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1 October - As October begins we've still only lit the fire a couple of times and we're still getting glorious days (click left to look out of my office window here in the house). Long may it last!

2 October - We had a visitor today who just had to rush out to take photos of the beautiful autumn colours around the house. So I've added a couple of pictures to yesterday's (left).

3 October - Played for a funeral in Moi (the main church in the neighbouring parish; an hour and a half's drive south of here) today, on behalf a colleague who was ill. Lady in her 90s with an interesting life story - the sort of person that it would have been interesting to have met - including a period in the USA in the 1950s. Moi is a pleasant, traditional, church beside the lake (Lundevatnet Lake, which covers over 10 square miles, is one of Norway's 10 deepest lakes) - click right for 4 pictures.

The trees are turning golden by the ski centre at the top end of the Ørsdalen tunnel - 2 pictures here.

Not just Friday - it's also half term. So we're anticipating a quiet week; apart from Katie, that is. She is off on Monday to visit Uncle Bob, to whom she will have to give an account of her recent story writing!

Comments joanna - October 3rd, 2014 Hi the 2 photos by the ski centre are fabulous! I've just been watching "Tinthing" ten norwegian girls playing classical music on trumpet, trombones a french horn and a giant tuba type!! They play and move around the stage! Have you come across them? The group is named after the leader and I got the title off the program credits after the event. They were very good!! They were on the BBC an after proms program!!! Jon - October 9th, 2014 Tenthing are named after Tine Thing Helseth, a rising Norwegian star with an increasing reputation internationally as a trumpet soloist. She's very good - and so was the prom, which I've just watched on YouTube - thanks for the tip!

4 October - Recognise any of this stuff (left - click for enlargement)? Not the actual items, you understand - just the type of objects. A jumble sale in Ørsdalen somehow looks the same as a jumble sale in Caernarfon, Norfolk, Rossendale or any of the other places where this page is read. We're actually at swimming in Egersund so we'll miss all the fun (but have reserved a lamp that just looked handy ...)

5 October - Someone has put together their photos from a long round trip in Norway into a time-lapse video. I'd noticed it, but didn't bother to watch it until it was recommended (here) by our friend Jon, who identified several places around where lives. He's quite right: it's well worth watching the film here.

Comments Norah - October 17th, 2014 I loved the film even though only able to identify one or two places- Alesund was easy. You are quite right about the jumble sale, identical to ours. Were you on the tea? Tracy - October 24th, 2014 Afraid he wasn't on the tea, these events call for something much stronger. :)

Photo: How to groom a Labradoodle. They're not supposed to moult, but ...

Comments Jon - October 7th, 2014 Is being vacuumed really so painful that you have to give Fudge a sock to bite on? Tim - October 8th, 2014 It's a hard life. "Tracy's dog" is after all an anagram of "got sad cry".

6 October - Katie is now in England, where Uncle Bob has put together a little exhibition for her ("BP" stands for "Bob's punishment"). It's suddenly very quiet in Ørsdalen.

It's a while since we've done a round-up of the day's Norwegian news. Apart from the big story (the arrival in Oslo of a Norwegian health worker who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone), the main stories include the discovery of a 1300-year-old ski (complete with original leather bindings) in a glacier at Lesja (not far from Åndalsnes), the now imminent expectation of a big avalanche just outside Åndalsnes (this is a small part - only 4000 lorry-loads of rock - of the far bigger avalanche that is expected in the medium term and that we've mentioned earlier), and a man who had a problem on a mountain just a few miles from here. He walked up the mountain with his dog and - for some reason - his horse (I think the horse was carrying the picnic or something). When it was time to come back he found that horses don't mind climbing up steep rocky slopes, but absolutely draw the line at going down them ... (Photo of them all still at the top, wondering what to do next). If you have any suggestions, I'm sure they'll be pleased.

8 October - A sudden blast of autumnal wind and rain means we've lit the fire and are watching the deer that have come down to the garden for shelter and easier snacking (photo above right - click for pictures).

13 October - We've all been away for a few days. Katie, of course, to Uncle Bob & Auntie Pat's, from where she returned exhausted and happy. The weekend was spent very busily at a church course at Tonstad, but today it's all back to normal, including walking the dogs (quite unnecessary picture series; left).

Normal included a service at Tracy's church last night (Tracy preaching and Tim music-ing). Normal included also an old lady wanting some advice from Tim about her laser printer (we get very advanced pensioners around here), which she brought with her in a shopping basket, along with the instruction book. Instruction books are always of limited help; this one more limited than most, because it said in large letters on the front cover User manual for blue-rinse hair dryer.

Comments joanna - October 13th, 2014 Love the manual for Blue rinse hair dryer. Didn't realise you needed a different one from normal!! May be that's why I can't get blue hair!!

The past three weeks we've been trying to create a picture series to chart the arrival of autumn in our forest. You can see the result so far (click photo, right, for 3 pictures).

We don't generally write here about Norwegian politics, because Norway has traditionally had the remarkable idea that politicians really ought to more or less agree about things. About the most forceful form of attack is to suggest that the other party overindulges in cod-liver oil. But the last general election resulted in a right-wing coalition which has frayed the traditional tolerance and made for a more combative atmosphere; particularly noticeable in this week's budget which has been widely attacked for giving tax benefits to the wealthy while cutting social services for the less well-off, as well as a whole series of measures that will hit immigrants and the less fortunate in other ways. To be entirely fair, however, the new government is making an attempt to clear up a few of the nuttier rules that have caused us amusement or frustration over the years. The total ban on using Segways (those 2-wheel vertical electric scooters that you see in airports and places) on public or private ground has now been lifted and the budget proposes dropping the ½p per kilo tax on importing "asparagus, prepared or conserved other than in vinegar, not frozen". In 1975 a rule was introduced by which any item sent in the post to Norway containing goods worth £20 or more (except if demonstrably a personal gift) was subject to VAT on the goods and the postage cost. Unfortunately this also involved an administrative charge of some £20, meaning that anyone buying something abroad for £20 by mail order would end up paying about £45 for it, which is probably about what it would cost in Norway anyway. Nearly 40 years on, the £20 limit is still unchanged and the government has proposed doubling it (now to be £50 but including postage and insurance charges). This has been met with an outpouring of grief and indignation by Norwegian shopkeepers. "This is designed to close down Norwegian business", says the National Body for That Sort of Thing; "it's incomprehensible. Thousands of jobs will be lost. They might as well be handing out 100 kroner notes at the airport". The unpickled asparagus sector has been tight-lipped about the whole budget, but a statement is expected presently.

14 October - Northern Lights - We don't get the Northern Lights here in Ørsdalen, partly because we're a bit far south but largely because we have a large mountain a few yards to the north of the house so we don't in any case see any sky in that direction! But tonight I was lucky: passing the ski centre while driving back from a choir practice in Sandnes, there they were - a few straggly bands of light with a hint of green, being slowly turned on and off in the sky. Nothing dramatic, but worth stopping for a look.

16 October - popular television - Norwegian television has featured a popular, if somewhat eccentric, series of long programmes. It all started by simply putting a camera on the front of the Bergen to Oslo train and showing the whole 9-hour journey as a live broadcast. From there, they moved on to doing much the same with Hurtigruten, the coastal steamer - a journey/TV programme lasting the greater part of a week. Since then they've done programmes on knitting and on - of all things - firewood. If you tune into one of Norway's main national television channels (NRK 2) at mid day on Friday 28 November, you will hear the first hymn in the Norwegian hymn book being sung (Herre Gud, ditt dyre navn og ære). If you're still awake around midnight on Sunday they'll have arrived at hymn number 899 in the same book. Two-and-a-half days of continuous hymn singing. I can't quite see it happening on BBC2.

19 October - Two gold medals for Katie at today's swimming competition, as well as 7 seconds improvement on personal best at 100m crawl (some photos, click left).

20 October - Quiet policing - A police operation was required last night in Stord, a few miles up the coast from us, after complaints that someone had their radio on very loud at 4.30 in the morning. According to this morning's national news, the police turned up, found the front door of the house unlocked (naturally), and went in, finding the homeowner asleep in front of his over-loud radio. They turned it down and considerately tiptoed out without waking him.

21 October - Walking across Belgium - I (Tim) am in the middle of a road trip and found myself today in western Germany. And in Belgium. In fact, this afternoon I walked right across Belgium from one side to the other. And back again. I actually did it twice, but don't want to seem boastful. This did not require performance-enhancing substances, nor, in reality, a great deal of effort - just a rather curious side-effect of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. An article of this treaty defined a railway line that runs nearly 50 miles through Germany as Belgian territory, creating a narrow strip of Belgium that winds its way confusingly around Germany ( see map here - the national border is the solid line). For some unexplained reason there is also a similarly-disembodied roundabout at some road junction somewhere, but I didn't bother with that. The actual railway line has been dismanted within the past decade, leaving only the station signs along with the odd signal here and there left as a souvenier, and the track is now a smartly-tarmac-surfaced cycleway - but still Belgian territory. Most drivers who hurry along road 258 through the Aachen suburb of Roetgen have no idea that they spent a split second abroad. I did vaguely wonder what happens if you run over a cyclist on the crossing - would it be the German police who would sort things out (even though it happened in Belgian territory), or would you have to fetch the Belgian police over the border into the middle of a German village? I decided not to find out.

26 October - Back in Belgium - I learned a new word over breakfast this morning. I'm back in Belgium after a very quick trip over the channel on family business, and stayed last night in a hotel near Veurne, just over the Belgian border from Dunquerque. The border is straight and normal at this end, though the hotel wasn't. The hotel was the result of trusting myself to the heavily-discounted lottery of the German hotels website, and on this occasion it came up trumps. It was a modern fantasy castle, with large, comfortable rooms and a breakfast full of home-baked breads, a variety of speciality cheeses, meats, freshly-cooked eggs, pastries and so on. Click right for photos of the building. I asked the owner-lady how the place had come to be built. "There used to be a farm here, but the lady who lived here decided she'd always fancied living in a castle, so she knocked down the farm and built one". "There are some things I could just fancy doing too", she added with a toss of the head, "but I can't just indulge my fantasies like that". Anyway, the new word. The breakfast room this morning was full of voluble discussion in French of the power cut that had affected the hotel for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. The French word for a power cut? "Le blackout".

Leaving Veurne at 8.30 this morning I made it to Bremen by just after 4, stopped there for a couple of hours of swimming in the excellent pool complex there and then carried on in order to get the right side of all the roadworks and closed motorway junctions around Hamburg before the Monday-morning traffic made life impossible. So some 12 hours after leaving the one hotel I was able to check into a new one. A lot more normal (no turrets), but at least it's got electricity.

28 October - Safely home after a drive up through Denmark, the night ferry over to Kristiansand and the struggle to stay awake for the drive back to Ørsdalen, arriving at 4am. In work the following morning. The most entertaining part of the journey was the 4-hour boat ride from Hirtshals to Kristiansand. About an hour after leaving Denmark the announcement came over the loudspeakers, in Norwegian, English and German, that the boat would be docking in ten minutes and would all car drivers please head to the car deck. Last time this happened to me was when the boat had turned round due to engine trouble and was returning to Hirtshals, so I had a few moments of worry before the steward made a new announcement, in Norwegian only, to the effect that they were experiencing some problems with the announcement system and we should disregard the previous message. Five minutes later a new trilingual call came over the loudspeakers. "We will be docking in ten minutes. Will all car drivers please report to the car decks". Once more the steward apologised in Norwegian. By this time there was a clear racial divide on board. All Norwegian passengers were sitting relaxing with cups of coffee, while all non-Norwegians were hammering on the doors demanding to be let in to the car decks with their luggage.