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2 October -
As we move into October, the sun is still shining and we're making the most of autumnal days (click photo, left, for today's pictures from the garden) -
while making sure that we've got winter tyres ready for the snow which for the past few years has arrived each October.
It feels like months ago (though it's only 7 weeks) that Tim received a very special birthday present - a story. After protracted copyright negotions with the author, we have permission to reproduce it here. Click picture, right, to read it.
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6 October - Subtitles -
We watch very, very, little television, but there is one programme that we do watch every time we're actually home on a Sunday evening during the winter.
It's called "71° North" (which is, of course, the address of Norway's North Cape) and the idea of the programme - which has been running each year for the past 15 years -
is that a group of contestants sets out from the southern end of Norway and makes their way to the northern end, undergoing all kinds of competitive hardships on the way.
The few remaining participants compete for the final prize at the North Cape plateau.
Along the way there's wonderful scenery (with the added bonus that we've been to most of the places so we can identify with it) and
we can watch the participants suffer without having to do it ourselves.
A typical day's routine will be to walk up a mountain, carrying a tent, skis, a couple of day's worth of provisions and a few rocks if that didn't seem heavy enough,
then on reaching the snowline they will ski over the top, staying overnight in the tent,
and using a map to locate several hidden posts along the way, at each of which they have to correctly answer questions about the local area,
then descend the other side of the mountain to the fjord, way below, at which point they only have to paddle twenty miles back to the starting point in the conveniently-positioned canoes.
In a nice twist of programming juxtaposition, this programme is immediately followed by another group-competition programme,
in which a bunch of Americans with Norwegian ancestors come to Norway to discover their roots.
They too travel from place to place and are given active tasks to do - perhaps rowing a boat across a lake or carrying buckets of feed to some chickens -
tasks that they often perform along with comments about what this is doing to their hairstyle or their nails.
It's a very unkind bit of programming (the participants are quite unaware of the comedy value caused by the more heroic nature of the previous programme)
but very amusing.
So, after rather a long introduction, to the subtitles. Norwegian television always provides subtitles for foreign speech
(and quite often for what Oslo editors regard as the more difficult Norwegian dialects as well).
These subtitles are not always accurate; misunderstandings of language often providing more entertainment value than the programmes themselves.
So when one of the visiting Americans was peering over the side of a boat and pointed out some "schooling fish"
that were visible in the clear water below, the subtitles referred to "fisketimer" (fish lessons).
Thomas Andrew supplemented this with some examples he has noticed recently in films:
in Apollo 13 "Go for launch!" was subtitled "Gå til lunsj" (go for lunch),
while in something more gangsterish, the threat "If you don't cooperate, you'll be six feet under" became a threat of being turned into a dwarf,
and the phrase "...and I got a little knife-happy" was rendered "... and I made a little knife very pleased".
7 October - Subterranean -
Today's NRK news tells us about the old silver mines at Kongsberg - a Norwegian national treasure and historic monument that's as fiercely conserved as a pot of supermarket jam.
It appears that a man who lives nearby - a respectable and pleasantly-spoken family man, we are assured -
has for the past twenty years been popping down his own private hole into the mines, armed initially with a spade but later with highly-advanced drilling equipment and high explosives
- 65kg of illegally-stored high explosives were found lying around his garage at home, so we assume that he parked his car very carefully each evening -
and extracting silver and precious minerals.
In a nice twist, the items that he did not add to his "very considerable" private collection (valued at a couple of million kroner), he sold to the mines museum for tens of thousands of pounds at a time.
If you'd like a piece of Tracy's home-made hazelnut merangue with rasperries for tea (click left for a bigger piece), you've got two hours to get here before we eat it ourselves. Welcome!
Thirty-five green bottles ... "What are we to do with all these apples?" is a perennial question. When the apple trees have been full in previous autumns we've made gallons of juice, or peeled, boiled and frozen the fruit for later use - but it's all rather time-consuming and we've had a busy autumn. So this year we took advantage of a local cooperative. You know how in France you can take your grapes in to a local wine-producing cooperative and return to collect some bottles of local wine? We have the same system here for apples, so we're now stocked up with a winter's supply of bottled apple juice (a few bottles lined up on our balcony, right) - and it's very good!
10 October - Roadworks -
We woke this morning to sounds of digging.
Although the Highways Agency have maintained their usual secrecy about planned work,
we were aware, thanks to Thomas Andrew's private information service, that they have been planning to widen the lane at the bottom of our drive.
The reason is that the lane is very narrow at that point - the wheels of the school bus reach almost right to the edge - and borders onto a steep drop towards the river, with no barrier or other protection.
Added to which it has a blind bend and a very uneven surface/camber, which makes it rather hazardous in the winter snow and ice.
The plan is to dig away a bit of the banking in order to broaden out the bend.
presumably they'll have to dig away the lane at some point in this process, so we'll be blocked in or out for a day or two,
but we'll find out about this when it happens.
In the meantime, I walked down this morning to find that our postbox had been removed and transplanted and that a large digger was busy removing the banking
(photo, left - click for enlargement).
I wonder whether they're aware that the electricity board laid cables under that very same bit of banking just three months ago
(see photo here)?
I suppose we'll soon find out.
11 October - Autumn lakes -
Drove to Vikeså today, together with Norah (who is visiting from Wales), in order to collect various items, including a triangle for Andrew's tractor.
The autumn colours are at their height and we couldn't resist stopping four times on the way to admire and photograph lakes (click photo, right, for enlargements).
Congratulations to Lyndsay and Tommy on the birth of their daughter Annabel Louise - our second great-niece!
13 October - Autumn beach -
Together with Norah, we drove to nearby Brusand beach, where we were able to lie on the sand in very warm sunshine as though was still the height of summer (click photo, left, for enlargements).
15 October - Work continues on the lane at the bottom of the drive. The plan, as mentioned on 10 October, is "to dig away a bit of the banking in order to broaden out the bend". So far they have dug away a 20-yard wide area of field on the one side of the lane and about half as much on the other. It looks rather as though it's going to be a dual carriageway, perhaps with a roundabout at the bottom of our drive. They're still digging - and we await developments with interest (third picture here).
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We've enjoyed a lovely week with Norah; now it's time to welcome Matt who is here for a few days from Bodø. The autumn sunshine continues, making everywhere look at its best. Just to prove the point, even the Town Hall car park in Vikeså looks appealing today!
17 October - News.
One day while Norah was here we watched the main national evening news on the television.
The main story was about the Nobel prize for literature, with a supplementary story speculating who would receive other Nobel prizes.
The second story was a ten-minute report about this year's Norwegian apple harvest.
In terms of content and presentation (including length of time spent on each item) this is apparently rather unlike the British television news.
Today's news tells us that a nursery school has been broken into - according to the headline (right), "cow costume stolen ... also ate the children's rowan jelly";
that 500 people in our county were sent an emergency message instructing them to evaculate their homes without the use of vehicles due to a gas-line fault
(but forgetting to mention that this was really just a rehearsal for the emergency services and they weren't actually supposed to do it);
and that during the night a horse called Thunder was attacked by a bear and needed stitches this morning.
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An odd thing about keeping this diary is that we never know which items are going to attract attention and which will be immediately forgotten. On 8 September, while in Germany, I mentioned eating Thüringer Klöße, those rather heavy potato dumplings that are such a part of mid-German tradition that there is even a song in which a young man is singing about their superiority over spaghetti while climbing a hill or joining elderly diners at their meal in a café (they're evidently deaf, too, because they don't seem to notice the singer or his orchestra next to them). This video has been widely commented (admittedly along the lines of "how did you dredge up anything so awful?") - so here, for those who appreciated the original, is the re-make. Thüringer Klöße II. Same artist, now transplanted into a frankly rather nightmareish world of balloons and dancing chefs in a Telly-Tubby landscape, giving the distinct impression that prohibited substances have been stirred into the Klöße. Not recommended for those of a nervous disposition - available here at your own risk.
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20 October - the first snow.
Various friends up north have been telling us this week that they have inches, if not feet, of snow.
The newspapers are carrying reports of customs officials at northern roadside customs stations
comforting weeping lorry drivers (really!) who have arrived from further south in Europe to find themselves in
deep snow and perilous roads.
Here, the sun has been shining and on Friday evening, while out visiting friends a few miles down the road, there was even talk of swimming in the lake.
It never got beyond the talk, and there wasn't much of that, but it certainly hasn't felt wintery.
Until today. And even now, we're almost ashamed to mention this pitiful first snowfall in Ørsdalen (left, click for enlargement).
But it's enough. We've had winter now. Can we move on to spring, please?
(We see from past years that this is more or less on schedule -
Ørsdalen's first snow has previously arrived 3 October 2009, 15 October 2010, 21 October 2011 and 9 October 2012).
22 October - "Intoxicated cow arrested in Oslo", reads today's news (right). Police apprehended a cow in Oslo city centre this morning. It turned out to be under the influence, but happily it hadn't been driving. We assume this was a real cow, rather than someone wearing the missing cow costume that featured in the news on 17 October (above right).
27 October. There was a big thunderstorm in Ørsdalen in the middle of the night Friday-Saturday, with lightning so close by that knocked off our main fuse. In the morning, not unexpectedly, we had no internet, so our first port of call was as usual to cross the river and walk over the marshes to reset the transmitter station there. Tracy, who was in fine form, was moved to a return to childhood, resulting in this narrative of our outing. We were able to put the fuse back on at the transmitter, and re-set it, but more is evidently needed because we're still without internet (and therefore phone) on Sunday - we won't get them back before Monday at least.
Another casualty - maybe of the storm or of something else - was one of our long-term residents: the owl, who was found dead in the barn this morning (sad photo here).
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