Still catching up after months of neglect: January and February are almost absent from these pages, I'm afraid!

January included a Molde trip to visit Beth, Gjermund and Sofie (no, it is pronounced “Sophia” — remember?), while February featured a week during which members of our churches in Sandnes read out loud all the way through the New Testament in one go. To add variety, Tracy chose to read in English and Tim in Welsh, both of which felt a bit unfamiliar to us after all these years. (a tiny snippet of the Welsh one here - sorry about poor sound quality due to recording in an echoy room with speakers!):

And then on 16 February, five of us (T&T; Katie, Thomas and Matt) all took a train trip to dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Kristiansand (Beth and family were naturally invited but of course were much too far away).

What, by the way, is this?:

Nothing to do with lego. The answer is here.

Norway has lots of water power, so it has never really gone in for nuclear. A couple of reactors have been in operation since the 1950s/60s, just to keep all options open, but these are now being de-commissioned. While de-commissioning was going on, the authorities found a further two that had been forgotten about. Forgotten? If you don't believe me, the story is here (NRK news).
The reporter asks the man in charge:
"How is it possible to overlook two nuclear reactors?"
He replies:
"That's a question I've been asking myself as well. They're not easy to overlook. They're pretty big".

Our friends Jon and Sarah up north in Finnsnes are used to it being colder there than here. But when they looked at this week's weather forecast they rushed for the jumper cupboard. See forecast here (hint: Sunday the 10^th).

25 favourite photos from past numbers of the blog.

8 March - International Women's Day, so Tracy had to have a man walk in front of her car while she was driving. It is said that unrepealed traffic laws remain in Memphis and New Orleans to the effect that women drivers have to be preceeded by a man with a red flag. We hope that women don't drive Porsches down that way. There is no such law in Ørsdalen, but the school bus had broken down (a subject you will recognise from many reports in the early stages of this blog), which meant that anyone wanting to get past had to drive over the field (the road through Ørsdalen is, naturally, single track). And the field is rocky, uneven, and covered in a thin layer of snow, so the man needed to walk ahead of her to make sure that the ground was passable. Speaking of obscure American traffic laws, one such apparently dictates that on country roads in Pennsylvania you must stop every mile, send up a flare and wait 10 minutes for livestock to be cleared from the road. Now there's a law that could appeal in Ørsdalen ...

Not only men walking in front of her car - Speaking of wildlife, Ørsdalen is still providing the goods: Tracy mentioned being held up twice on the same journey between home and the Ørsdalen tunnel — once by a badger and once by the white hare that often zigzags up and down the road between the bends.

15 March - Tracy is off to Cambodia again today, for a 10-day trip. We'll provide a few highlights here. And Tim will be taking a few days free next week to visit the flat in Germany.

While Brexit rages in the UK, things are more on the rails over here. So to speak. We've said before that — outside the large part of Norway that is served mostly by boats — the railway is a vital and much-loved part of the infrastructure. So much so that when, for the whole of the 1990s, Norwegian TV ran a customised version of the American children's programme "Sesame Street", it was set on the railways, at the fictitious "Sesame Station". You can watch the first-ever episode here, if you like. And we have fond memories of the discomforts of the ramshackle triple-bunk sleeping compartments in which we used to make the overnight journey between Oslo and Trondheim or between Trondheim and further north. On the whole the trains run absolutely reliably and on time — though, as many people point out, those times are not exactly challenging. The Norwegian railway system was built piecemeal between the 1840s and the 1940s, and journey times remain the same, or longer, than when the lines were first opened. Even inter-city trains typically chug along at 40mph or so. The last time there was a big makeover was in 1996 when — according to Wikipedea — "the largest structural change in Norwegian railway history in the 20th century occurred", which involved NSB [Norwegian State Railways] being renamed NSB Ltd. So it's time to do something drastic. Because that generation of "Sesame Station" children have now all grown up and become marketing consultants, NSB has just announced that it has invested 28 million pounds in transforming its operations. They are re-painting the trains green (instead of red — perhaps as a symbol that they won't stop as often?) and changing the name again, from NSB Ltd to "Vy". "What?" people are asking. "Vy" is not a word anyone has ever heard of, although the dictionary does tell us that it is derived from the French "voir" (to see). My own take is that it is a combination of two much better known Norwegian words, "Ve" (which means "alas", or sometimes "alack") and "Fy" (which is a common expression of distate or disgust). In any event, we'll see whether the trains will continue to run on time.

There is a little bit of political interest, even here. Even prime ministers and other senior politicians in Norway live pretty normal lives, in normal homes, without heaps of security. So it was headline news when the Minister of Justice started to get threats. A slogan was painted on his house wall, and the other day his car was set on fire while parked outside his house. He was suddenly put under protection and a major investigation got going to try to find out who was responsible. The culprit has now been identified and arrested. It turned out to be his wife (or rather, partner). Perhaps she was protesting at having to have a man walk in front of her car while she was driving (see 8 March above).

19 March - A peaceful evening at home.

20 March - T&T are now spread around the world (though Tracy has been spread much further). All is going well with the Cambodia work. Tracy reports that her teaching is going down well and there have been no great problems, except that a national water shortage, in a country that relies on hydro-electric power, means that the electricity is off for many hours a day. This is a particular problem because of the very high temperatures — air-conditioning is a rarity at best, but with no power there are not even any fans working. Photos from Cambodia, left. Tim is spending a few days at the flat in Germany, combining work and walking (here are today's couple of typical sights by the lakes).

24 March - I stood this evening on the little wooden jetty at Lake Fürstensee, watching the changing colours of the trees across the water as the sun set behind me (photo). And as I stood there a man walked up behind me. He was very old (not wanting to offend our older readers, but he looked 90 or so) though sprightly, and dressed in a dark green woolen hunter's coat and matching deerstalker with a slightly dishevelled feather on it. He was called Herr Müller and for three quarters of an hour I was his best friend. He told me his life story, as well as the life stories of his father and his mother and of the residents of all the houses he could point out from where we were standing. His father had been head forester in the village, and he had followed in his footsteps. Of course, Herr Müller spoke mercilessly in the local dialect, so I didn't catch more than a third of what he said, but it didn't really matter as long as I chuckled appreciately in the right places and spat appropriately whenever he mentioned the occupying Russians, the new-fangled National Park managers (the latter are apparently the natural heirs of the former) or the tourists who during the summer crowd out the place where we were standing. And as I was not required to say more than the occasional "Mmm" or "ja", or — greatly daring — echo the punchline of one or another of his comments, the inadequacies of my own German were never really exposed. He told me when to expect the passing geese on their way northwards or southwards, where the best fishing is on the lake — and how to avoid the attentions of the National Park managers (spit) while catching them — the foolishness of the new rules forbidding motorised boats (except electric ones) and where on Lake Fürstensee to find a beach that the tourists don't know about (and where the sand shelves gently into the water, but watch it because a few yards out there's a sudden cliff edge and the water becomes 38 metres deep (whereas the National Park officials swear that the deepest part of the lake is only 36 metres) (photo of the beach here — went back the next day to look at it). He pointed out where there were 160-year-old pine trees with trunks this wide and how the occupying Russians (spit) had cut some of them down and given them to the Swedes (sending pine trees to Sweden sounds extremely odd — coals to Newcastle; or rather, owls to Athens, as the German phrase puts it — but I queried it and he repeated it). And that house over there (a rather grand detatched house by the lake) was taken from its owner and requisitioned for the Russian garrison manager, but at least when it was returned after the collapse of eastern Germany it had been done up with very posh parquet flooring and a new balcony. As head forester his father had been required to advise the Russians about game hunting in the forest, but in return he was allowed to purchase ammunition from the store that the Russians kept, and which apparently was "just like shopping in the west". He recalled being in his father's car when his father drove there, and lines of soldiers standing at attention and saluting them. He also remembered playing with other boys in that same store just at the end of the war (presumably before the Russians took over). "There was a lot of dynamite there and my father told us to keep away. But we didn't, of course". I wish I could have recorded it all and replayed it a few times. It would have made a great book.

28 March - Happy 30^th birthday, Beth!