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

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY List of posts

1  Landing at Kristiansand and driving to the Strand Hotel Fevik 

2  A gargantuan breakfast, two walks and a swim

3/1  Migraine and shopping in Arendal

3/2  The party

4/1  Alpine scenery and islands

4/2  The dinner

5/1  Exploring the interior

5/2  A city built on rock and water

6/1  Movik fort

6/2  A wild and beautiful country and a benevolent system

7   Saying goodbye

Epilogue

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.

Click here for the list of posts in this series

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.

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.

Click here for the Epilogue

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 6/2 A wild and beautiful country and a benevolent system

High tea and birthday pizza

My cousin An, my aunt’s daughter, had invited us to tea, so after a brief wash-and-brush-up back at my aunt’s, we loaded the sat-nav with An’s address and set off across Kristiansand again. An had taken the trouble to visit us several times in the UK, so I was more than pleased to return the favour.

    ‘She lives in a much better area than me,’ said my aunt, ‘except for her road.’

    The road looked fine to us –wide and peaceful, big houses with gardens. An lived in the top flat of one of the houses with her young son HJ. She showed us around and on to her spacious verandah with its green views where she was drying her washing.

My cousin's spacious verandah

HJ wasn’t well. What with the heat and the party he’d been overdoing things.

    ‘And then today he went swimming with friends,’ said An.

    ‘Where did they go?’ I asked, ever curious.

    ‘There’s a lake nearby,’ she said.

    ‘Did they go on their own?’ I asked.

    ‘Oh yes,’ said An.

    Wow, I thought. Even though Frog and I had been able to wander where we liked as children, free from adult supervision, we’d been brought up never to swim in fresh water (polio, pollution, steep-sided quarries). English children today might have been able to swim in fresh water but they wouldn’t do it alone. (I don’t know about the rest of Britain.) It reminded me of the Australian bush, where I’d worked in the 1970s. There we’d leapt into rivers and waterholes without a qualm.

    An shared a garden and a basement with the other inmates of the building. Frog, who loves underground areas of all kinds, lifted the basement hatch (a semi-recumbent door at the foot of the house wall) and climbed down to explore.

    ‘Yes,’ he reported. ‘Separate rooms. Washing machines. Lots of space.’

     In the garden An had the section with an apple tree and some shade, but she was also allowed to pick currants (black, white, red) from bushes in the other half.

Looking towards An's part of the garden

 ‘The building was put up in the 1950s,’ An explained. ‘They planted the fruit trees and bushes at the time, and made sure we had space to store bicycles.’

    How benevolent, and what an investment in health. So many of the roads had cycle tracks as well as pavements and we saw cyclists everywhere. The Norwegians were getting fatter, according to my aunt, but they still looked pretty healthy to me.

    We sat at a table under the apple tree

Sitting under the apple tree

and my cousin brought food and drink down in a large basket. A good ruse, I thought. She could even have lowered the basket from the terrace. We had green tea, brown rolls, salad, Norwegian white goat’s cheese, and some of An’s home-picked and home-made rips (redcurrant) jam which was deliciously tart. I complimented her on it.

    She was pleased as it was a first attempt. ‘Mum was very rude about it,’ she said.

    I wasn’t sure why. I had a feeling my aunt didn’t like rips but it was more likely that, as a career woman and writer, my aunt was scoffing at An’s attempt to be domestic.

    Norwegian meals were confusing. They had huge breakfasts, lunches (sometimes), early suppers (with the confusing name of middag – ‘midday’) and late suppers. And now here we were having high tea. It didn’t matter however. We were more than ready for it.

    An worked for an environmental organisation which had just acquired the right to give Norwegian companies an internationally recognised certification. She was attending a short course at the university (at the end of her street) on EU environmental law, hoping to become the organisation’s expert.

    ‘People seem much more in touch with the environment here than in the UK,’ I commented.

    As my aunt had explained, Norwegians spent summers on the coast and winters in the mountains where they ski, often along lighted trails. (That was why the inland lake we’d seen had been so deserted.) People appreciated the open-air life.

    An nodded. ‘Yes, maybe.’

    An had travelled widely before settling in Kristiansand and studied for long periods in the UK, so was much better qualified than I was to make such comparisons. I was pleased she agreed with me.

    ‘I suppose it’s because you didn’t have an industrial revolution,’ I continued.

    An nodded.
    That evening, when we were talking about the war yet again, An's grown-up son mentioned that someone had done a calculation at one time as to what the Germans had actually contributed to Norway in the way of infrastructure (roads and railways) and heavy engineering plants.

    The night before my aunt had told us about one of her visitors, a Canadian, who was aghast that the Norwegians didn’t make more money from their trees.

    ‘How are we supposed to get the timber out?’ my aunt had said.

    Having seen something of the terrain, I knew what she meant. Which led to another reason for not cutting down the trees – the fact that the trees didn’t grow out of lush soil, like in the UK, but balanced precariously on rock.

    I put this to An. ‘And you can’t cut the trees down because the soil would then blow away and you’d be left with nothing.’

    ‘Yes,’ said An. ‘We have a fragile ecosystem.’

    They did, and they knew it, and they’d turned their disadvantage into an advantage. Unlike many, they still had a wild and beautiful country.

Back at my aunt’s we showered and changed – it had been a long hot day – and then we attempted the watering. Frog found some hose in my aunt’s garage and managed to get it to stay on her outdoor tap and I then climbed my aunt's rocky garden in my best flimsy sandals trying to spray flowerbeds, pots and shrubs rather than my newly washed hair and my best white trousers. An was coming over shortly with HJ and her visiting older son Ar who lived in Oslo and whose 21^st birthday it was. They were bringing pizza and we were going to have a party.

We sat outside again, at a different table. My aunt cracked a bottle of champagne that she’d been saving.

    ‘What did you do today?’ I asked Ar.

    'I hiked for 5 hours with a friend,' he said. 'There's a sort of mountain in the middle of Kristiansand.'

    I only half believed him but still. How many English boys would do anything approaching that - even if they could - on their 21^st birthday?

    Ar, who had an Italian father and was about 6 and a half feet tall and good looking, was a budding actor. He’d reached the semi-finals of Norway’s Got Talent (doing breakdancing, I believe) something of which we were all very proud. He told us about his recent role in a film about a Norwegian Resistance hero, when he’d played the assistant to a German torturer.

   ‘So Norway’s still making films about the Second World War,’ I said.

    Ar explained that the state sponsored much of the Norwegian film industry and in return the films had to have some historical or factual content.

    Norway was once a poor country but now, because of gas and oil, it was rich. But that wealth did not fall into the hands of the few. As I was beginning to understand it, people were heavily taxed and the money was used for health, education, benefits – and, it appeared, the arts. That explained the lack of commercialisation. Norway was expensive for the Norwegians too. They didn’t have money to spend on things like shopping and eating out.

    I struck me as a brilliant system.

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