doings

March 2013

1 March You see, we manage to get our words the right way round, even in Welsh (left). That's more than they manage in Norway. It's the skiing world championships at the moment, which is naturally engaging much attention here, and the Norwegian national song "Ja vi elsker" has been heard quite a few times in connection with medals. The ladies' skiing group did their bit by dressing in national colours, each with a large letter on their front so that together they would spell out the word N - O - R - G - E (Norway, in Norwegian). Unfortunately, four of them forgot that in order for it to appear correct from the front, they had to spell the word backwards from where they were looking. They therefore celebrated Norway's achievements by spelling out the word G - R - O - N - E (right), which wasn't at all what they meant. "That doesn't like quite right - oh dear, it's back to front" said their trainer, Egil Kristiansen, on seeing the picture.

Katie's birthday party was carefully planned in consultation with the met office to avoid any danger of bad weather. For once, it all went fine (photos, click left).

Comments joanna - March 4th, 2013 I love Katie's expression as she watches the candles!! Tim - March 4th, 2013 Yes - "I know what's going to happen!" Katie - March 4th, 2013 !!!!!!!!!!!

They say that Norwegian children are born with skis on their feet, but here's the exception. This 2-year-old prefers snowboarding (click photo, right, for a short film clip of her in action).

Katie, too, should be having a ski day together with school - a day up by the �rsdalen tunnel, instead of ordinary lessons. Actually, they get out quite often, with days in the forest and up the mountains. But the ski day has been posponed. The weather has been back to the previous pattern of brilliant sunshine but -10° or so, which means that the snow is a bit too icy for safe skiing and the weather is a bit too cold up on the mountain (where it's probably -20° with the breeze). Hopefully they'll get their ski day before too long!

Apologies that this page hasn't been updated for quite a few days. The reason is that the past week has been a music festival in the region, for which Tim is leader, so every hour of the day has been taken up with this. You can read an article about the festival from the local paper (but it's all in Norwegian, of course). The week's events, funded by national government, the country council and all the local authorities, included concerts (Tim playing at two of them), lectures and a whole-day music course (again led by Tim). It was all a great success, but we're glad that it's over! Bits of it were recorded: if you want to, you can hear:
Saxophone and organ/piano: Bluesleeves,   Satie, Gymnopedie,   Piazzolla, Oblivion;   violin and piano: Corelli, Sonata,   Mozart Sonata;   panflute and organ/piano (here's one I recorded earlier with the same soloist):   Handel sonata,   Piazzolla, Ave Maria .   And here, for what it's worth, is a bit of the music course - but it's in Norwegian.

Yesterday Katie had half a day off school, not for skiing but for a check-up at the dentist. It was bad timing, really, because she also goes periodically to the orthodontist, and she'd been there just a few days earlier. So when her dentist said: "we'll just take a few X-rays" (they're very keen on X-raying teeth in Norway; it's pretty much standard when you have a check-up) she replied: "unneccesary dose of radiation - they've got new pictures next door". This apparently surprised the dentist, who wasn't used to 13-year-olds arguing back. What have we produced?

There's a tradition in Norway for annual youth culture competitions, in which individuals in their upper teens compete first at local-authority level and subsequently at county level to give the best presentation - irrespective of genre. It was our local competition this Saturday and Tim was one of three judges. He had a good time and awarded first prize to a girl who was reading her own short story and second prize to a dance group.

Snow clearing This winter, Andrew has had a job he's enjoyed a great deal - driving his tractor (and other tractors) as the snow plough to keep the road out of �rsdalen open. But what's it feel like to drive a snow plough? Now you can find out. Or, at least, you can share what the driver sees, but without having to worry about getting it right! Here (click small photo, left) is a film clip (10 minutes, edited down from nearly an hour) taken from the tractor cab on a circuit; heading first into �rsdalen, then back half way to Vikes�, then back towards �rsdalen again. Filmed by Andrew's friend Nils. It should be added that this was a pleasant day with little snow: conditions can of course be immeasurably worse!

Katie spotted two mooses (moice?) while waiting for the school bus in �rsdalen today. We're not technically supposed to have moose here, but they don't seem to know this. Tracy saw one just beyond the tunnel on 4 May last year, so they are around.

12 March - Andrew and Katie are both up the mountain this afternoon, hard at work collecting wood. Andrew is intending to earn money this winter, supplying firewood to people who have cabins just beyond the tunnel.

13 March - painting the town red causes cold front. Just fifty miles over the mountains from �rsdalen, in the village of Hovden, a Chilean artist has created a work of art by painting a (frozen) water fall bright red (right: click for enlargement). We would be failing in our public duty if we were to describe the public reaction as anything other than "chilly". "You just can't go around painting the landscape", said an angry resident; "well, not like that anyway". There's talk of filing an official complaint. Perhaps they ought to just sell the artwork to some London art gallery?

We're still listening to a constant stream of little rockfalls and icefalls from the mountain, while the bigger avalanche that we reported on 2 January seems to have grown even more due to soil and small stones being swept down in the latest round of melting (photo here).

This blog describes life as it's seen from �rsdalen. If you'd like a broader view of life in Norway, there's one here.

The NRK news appears to have insider information from the Sistine Chapel - a mole amongst the cardinals, perhaps. At any rate they are able to drop a broad hint about the identity of the next pope. "The next Pope will also be a Catholic", reads the headline (left). So now you know.

It turns out that NRK was right - the new pope, announced this evening, is indeed a Catholic. Impressive how they got that right: we'll have to believe their predictions in future!

Comments Jon - March 13th, 2013 Whilst it might appear that NRK are bastions of truth, today we encountered 'the dark side'. We received a red bill, including a late payment charge, without first getting an ordinary bill! However, other than that, they appear to be trustworthy (if only we could understand what they were saying . . . .). BTW, loved the Norway video!

This evening it was Andrew and Tim who spent a happy few hours rolling big logs down the mountain. We're just starting to get going with next winter's firewood!

14 March. Not to be outdone by the Vatican, white smoke has also curled up from the chimney at Normisjon in Bod� to announce the appointment of a new person to run youth work in Nordland county. Their new appointee is Matt. He went up to Bod� for an interview a few weeks ago and loved the place, so he's very pleased. We know Bod� very well, of course - it was our nearest big town all those years ago when we lived in Lur�y - so it will be fun to go back. Driving distance by road from �rsdalen is a thousand miles almost to the inch, but there's an airport at Bod� with very good connections so travel is not a problem. (Click small photo, right, for further pictures of Bod�).

Comments Joanna - March 14th, 2013 Congratulations Matt, here's wishing you Gods blessing on your new job. from that old eccentric!!! Matt - March 16th, 2013 Thanks Joanna, looking forward to getting back to work.Hope all is well with you. Lots of love.

Ice with that? (Left - click for enlargement).

Caravan holiday, Norwegian style (right)

Andrew was hoping to load some of the 100 or so logs that so far have made it to the foot of the mountain, onto a trailer this evening to bring them down to the barn. But the weather isn't helping (see photos here). Ah well, there's time yet, and this is only the beginning!

We mentioned on 18 February that some passengers at Kristiansand airport were having problems because in the relaxed and friendly chaos of the airport they were getting on the wrong planes and having to make a hasty exit to avoid being flown to some pleasant but entirely incorrect destination. Today, a planeload of passengers at Kristiansand listened carefully to the pilot's "we'll shortly be taking off to Copenhagen" before relaxing in the knowledge that they were heading to the correct place. Shortly afterwards, reports the NRK news, the pilot made a new announcement. "Ah, err, I'm sorry ... we're all sitting in the wrong plane. We're supposed to be in that one over there".

Katie spent the weekend away at a "4H" camp a few hours drive to the north. She spent much of her time riding horses, arriving home on Sunday afternoon with significant sleep deprivation. She's just hoping to get through the coming week at school before the Easter holidays when she can catch up on a bit of sleep!

A jumper for a jumper - "I had to find some really big knitting needles", said the girl who knitted this traditional Norwegian jumper.

We also end up doing some pretty wierd things in our lounge before services at Tracy's church. Here we were cutting, folding and sticking - a distinctly pre-school feeling - to make an eight-faced "certificate of completion" for people who'd stayed awake through Tracy's eight-part evening sermon series on the facets of God as seen in the Old Testament (click small photo, left, to see the production process in full flow).

Matt will need to move a quantity of belongings to Bod� when he starts his new job in the beginning of July. Happily, a Stavanger sixth-form college has its own ship - click here for photo (no beat-up school minibusses here!) which, as it happens, is sailing from Stavanger on 3 July straight to Bod� (arriving on the 6^th) - and which is happy to take his belongings along, saving us a 2000-mile return trip in a van. Fantastic!

22 March - last day before the Easter holidays, for which everyone is thankful. The weather is still dry, sunny and minus 10 or so, but it's expected to warm up next week so it will be perfect Easter weather! But perfect for whom? Perfect for the dogs (see their walk yesterday evening), but there are two snags for us. Firstly, since it's not rained so far this year (or only a drop here and there), it's in the back of our mind that if we have a very dry spring and early summer we could get concerned about the state of the well in late summer. Secondly, Easter is always a little strange in Norway, because almost the whole population makes for the mountains (generally for their cabins), armed with skis, flask of coffee and kit-kat. This means that churches are generally more or less empty (Tracy's church only has one service over the whole Easter period - and that's on Easter Monday in the hope of capturing returnees) but that the road past our local ski centre will be clogged with tourists, which is rather a pest. And the good weather will only encourage them. But we don't mind good weather really!

Katie and all her classmates went to their teacher's house today, armed with knives, sticks and raw eggs. Before you worry about what kind of society we're living in, I should explain that he was expecting them. Being the last day of term, the class was invited to his home. They were told to take hunting knives so that they could have fun in the forest, eggs for boiling (and decorating?) and sticks for the inevitable toasting of sausages over the bonfire, without which no Norwegian picnic is complete.

Whenever we go down to the river or the lake at the moment, we can hear a groaning sound coming from it. An erie, loud, low-pitched note; rather the sort of thing you imagine from Romans 8:22 (in which "the whole creation groans") But it's the ice - still trying to melt in the sunshine, but not quite getting there because the air temperature is still way below freezing. Looks lovely, though (click photo, right, for 5 pictures of ice on the lake trying hard to melt).

23 March - �rsdalen Bazar. The annual bazar marks the end of the fortnightly childrens' meetings in the valley until the autumn. Click photo, left, for four pictures.

24 March - Something strange on this picture, taken in �rsdalen today. Cars! Probably the first time in the four years we've been here that we could have captured three cars on the same photo (except in connection with the couple of funerals we've had). As expected, Palm Sunday featured glorious weather, warm sunshine and ... tourists, coming to see what this strange valley is like. It feels a bit like being in a zoo - we half expect visitors to poke sticks through the bars!

Comments Joanna - March 25th, 2013 Not quite as bad as the coast road here in summer or the Dales in summer!! Could do with your glorious sunshine!! Its bitter cold here and Kelbrook, Haworth etc are full of snow drifts, the Arctic blast is foul but luckily we still have power and no snow!! Tim - March 25th, 2013 That's true! But normally we'd have three cars in a whole day on the road through the valley - us, the neighbours and the postman. If we see a car we don't know, we stop, look at each other and say in tones of amazement, "I wonder who that might be and where they're going". So it comes as a shock to the system to see three strange cars all at once! (But we've remembered since that someone is selling a cabin down towards the lake, so they were probably holding a viewing and the sudden influx of cars would have been people looking round the rest of the valley). We've seen pictures of the snow around Kelbrook and the Dales: I've just been sitting outside, enjoying my coffee in the sunshine! There's still snow on the ground, but the sun is really warm - classic Easter weather for Norway. Hope you're surviving your Arctic blasts! Joanna - March 25th, 2013 Are any houses in the valley just holiday homes, the blight of this area and the Dales? I could sit out side and drink coffee if it wasn't for near gale-force arctic winds. It's pretty warm sitting at the computer with sun pouring in through the window!!! Brrrrr Tim - March 25th, 2013 A house just over the fields from us was formerly lived in by an elderly couple, but the man died and the wife is now in sheltered accommodation - so the house is now a weekend "cabin" for their children (who are not regarded locally as "real �rsdalen residents"). There are a couple of similar houses or cabins in the valley, but the vast majority of the dozen or houses here are working farms with families (mostly with small children). So it's very much a living community.

25 March - You can kind of picture the scene. They were sitting in their cabin at Hornsund (near Longyearbyen - Norway's most northerly town), sipping cups of coffee and discussing where to go for their afternoon ski tour, when they heard someone tapping on the window. They went to open it and a polar bear stuck its head in and followed this up with the top half of its 48-stone body. "Good afternoon", it said, "I've come for my tea" (oh, sorry - wrong story - that was a tiger, wasn't it?) Not feeling particularly hospitable, they didn't invite it in for coffee and glacier mints, but shot it instead. But they did take a photo for their cabin guest book (click here to view). Moral of the story? For a good reception, knock on the door rather than the window.

While Tracy is shivering on a quick visit to England, Katie and Tim have been sitting out on the balcony this afternoon, eating ice cream in the hot sunshine. There's now an official bonfire ban in the district, due to the fire risk caused by the drought.

27 March - Continued from above. We've again been sitting out on a balcony - this time at a cabin belonging to a friend in Egersund (photo from inside the cabin here) - in glorious hot sunshine (although there's snow on the ground and the air temperature was -6 when we were driving there this morning, it feels really hot: you have to have experienced spring in Norway to really believe this). And the long-term forecast is for more of the same, indefinately - just getting even warmer. It really doesn't get better than this!

Katie has a friend visiting and has decided that learning cricket is an essential part of a first visit to �rsdalen (click photo, left, for pictures).

Police intelligence - Last week, the Oslo police arrested a couple of Latvians who had been snooping around suburban houses "with intent". It seems that they had been leaving sticks propped up against people's front doors in order to detect whether they were away on holiday. A few days later, the police found an incriminating document nearby. According to the local police station chief, the document was the thieves' master plan which they had dropped during their operations and which "viser hvor utspekulerte de er" ("shows how devious they are"). You can form your own opinion of the intelligence of the Oslo police by viewing the incriminating master-plan.

A few paragraphs ago we mentioned ice on the lake trying hard to melt. The lake on the photo has a large river flowing into one end of the lake and out the other, so the ice is relatively thin. Andrew tells me that the ice on the large lake just by the �rsdalen tunnel was measured today and is currently almost exactly 3 feet thick. Some of the smaller lakes higher up the mountains generally have twice the ice thickness of that one.

Andrew just called me out into the garden (8.30 on a beautiful starlit evening) to listen to two owls having a game of "when I'm calling you ... twit twoo ... twit twoo" amongst the trees up in the forest.

Comments Tracy - March 28th, 2013 Just had a read in the local library to catch up with what the rest of my family are doing back home. Katie - March 29th, 2013 As far as I'm concerned the blog is the only way to know what my family are doing, even when I'm at home! Andrew - March 29th, 2013 I didn't notice you were gone until you came back. joanna - March 29th, 2013 I have the same problem with Hannah and co. If it wasn't for her blog I'd know very little!!! Families!

Comments joanna - March 28th, 2013 just seen a BBC report on a miraculous escape of a driver as his rescue lorry got pulled over a cliff by the wagon it was pulling!! Still got that darned wind but it is a little lighter. Can you send some of your clear skies this way!!

Good Friday - 29 March - Tracy safely home and thawing out in warm, sunny Norway. She came on the inaugural flight of Norwegian's new direct route from Manchester to Stavanger and says that it was very quick (1 hour 25 minutes) and easy - highly recommended!

Easter Garden - Soon after getting home, Tracy was in action. We were to have a Good Friday service in �rsdalen, so in order to create something that would be of interest to the children in the valley, Tracy ran an "Easter Party" in the adjacent schoolroom. This involved bible story and activities involving chocolate as well as making an Easter garden (using containers donated by the coop, stones from our garden and moss donated by our lawn - click photo, right, for enlargement). It was a great success - and children outnumbered adults very considerably!

In Norwegian, Good Friday is called Long Friday (Langfredag) - and such it was for Tim, who after doing two services here played a night-time concert at the cathedral, arriving home in the early hours of the morning.

30 March - what has made this tracks in the ice on the lake? (click photo, left, for answer).

Pole dancing? - Making the most of yet another day of brilliant sunshine (this evening's European weather forecast showed only one unclouded sun in the whole of Europe for the next two days, and that was sitting directly over �rsdalen), we went out for a long walk with the dogs in a nearby valley followed by hot chocolate and svele (kind of Scotch pancakes) in our favourite cafe. Stopped off at the village school there to play on their playground equipment, which as Katie points out, is much better than the stuff at Vikes�! (click photo, right, for pictures)

30 March - Easter Day Happy Easter! The church was packed with people this morning - which was a surprise because having seen the number of people at the ski centre I didn't think there was anyone left anywhere else. After an Easter lunch of reindeer (this is an Easter dish: after all, you can't eat reindeer at Christmas) we've all been out enjoying the sunshine in the garden (photos here).

Comments joanna - March 31st, 2013 A very Happy Easter to you all. He is Risen!!