's fascinating discovering so many words in Norwegian that have English counterparts. Here are a few I have noted:

drypper over : drip over
kolde : cold
varme: warm
blod : blood
mørke : darkness (or "murk")
under : under
hjerte : heart
drøm : dream
furer : furrow
hånd : hand
fingre : finger
stoppet : stopped
glinsende : glistening
spor : tracks (or "spoor")
dør : door
bryst : breast
hundre : hundred
tusen : thousand
runde : round
tre : tree
ende : end
først : first
fjell : mountain (or "fell")
lang : long
is : ice
hate : hate
sten : stone
melk : milk
kysser : kisses
sand : sand
hel : whole

It seems that very few, if any, of these words can be traced back to Old Norse origins. Instead they have common Proto-Germanic roots in Norwegian and English. I suppose they have found their way into Norwegian via Danish influence.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Old Norse was the Norwegian language as written and spoken c.100 to 1500 C.E., the relevant phase of it (for the English language) being "Viking Norse" (700-1100), the language spoken by the invaders and colonizers of northern and eastern England c.875-950.

Wikipedia has a list of English words that can be traced back to Viking Old Norse origins, which includes such evocative words as anger, awe, berserk, club and die. And here is another site that lists yorkshire dialect words of Old Norse origin.

I've also found a couple of websites that provide courses in Old Norse, including one from The University of Texas Linguistic Centre and this one.

This all provides good food for thought, but doesn't get me much further with the Norwegian homework which I ought to be doing tonight...

Nikolai Astrup

2008-10-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

I picked up a card the other day in a bookshop. It shows two girls in a Norwegian meadow collecting bunches of yellow flowers. The meadow is carpeted with the yellow blossoms, traversed by a small stream of shining metallic blue, bringing down the colours of the unsettled sky. Beyond the meadow are apple trees, sparkling in fresh white blossom, their branches like the trails of exploding fireworks. And beyond the apple trees, a cottage farm painted white and red, just catching the Spring sunlight. Finally, in the far distance, gentle but vast mountains, streaked with the remains of melting snow.

This painting is the work of Nikolai Astrup. He was born in 1880, and lived in Jølster, a town 150 km to the north of Bergen on the West side of Norway. You can still visit his home in this commune where he lived until his death in 1928. I really like his work which is a rich and folksy interpretation of Norway's beauty.

I suppose you could argue that Astrup's art comes too close to a chocolate box type image for comfort, but at the same time there is a poetry and exhuberance about the paintings which seems to go further than this. In addition, not all his paintings are of young girls and spring meadows. He also paints scenes and landscapes that are concerned with capturing the everyday aspects of life. A gallery of his paintings can be seen on a web site dedicated to the artist.

Clearances

2008-10-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

Taking off from Stavanger airport, on one side you see the North Sea: white wave caps on the grey expanse, tiny boats, small rocky islands and beaches backed by rocky coves. On the other side of the aircraft, farmland: red or white painted farms and barns and a patchwork of fields. The fields seem to be of two main types: well ploughed rectangles or irregular pastoral land with cows and sheep.

The pastoral fields are intensely speckled with large boulders, hundreds of tons of granite dropped randomly by retreating glaciers. Looking at this, you suddenly start to realise the enormous effort that has been expended clearing farmland in this region. The effort is still ongoing because in some fields there are JCBs parked, ready to recommence the heavy lifting. Alongside the cleared fields are huge cairns of boulders, testament to a new age in Norwegian agriculture.

Sightings

2008-10-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

One evening, our neighbour playing a squeeze-box accordian in his kitchen.

Three celebrations in our road: three Norwegian flags flying at front doors.

Two children chalking pictures on the tarmac of a country road, waving happily to us as we edged past them in our car.

At a cemetry by the sea, an old lady supported on crutches, laying flowers on a grave.

Children in a school playground, dragging a child tied up with skipping ropes across the grass. The monitors looking on, unconcerned.

A man driving to work in a go-kart.

Dustbin ladies.

A museum of stuffed animals on top of the freezer cabinets of our local supermarket: lynx, eagle, arctic fox, moose, polar bear...

Two small boys running out into the road in front of my oncoming car, unconcerned.

A man searching for the best place to take photographs of himself on top of a mountain.

A strong man contest and barbecue on the beach.

Pizza restaurants.

Two teenagers lying on the pavement, t-shirts rolled up for an impromptu spot of sunbathing.

A row of unlocked bikes outside the shopping centre.

Every morning, the newspaper delivery boy arriving at 6.30 a.m. on his motorbike, stopping at every house with his squeaking brakes...

Our neighbours' porchlights left on all night.

Rømmegrøt

2008-10-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

For lunch today I ate the usual open sandwich (smørbrød) and a bowl of rømmegrøt.

Rømmegrøt is a wheat porridge cooked with sour cream. You eat it from a bowl like scotch porridge and sprinkle cinnamon, sugar and melted butter over it. It is often eaten with cured meat (spekemat) and flat bread (flatbrød). Flatbrød looks like a poppadum and tastes like a poppadum without the flavour.

Rømmegrøt is tasty, particularly if you like the flavour of sour cream. It is traditionally eaten on Norway National Day (17th May) and, in the countryside, is served at parties to celebrate the end of the harvest.

It seems to be neither main course nor dessert, lying somewhere in between the two. It is, indeed, a meal in itself and, if you ever try it, you'd be wise not to take too large a helping.

Out There

2008-10-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

We live near the top of a hill called Ullandhaug. Our house is shoebox-shaped, a wooden structure painted grey and white. We live mainly upstairs where there is a lounge, a bathroom, a kitchen and bedrooms. Downstairs we have a play room, washroom, spare bedroom and study.

The lounge is fronted by panoramic windows. During the summer, the sky changes every day: sometimes billowing cumulus towering high into the blue sky, other times wispy pink mackerel clouds. For about a month, I would take photographs as I ate my breakfast. This is one of them.

I have never lived in a house where the landscape outside was so vast and constantly present. The view demands to be seen at all times. Norwegians seem to rarely close their curtains, and this is perhaps why. While it is beautiful, it also creates a sort of uneasiness: the sense of immense distance and space. It is not what I am used to.

Norwegian Poetry

2008-09-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

I'm researching Norwegian poetry with a view to finding some books that might help me learn a little Norwegian and also broaden my knowledge of Norwegian literarture and culture.

So far I have discovered three major Norwegian poets of the 20th Century:

Tarjei Vesaas came from the Telemark region in the South of Norway. He was both novelist and poet who wrote in Nynorsk (New Norwegian). During the Second World War, he hid his manuscripts by burying them. He lived from 1897-1970. A book of translated selected poems called "Through Naked Branches" was published in 2000.

Olav H. Hauge came from the Hardanger area of Western Norway and wrote mainly poetry and a long diary discovered after he had died. He lived from 1908-1994, making his living from gardening and working on his fruit farm. His "Selected Poems" in translation was published in 1990.

Rolf Jacobsen was born in Oslo. His poetic debut in 1933 marked the first modernist poetry in Norwegian. He was convicted of treason after the war and sentenced to hard labour for writing newspaper editorials that supported the Germans who had invaded Norway. A central theme in his work is the balance between nature and technology. His translated selected poems called "Night Open" was published in 1993.

These three appear to be the most widely translated poets. Younger poets such as Eldrid Lunden (b. 1940) and Paal-Helg Haugen (b. 1945) do not yet seem to have published translated editions in English.

I've also discovered Norvik Press which specialises in publishing Scandinavian literature including a book of "Contemporary Norwegian Women's Writing".

There is also a very recent book called Voices from the North: New Writing from Norway which has been published by Maia Press to celebrate Stavanger's status as a "European Capital of Culture" in 2008.