Header picture: House, 1 June 2017
(full picture here)
1 June - It's going to be a busy month. Tracy, for instance, starts June with a couple of weeks in Norway before going on to Cambodia, from where she's travelling straight to England before heading from there to Germany. Thomas (while keeping an eye on all his sheep) is re-building a tractor for a neighbour, Matt and Beth are hard at work in Sandnes and Ålesund respectively and Katie is doing end-of-term exams and looking forward to the summer holidays, which start in a fortnight. Tim is taking advantage of the summer break to get on with some projects, though it's also wedding season at church. One of the most challenging things about weddings (and funerals, by the way), is how to tell people politely that they really ought to think again about their choices of songs when they ask soloists to sing. A surprisingly popular request for weddings is Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (after all, with a title like that it must be a good churchy song, mustn't it?) — until you look more closely at the text:
You saw her bathing on the roofOf course, it's not just in Norway that you get problems with people not quite understanding what song texts are saying. Years ago, in Holyhead, an English-speaking couple decided to throw in a Welsh hymn, either just to add flavour or to satisfy the Welsh side of the family, I'm not sure. They chose at random out of what they believed was the "weddings" section of the hymn book and (because I didn't get to see it in advance) ended up singing the following in their wedding:
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
Arglwydd mewn trugaredd, Moes dy nefol heddA very literal word-for-word translation of this would read:
I'r eneidiau ffyddlon Aeth drwy byrth y bedd.
Yma, mewn gorthrymder, blinder beunydd ddaw,
Yno, wedi'r ymdrech, boed eu rhan heb fraw.
Lord in your mercy, grant your heavenly peace
To the faithful souls going through the gates of the grave
Here, in oppression, daily troubles come,
There, after the struggle, let them be without pain.
All of which is in my mind at the moment because someone has just booked a song by Queen for the funeral of a man at Sandnes, and I've got to find a way of telling them that they can't have it:
I'm just the pieces of the man I used to be
and it seems like there's no way out of this for me ...
Too much love will kill you.
4 June -
Enjoyed a visit to Thomas at his farm (click photo, right, for long picture series).
Although his farm is not far away from our house (7½ miles in a straight line) and actually borders with the farm in Ørsdalen where his friend Kjell Arne lives,
the road journey is 35 miles and over an hour's hard drive (see road map here - our house is A; the farm is B).
But well worth it!
Farmer and animals are thriving and seem to be enjoying life by the lake.
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5 June - Pentecost services, at Sandnes church on Sunday and Tracy's Norkirken on Monday (click photo, above left, for pictures from Tracy's service).
Back to the farm today to help with something;
went a little overboard with photos (including the beautiful bit of the farm where the stream descends a little series of waterfalls and runs out into the lake) —
so the photo series (above right) has been updated.
Here (below: click for enlargement; then click the resulting picture again to see it at full size, scrolling left and right as necessary)
is a panorama showing Thomas' farm today.
8 June - Jon has prompted me to correct an omission here. We've written before about Norwegian words that are hard to translate into English:
and so on.
- seter / sæter
- generally a little gathering of relatively-primitive log cabins on a mountainside. These cabins are traditionally owned by the farming families in the nearest village and formed the summer accommodation for women and children who looked after the farm animals at summer pasture in the mountains. This in turn was necessary because the grass grown down in the village was needed as feedstuff for the winter. Dairying (particularly cheese production) was carried out at the seter during the summer. Nowadays, however, most seter buildings have become weekend accommodation for villagers wanting to return to a “simple life” in the mountains (and in some cases as commercial holiday accommodation), and have lost their traditional dairying associations.
- 17th May
- processions of people in national costume licking the first ice cream of the year, flags, speeches, the local village brass band, silly games, rømmegrøt (won't even begin to translate that one); independence day (or more properly, constitution day: independence from Denmark on 17 May 1814 resulted shortly afterwards in the transfer of sovereignty to Sweden rather than full independence which only arrived in 1905, but no matter).
- plussgrader
- what you measure the temperature in during the winter when the temperature is supposed to be well below freezing but unseasonally isn't
- ferdigmåket (=ready-shovelled)
- snow that falls as rain in connection with the above;
The latest word, as Jon says, is huskapping, which describes someone sawing his neighbour's building in half.
A "hus" in Norwegian means a dwelling house or any other type of building from garden shed to town hall.
In this instance it was a garden shed which was built in such a way that it jutted over into the neighbour's garden.
Even in peaceful Norway, neighbours don't always see eye to eye about land boundaries;
in this instance the offended neighbour waited until the intruding shed-owner was away on holiday and removed the trespassing section of shed with a chain saw.
The returning shed owner was naturally upset about this and the matter has ended in court.
This provides us with the interesting headline:
"
Nesøy man says that he had the right to saw his neighbour's outhouse in half".
Nesøy is an outpost of Oslo, which explains a lot.
So if you're learning Norwegian (as, of course, everyone should), then remember today's word: huskapping.
9 June - Today's big news (never mind elections) is that the huskapper (who had accidentally or deliberately overlooked the fact that his neighbour had every right to build his shed on that piece of land, due to a deed from the 1940s) is having to pay some £75000 compensation and costs and faces a couple of months in jail for criminal damage. Huskapping might be a useful word, but is clearly not advisable in practice.
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Captions invited for this photo from the Hardanger Fjord. Thanks for all the captions received including from more-or-less prime ministers - keep them coming!
11 June - Eight years -
8 years today since we moved in to our house in Ørsdalen: the longest we've ever lived in any one house
and a period of rich memories and experiences, a selection of which we're lucky enough to have recorded here.
What better way to celebrate than with a baptism at Tracy's church? Not just any old baptism, but a full-immersion one at the nearby river. Neither the weather nor the water was super-warm, but it was a great day. Click photo, left, for long picture series.
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14 June - Enjoyed a barbeque with good friends at Vikeså on the way home from work (photos, right)
Speaking of services, Thomas Andrew in the meantime is servicing two parts of his car (click picture, left, to see photos of the two parts in question).
15 June - End of term! Katie celebrated summer holidays by turning off her alarm clock for the next couple of months and by a swim from our "private" beach in the river.
16 June - Tracy off to Cambodia
Tracy is once again on her way to Cambodia and once she arrives will be updating her Cambodia blog from there.
17th - Now safely arrived.
18 June - Thomas has sent a couple of photos of his friend May-Britt who lives with him at the farm.
A foretaste of one of our summer activities.
From where we keep the kayaks in Germany, we can cross the lake and then use a system of gentle rivers and lakes to form a half-day round trip.
Here is a (shortened) film of that trip (not filmed by us - just found on the net).
19 June - Happy birthday! The character being celebrated with a birthday cake (right - no enlargement available because it's fattening enough as it is) is 100 years old. It's the character Å in the Norwegian alphabet, officially adopted in 1917 to replace the compound letter Aa (which like the Welsh Ll is a single letter). It's pronounced, by the way, rather like the letter o in sore. Amongst other things, the old way of writing it used to get a bit much in words where the letter "aa" was followed by the letter "a" (making the word look like a tonsil-inspecting exercise). And Norway's shortest place name is "Å" (a village in Lofoten). Funnily enough, the old form of writing "aa" has had a mini-revival over the past 20 years because of the internet. Email and web addresses can't cope with "å" so they end up having to be written with an "aa" instead, which means that today's kids are more familiar with the old way of writing than their parents were. So that's today's Norwegian lesson (rather safer than huskapping).
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23 June - Midsummer - This is our "bonfire night", when every community throughout Norway heads out to an open space (in our case, the beach at the lake), lights a bonfire and a barbeque and sits around chatting or playing silly games until the small hours. As we've said before, this was the forum at which we first met all our neighbours, eight years ago (photo sequence here). Tonight there'll be no bonfire on the beach, but barbeque in the barn. It's raining hard and the cloud is hanging low. Bergen (the Norwegian city that's famous for its rain) has had rain every single day in June — which even for Bergen is a record you have to go back to 1952 to match. But I'm sure we'll have fun anyway.
The "two good neighbours" - Years ago (when Matt and Beth were little), this was the title of one of the favourite programmes on Norwegian children's television. Two permanently happy and optimistic neighbours were constantly helping each other out with odd DIY jobs. In each episode the DIY job would go slightly wrong and the situation would escalate, aided by the bizarrely-inventive solutions devised by the two friends. The series was made in Czechoslovakia and apparently exported to several countries (under the English name Pat & Mat). Some episodes were apparently banned on German-language Swiss channels because they didn't want children trying out these solutions — but those same episodes were allowed on French-language Swiss channels because ... I don't know why. Anyway, to return to the point, I was reminded of this series when we had a problem with the mechanism for flushing the toilet. I started to dismantle the system and eventually found the problem: a thin plastic rod had snapped. I removed the rod, measured and photographed the rest of the mechanism and went into the plumber/bathroom specialists in Sandnes. I showed him the piece and the other information and asked if he could get a replacement plastic rod. The toilet was put in when the house was re-built, so it's 15 years old or so, so I wasn't expecting that he would have exactly the same system still in stock. But he said immediately that it would be no problem. For only £500 he would come and take away the toilet and replace it with a new one. I suspect he would have changed his mind when he found out where we lived, but no matter; he didn't get the chance. I told him not to be so ridiculous and went back home. After a bit of rooting in the shed I found a nylon screw plug (a Rawlplug equivalent) that was just the right diameter, cut the top half inch off to create a little plastic tube and used this, with liberal amounts of superglue, to create a joint for the two bits of plastic rod. No problem. I put everything back together. But then I found that the location of the new joint had altered the alignment of the system slightly so that another rod at the other side no longer stuck up quite far enough. But by then I was in the swing of it and another Rawlplug stuck on the top of the second rod fixed that. It was a bit wobbly so I had to superglue it twice and press it firmly to get it to hold. Mind those gluey fingers: it's always embarrassing to walk into casualty carrying a toilet. No problem. I reassembled the system again and triumphantly pressed the flusher. It wouldn't budge. Dismantled the system again. Lower down this second rod there was a little plastic ring that holds the rod in alignment as it moves up and down. Superglue had dripped down the rod and fixed it firmly to the ring. Apparently, nail-varnish remover can be used to remove superglue from plastic so I went out, bought some ("it's not for me") and painted it on. When this didn't help, Katie helpfully pointed out that the nail-varnish remover proudly advertised that it was acetone-free (acetone being the stuff that helps with superglue). It was a bit of a long shot anyway — I wasn't really expecting it to work. So I went out to a builder's merchants and bought a small metal pipe clamp, before sawing off the offending plastic ring. I then got out the superglue again and glued the pipe clamp to the mechanism in such a way that it served the same function as the plastic ring. Even with the superglue, the metal clamp didn't want to stick to the plastic, so it had to be helped out by going to the office-equipment drawer and adding a bulldog clip to the system. Reassembly took longer than usual because this too had somehow created alignment problems, but it's now all back together and seems to be working surprisingly well for the moment. If it gives any more trouble I'll call in those two good neighbours: they'd probably do a faster job. If you want to watch a sample of their work, here is Pat & Mat mending a garage door.
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Tracy is approaching the end of her visit to Cambodia — remember that pictures and descriptions of the trip are on her Cambodia blog.
24 June - Surgery to correct the cruelest cut - Strange crimes take place in Egersund. We've reported earlier front-page news stories of people kicking lamp posts, throwing kebabs at tractors or the egg thief who made a high-speed get-away from the police on his moped. The latest story involves a "new" landmark tourist attraction. Anything to do with trolls is an automatic attraction, so we have the Troll Road, Troll Wall, Troll Tongue and so on. And four days ago Egersund launched its own rival attraction: the Troll ... well; thing, you know. See the first of the two photos here. But this morning came the terrible news that someone, for reasons unknown, attacked it during the night with a drill and chopped it off. See the lower of the two photos. Perhaps a representative of one of the other Troll attractions, or of Pope Pius IX if you believe Dan Brown). However, by lunchtime, "after the initial shock had settled", as the local newspaper Dalane Tidende puts it, the geologists and construction people are already at work planning how to glue it back in place again. "We've repaired larger ones than this", they said, a little alarmingly. You can't do that to a troll and get away with it in Norway.
The story has been picked up by international news organisations such as the BBC and Der Spiegel. Perhaps after all the vandal was a clever marketing consultant for Egersund?
25 June -
Tracy has made it safely to England, where she's spending a few days before heading on to Germany.
Bergen (see the day before yesterday) has now broken its 1952 record and is considering re-branding itself as the Venice of Norway.
Thomas has bought two old-style Norwegian Spæl sheep, each with two lambs. The one in the picture, left (click for picture series) is called Hazelnut because she is a present from grandma Hazel; her lambs (the sheep's lambs, that is) are called Wholenut and Halfnut. The other sheep (the black one with the black lambs) does not have a name yet. Names sought (but they will need to be translatable to Norwegian).
Admininstrative question:
This month I've been trying to devise a new way of showing the pictures on this site.
Initial feedback was that the arrows and the captions were both hard to find.
I've had a go at improving the programming — see pictures of the sheep, above left.
Any problems?
Thanks for the following suggestions - do keep them coming!
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26 June -
Not to be left out (but naturally well separated from Thomas' sheep), next door's goats all wanted their pictures taking (right).
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