doings

December 2010

Every day one of our neighbours (the one whose wood-chopping equipment we use) takes his JCB through the tunnels to clear the icicles off the roof and scrape up stalagmites from the road surface. But by the middle of the day they've started to grow again. Here's today's growth photo, left - click for enlargement.

Want a lift? A farmer near the coast (moped country, if you've been following the stories from over there) was spotted today moving his van. The van seems to lack a few wheels, which is perhaps why he's carrying it on his tractor fork. He was probably going slowly, but no-one seems in a rush to overtake.

1 December. Advent. We've put the lights up on the big tree at the front of the house (if truth be told we never took them down from last year but we've now plugged them back in) and last night the children's club in the valley started filming their Christmas film (with four kings walking across a deeply-frozen field followed closely by the Tim in the 4WD providing the lighting (full beam)).

Tim was pleased by a text message from North Cape Church (which if I remember rightly is the world's most northerly mainland church) asking him to be consultant for the building of a new organ there. But they want a visit before Christmas!

The jumper. Tracy's been working for a while on a fantastic knitted/felted jumper as a Christmas present for a child in the valley. To get the thick felt texture you knit the jumper in a size that would fit an 18-foot-high obese troll and then shrink it. The knitting was finished amidst great rejoicing yesterday afternoon and the jumper went into the washing machine to shrink it for the felting process. It emerged the size of a paperback book; rather too small for the average teddy. Panic stations. A period of stretching managed to double it in size (photo, left, is after the stretching) and a couple of hours more work (click photo for pics) got it up to a size M (Midget). The next plan is to put the child in the washing machine as well to see if she will shrink to fit the jumper.

The Mayor gave his chain an extra rattle this weekend at the news that the national electricity body Statkraft is to invest �80 million in a new wind farm in our local district. It will be located on the moors at the opposite end of the district (so 25 miles from here) where there is apparently "good wind". Just to put that into perspective from the local authority's point of view, this investment is the equivalent of about �150,000 per household, so it's not surprising they were pleased.

2 December. In sunny and snowless (but still -12°) Norway we're reading with amazement about Britain being closed due to blizzards. (Photo, left, of ice lantern on balcony).

3 December. Matthew and Katie are away for the weekend at (separate) camps, so there's just the three of us home. Went out for supper with a neighbour.

4 December. Heatwave. The temperature has shot up overnight and is now 0° - which feels absolutely tropical. Went outside in T-shirt to bring some firewood in.

I (this article © Andrew) went out for a walk today and discovered some Lynx footprints. (Click photo, right, to follow the Lynx).

While Andrew was out lynxing this afternoon, Tim and Tracy drove to Stavanger to visit friends there. Snowing hard on the way home - it will be interesting to see what the roads are like in the morning.

7 December. Temperature now back down to -15° C - fairly chilly. Earlier in the year (18 May) we wrote about an 7-and-a-half-hour-long programme, which was watched by a quarter of Norway's population, on the main TV channel. The programme consisted simply of putting a camera on the front of the Bergen to Oslo train and filming the journey in real time. It was such a success that they're repeating the idea - but this time filming one complete journey from Bergen to Kirkenes on the coastal steamer Hurtigruten. Journey time (and thus programme duration) - 133 hours and 45 minutes (assuming it arrives on time). There's not even any adverts on that channel. How are we going to make cups of tea without missing a bit?

8 December.Political trouble in Norway. Doesn't happen often, but when it does it can be entertaining. The Centre Party has just "renewed" its logo. The old logo, a coloured drawing of a four-leaf clover, was a bit outdated and downbeat, so it's been replaced by a very nice photo of a four-leaf clover (photo, left). Two problems have been mentioned so far. The first is that the photo is not of a clover at all - it's a wood-sorrel. As I'm sure you noticed straight away. The second problem is that they took the picture off the internet without checking first who owned the rights to it. "We just found it on a website and it didn't say there that the picture belonged to anyone". Perhaps it wasn't so lucky after all. (PS - 9 December. The new logo was officially withdrawn this afternoon)

In town tonight. Katie was playing at a music-school concert last night,so we got to see the bright lights (photo of Vikes� main street last night, right - click for enlargement). She played very well.

Poo Bear. Want to earn some pocket money? The Wild Animal Commission in Nordland county has offered a �100 reward for every "complete" set of bear droppings that you take to them. (This is actually because they want to analyse where bears have been, what they've eaten and so on). Picture, right (click for enlargement) is of Scandinavia's largest bear excrement, recently found in Nordland. Isn't it wonderful what you get pictures of on this website? But if you're going to go collecting, you should note the Commission's guidelines. Amongst other things, the samples are to be untainted so please don't carry them in your hands or stuff them in your pockets (oh blow - just what I was about to do). They would also be quite pleased if you can give them a hair sample from the bear ("excuse me, Mr Bear, just stand still while I pull out a hair from your chin").

Katie's just come home from school and reported from today's swimming lesson. After swimming a few lengths the pupils were told to pop outside and roll around in the snow for a bit, before coming back in to the water to get warm. It was fun, apparently (very Norwegian thing to do) but the third time it started to get a bit cold!

9 December. Hard to believe it, but the infamous "Google Street View" has even made it to �rsdalen and has taken a beautiful picture of our letterbox, with the house visible in the distance. (click picture, left, for enlargement). Or see for yourself the relevant bit of street view - which is actually worth doing (turn off the panel bit on the left and you get a wide-angle picture that you can turn this way and that to get a 360° round view).

As the end of the year approaches, official bodies start turning all statistical. So we learn, for instance, that unemployment in our district has gone back down to 8. (People, that is, not percent). All of which inspired me to a burst of statistics of my own. The 2500 inhabitants of our district occupy an area of 250 square miles (but a third of them live in Vikes� so there's enough shoulder room for the rest of us). Just to put that into perspective, if England were to have the same population density, 99 people out of every 100 currently living in England would have to vanish. But even our district is by no means thinly spread in Norwegian terms. There are huge areas with very low population. Take the district of Kautokeino, for instance (no-one else seems to want to), which has less than one person per square mile (less than a tenth as many as us). Transfer that to the British landscape and the total population of England would then be the same as the current number of students at Sheffield University. Or for that matter as the number of grey wolves in Russia (who was it who said that 99.2% of statistics are of no use to anybody?) ...

12 December. Strong winds overnight. The temperature has risen during the night by 15° C, which means that the snow has abruptly gone. The fields have turned green again, but so has the river - which is still solid ice but now with water running over the top of it, giving it a bright green appearance. Water-covered ice is all over the roads as well, which together with rockfalls and a variety of debris blowing about, made for an interesting journey to Vikes� this morning.

13 December. The all-night party. It was rather after midnight - sometime in the early hours - that I woke up from a dream featuring bells and people squirting pepper spray (my brother's to blame for that one, but that's another story). And realised that a tooth was hurting. It was one of those toothaches that didn't build up gradually over a day or two but just turned up uninvited in the middle of the night. Got up to have a rinse with antiseptic tooth stuff. No water in the taps. It's hard to think straight at that time of the morning, especially with a toothache, but it did occur to me that the water in the stables had been frozen for several weeks and that there'd been a thaw the last few days. Perhaps the pipes had thawed and were now leaking, causing the well to be empty. Went downstairs. Scritchity-scratchity. The noise was coming from the lounge. Went into the lounge. Somewhere in the depths of the wall there was what sounded like a mouse doing a clog dance. Clearly nothing to do with the water, but something else to deal with. Went out to the stables and even as I opened the door I could hear a trickling noise. There's a drinking trough in there with a lever that animals can press to get more water. The trough was full of ice, which was pressing the lever, and as the pipes had now thawed water was flowing freely all over the floor. Broke up the ice, emptied the trough and swept the floor (still in pajamas, of course). Went back inside the house, where the mouse party was still in full swing. Tracy came bleary-eyed down the stairs to enquire what on earth I was up to. In the end we made cups of tea and joined in the party. This morning I'm looking for a dentist who does (mouse) extractions from (wall) cavities with a sideline in emergency plumbing.

15 December.Tooth is much better (thanks for expressions of sympathy) and the mouse seems to have moved out, or at least be partied out. But some people seem to have even worse luck with animals. We mentioned Kautokeino in the context of a burst of statistics a week ago and have to make mention of the unfortunate NRK reporter Marie Elise Nystad who was there earlier this year, doing a report about reindeer. She got rather carried away, as you can see in the news report by clicking the picture, left. (The news report is followed by pictures of that day's northern lights and then by the weather forecast, but you can turn it off before that!). Yesterday she felt sufficiently recovered to have another go - and exactly the same thing happened again (but this time the reindeer took the camera as well). She says she's not doing any more reindeer reporting again for a while so she's taking Christmas off in case she has to interview Santa.

16 December. Last night Katie had a nearly-end-of-term class party in Vikes�, involving shooting, barn dancing and silly games (photo, left, from the "eating chocolate with knife and fork whilst dressed in chain-saw protective clothing" game (by this stage it had reduced to just protective gloves)). Click photo for enlargement. Andrew is doing work experience this week and (because I was in Vikes� with Katie and couldn't collect him) had to get home by himself. So he borrowed someone's tractor and drove himself home, which turned out to be no bad thing because the roads were terrible, with snow and rain on sheet ice, so coming down the mountain was no joke. (Click photo, right, for enlargement).

21 December. Shortest day. Looking forward to lighter times to come. Also end of term, so we're all very relieved at the prospect of not having to get up early for a bit.

Headline story in today's news is that the Russians are annoyed that Norwegian reindeer have been crossing the border illegally. Without a visa and all that. Perhaps it's the one that attacked the NRK journalist the other day, running away from possible reprisals?

22 December. Although the eclipse of the moon did not oblige (for once the skies were cloudy), the moon is back in full strength over the lake tonight (rather abstract photo, left - click for enlargement).

Katie and Tim went off into a forest today to get a Christmas tree. Katie chose it and sawed it down (photo, right - click for enlargement). We didn't hang about because it was -15°, but it was a beautiful day!

Norway has a national body called the "meat information board" which amongst other things pays for TV adverts reminding us just how good pork chops can be (or whatever). Over Christmas they operate an emergency helpline for people who are in a mess with their Christmas dinner. "This is an emergency telephone with rapid response", says the spokesman. "We will provide emergency assistance, good advice, tips on buying and recipes". They will have 14 food experts waiting by the phones on Christmas Eve. Last year they had a desperate housewife whose husband had forgotten to soak the salt meat the night before, and another who rang in fury to report that her Christmas turkey had apparently been killed by being shot with a bow and arrow. On closer investigation, it turned out that it came with a little plastic thermometer ready inserted ...

23 December. (Text © Katie.) All went on a Christmas trip to Stavanger today. It�s not a bad city, as cities go: cobbled streets around the frozen duck pond in the city centre (it's a pond with frozen ducks on it). On one shore of the duck pond is the cathedral. First we all had dinner at a Turkish restaurant that was yummy (we even got pop.).Then Dad and Matt went to the cathedral early for a choir practice so we were left to wander away through the shops. Then we joined them at the cathedral. The reason we were there is that the English churches were having a 9 lessons and carols service. Matt was singing in the choir and Dad was playing the organ. It was very odd to sing English carols and to have a church service in English, while in Norway.

24 December. Happy Christmas! (this bit not Katie's). Given the recent reindeer problems (see stories 17 and 21 December) as well as problems finding flight paths with all the current chaos in European airspace, Father Christmas has found a new method of transport (left).

It�s not Christmas today � it�s Mum�s birthday. But she still had to take a service in Sandnes, and Dad had three services at his churches. This evening we�ve had a birthday dinner � which was the Norwegian-style Christmas dinner of pork, mashed swede, pickled red cabbage and potatoes. For pudding we had toffee-crisp ice cream with melted chocolate poured on.

25 December. Happy Christmas!

We've had a wonderful Christmas here (click photo, left, for three Christmas-day pictures) and hope that you have, too.

26 December. You may remember that a section of the road was closed for a couple of months this year for avalanche prevention (photo of some of the work, right). The firm didn't actually do all the work that had been agreed in advance, so it was with mixed feelings that we had a message this morning that there'd been an avalanche on that section. On the one hand, there was a cry of "hah!" from all around - but on the other hand we really couldn't face more closures. But luckily, it wasn't so bad and all the rubble was cleared from the road - just in time for Tim to get to the church service this morning!

27 December. The first day Tracy and Tim were both free from work, Thomas Andrew was at work, hanging up all the hooks that support the chair lift at the ski centre (photo, left - click for enlargement). While he was out working in the snow at -15°, we others sloped off to the cafe and enjoyed ourselves by the fire (photo, far right - click for enlargement).

Emails are now back in action - but we lost a few over Christmas, so if you've written in the last couple of days please re-send!

28 December. This tends to be a place where nothing much happens, but we've had some real local drama. Last night, one of the buildings at Vikes� school (where Katie and Andrew go) burned to the ground. Neither Katie nor Andrew are immediately affected (it was the building in which Katie's classroom was last year - the best bit of the school) but there'll be a lot of chaos for at least the remainder of the school year.

Remember the underwater webcam in the river? It's still running and there are still lots of salmon under the ice (click fishy photo, above or right, to go to fishcam).

29 December. The village "Christmas-tree party" was as usual attended by the whole village. A nut was hidden in the gr�t (rice-pudding-ish creation eaten with sugar, cinnamon and butter) and the lucky finder got a prize. There were silly games and competitions and carols round the tree.

30 December. The gingerbread house - essential Norwegian tradition - is decorated with sweets (photo, left - click for enlargement) and ready for tomorrow's demolition. Tim is out working all day, but in return doesn't have to play for the midnight service at church, which means he will be home for New Year for the first time ever in Norway.

31 December. Pleasant evening at home, playing board games. Managed to "attend" the wedding of an old friend in California, via a web link. Technology is so amazing! And at midnight (here) we were in the midst of a video conversation with friends in England (it was only 11 there). Amazing! Great evening. Strong winds as we went to bed, so no fireworks.

1 January.Continued on the January 2011 page: see the next exciting episode - "Goats may fly"