Monday 27 August 2018

Sometimes I imagine . . .

Sometimes I imagine myself as a famous writer on a chat show being asked why I write, and each time I give a different answer. Today’s answer is – because it empowers me.

Recently I’ve been feeling disempowered. This is, I think, for lots of reasons, the main one being building work, the debris from which taken over the entire house and half the garden.

The conservatory
The front door

The kitchen

The spare bedroom

Outside the back door
The garden (with raindrops on the lens)
I have nowhere to go. I can’t even hide in my ‘den’ as the door to the loft, where pipes and electricity cables are being worked on, is right behind my desk.

My desk and the door to the loft
It’s not the builders’ fault (the debris is ours) and they are embarrassed to be intruding, and for that reason I want to keep out of the way. I don’t want to embarrass them. I slink around like a ghost, a non-person.
    Frog, who is helping the builders, doesn’t want me around either. He doesn’t want me getting in a tizz about the mess or schedules or whether the work’s being done as we would want. He wants me to leave all the worry to him. But that’s disempowering too.

Being a writer (Phew! Can I say that?), I take everything to extremes. I imagine what it would be like to be truly disempowered, as women used to be – without money, education, jobs, control over their fertility and their sex life, a vote, respect. How did they survive? Why did they not just curl up in a corner and die?

Which brings me back to writing. That is my secret outlet, my way of proving to myself that I exist. Even if it’s only an inadequate blog post, like this one.


The new bathroom, the tidiest room in the house

Friday 3 August 2018

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY List of posts









SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY Epilogue

Because there have been too many words and not enough pictures in this series of posts, here are three pictures to finish with.

Back home, Frog models his vimpel (the pennant version of the Norwegian flag).



Now all we need is a flagpole.

And finally here are copies of two Norwegian prints which I have. They are much faded and my scanner has cut their edges off, and my aunt would probably call them sentimental, but to me they epitomise the country: wild beautiful nature, outdoor living, twilight, fairy tales come to life.





The creatures are I think friendly trolls, and those of you who’ve been paying attention to these posts will notice some of the food I’ve mentioned - rips (redcurrants), fish, Norwegian cheese (Jarlsberg), rye bread.

Wednesday 1 August 2018

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 7 Saying goodbye

It was another perfect day. At breakfast we watched battalions of swifts swim across the sky. After breakfast Frog and my aunt went to a DIY store to buy an Allen key so that Frog could mend a light. I finished my packing and then went to the summerhouse.

The summerhouse was a miniature version of the main house, hidden in trees at the top of the garden and used as a writer’s retreat and spare bedroom. I sat on the squishy white sofa and studied the bookshelves, the woodburner, the blue and white china.
     As a child I’d found Norway tough.
    Even though at home we lived in the country and spent most of our spare time outdoors, the Norwegian children were tougher than us, both mentally and physically. They would leap off rocks into deep ice-cold water without a qualm. They skied as soon as they could walk, up steep hills and down precipitous slopes.
    None of the houses we stayed in had flush loos. Some didn’t even have running water. Food was limited and often strange to our English palate.
    As a teenager I’d found the boys boorish. I preferred the romantic Mediterraneans.
    Now either things had changed or I had, or both. I’d fallen in love with this beautiful country - that was a quarter of my heritage.

I’d said we had to leave at 2pm, even though I knew it was much too early. I didn’t want to outstay our welcome. I wanted to allow my aunt time to have her afternoon rest. So after a sumptuous lunch on the verandah of the summerhouse (yet another place for eating out) – smoked salmon, smoked mackerel and the remains of the cake my aunt had made for the birthday party the night before (blurtcarker – a Norwegian speciality consisting of sponge, fresh fruit and cream) - we loaded our hire car and climbed in.
    I could see my aunt was trying not cry, just as my mother always did when I took my leave, so at the last minute I jumped out and said, ‘I feel more at home here than I do in England.’
    ‘So do I,’ answered my aunt. ‘That’s why I live here.’

The journey to the airport took half an hour, returning the hire car ten minutes, check-in two minutes. We had three hours to wait for our plane.

Ours was the next flight and no one else had arrived as early as us, so the airport was deserted. We whisked round the one shop without buying anything then found a seat next to the window and rummaged for our books. The other side of the glass the sky was clear blue as it had been all week and the line of trees beyond the runway a deep rich green. I wanted to be out there.

Eventually people began to arrive and go through to the gate waiting area so we followed them. The waiting area was a strange silent place, watched over by humanoid granite statues. Nearly everyone was plugged into a computer.

Granite statues in the gate waiting area of Kristiansand airport, Norway
The gate waiting area at Kristiansand airport
Frog and I shared his emergency rations - a smoked salmon and cucumber sandwich he’d made after lunch – and then I texted my aunt to tell her what stage we were at. (She’d refused to let me strip our bed, in case we had to return. I wanted to reassure her that we nearly on the plane.) We felt embarrassed to be showing such signs of life.

This way round we had only a two-hour stopover at Amsterdam's Schipol. We were old hands at the airport so didn’t need to explore and Frog had a bad foot (as he sometimes does) so we sat quietly by a window again and tried to read.

At 11pm I stood in Bristol Airport carpark in the dark with the luggage, waiting for Frog to find the car. A chill wind whipped round the corner of the building from which we’d picked up our key and I rummaged in my bag for the fleece and quilted gilet that I hadn’t touched all week.
    We’d made to Norway and we’d made it back. Now I had to work out what it all meant.