Alba & Uisge beatha

Tomorrow, I'll be on my way to Scotland for the fifth holiday in two years. I've developed a liking for the place that's close to turning into an obsession. Why? Any number of reasons. I'll try to list some here.

Edinburgh

Easily one of my top 5 favourite cities. Ok, it's predominantly dyed in all shades of grey, but it has such age for a Northern European city. And character. Oodles of it. First time I went there, I totally miscalculated my budget, so I spent 9 days there with only £100 left (that's after housing costs had been covered). It was actually a nice way of getting to know the city better - having to plan every purchase of food and whatever else I felt I could afford from day to day. It made for a lot of exploring of what daily life is like. It also meant that I had to entertain myself with what free attractions the city offers. And there's loads of them. Actually, I didn't run out of free attractions until the last day - for which I bought myself a day pass on the buses and rode around the town for several hours. Participating in quiz nights at one of the pubs was also great fun. And speaking of pubs - if you don't find one you fancy, you're dead above the knees.

On later visits, I've made sure to plan my spending a bit more carefully - Scotland is only slightly less expensive than Norway in most aspects. Edinburgh is a nice enough place for shopping, and not half bad for eating out - as long as you stear clear of the few places serving Scots food - that is pretty much the only downside I've experienced in Scotland.

Language

Scots English is great. Rolling R's, all sorts of colourful expressions (got to be at least 200 ways in Scots of telling the world you're drunk) and loads of connections to old Norse - like how words like "brown" and "house" are spoken - just like home.

Then there's Gaelic. Absolutely incompre-hensible. Quirky spelling and half the letters seem to just vanish when it's spoken. The northwest is generally where you find the Gaelic speakers, and all the road signs turn bilingual as soon as you enter the Highlands. Just like here in Norway when you enter the Sami regions up north.

For all the crazy combinations of consonants when written, Gaelic is actually quite nice to listen to. It has a very attractive, musical quality that I like.

People

This is where I start generalizing again. I've yet to meet an unsympathetic Scot. There probably are some less attractive Scots personalities out there, I just haven't met them yet. Straightforward, blunt, wicked sense of humour and an absolutely unique way with words is how I would describe Scots in general. Robert Burns has a lot to answer for, I think.

And I find their traditions attractive, too. Ok, so bagpipes and kilts have become cliché, but even so it lends such colour to what in my eyes is "Scotsdom", that you can't just ignore them. That, and haggis (the only traditional Scots food I find myself coming back to). Just got to have it.

Nature

Yes, I know. I do live in Norway. And yes, we do have amazing nature. Just outside my doorstep I've got scenery that probably would've had half of Europe go ooohing and ahhing for a good while. But we get used to it. Yes, I think it is nice scenery, but to me a mountain here is pretty much just another mountain. Bet it's like that for people living in the Alps, too. So, a change of scenery is always nice. Mind you, I've never been one for the rolling, pastoral landscapes of Denmark and Hungary - I do prefer having something that breaks up the monotony of the horizon.

The scenery in Scotland reminds me a bit of what you find on the coast of the regions of Sogn og Fjordane and Hordaland here in Norway. It is visibly absolutely downright geologically ancient - all eroded, broken down and battered - and, in summer, so absolutely heartbreakingly green. And naked. And desolate. People live more in small villages than spread all over the place like over here. The Isle of Skye, The Hebrides and the western part of the Highlands has wild, rugged terrain (that is, the Hebrides also have VAST expanses of bogs - miles and miles with nothing but bogs and gnats), that just gets to me...

History

Scotland has so much history, it makes my ears bleed. From Picts and Celts to Vikings and MacAlpin, Stuarts and religion, rebellion and repression, there is so much to learn. And half of it - the real ancient stuff, even the Scots themselves are pretty much left to guessing at. Like the standing stones. Like the settlement at Skara Brae in the Orkneys.

But the most fascinating tales come from the internal feuds between the various tribes that fought for domination over what would become Scotland, and the seemingly interminable wars with England that went on for centuries. So many twists and turns that you'll be amazed that there actually are people who's got the chronology of events down pat.

Just to top it up, you have the inventiveness of the Scots. There seems to be no end of significant things that Scots have invented or had a hand in inventing. Coming from a country that for some reason takes immense pride in having invented aerosol spraycans, paper clips (we're obviously wrong about that, though), grenade harpoons (boy, does the world love us for that...) and cheese slicers, your national pride shrinks pretty rapidly in this when faced with what the Scots have managed to wring out of their brains...

Whisky

Last, but definitely not least on my list of reasons to love Scotland. Coming from quite a minor place in Norway, I've been lucky enough to have a decently stocked liquor store nearby. It had some nice whisky brands to get me started on my whisky trail, and I quickly found that I have a penchant for the smoky, peated ones. Then I went to Scotland. Oh, my. Don't think I need to elaborate the subject any further, really. Can't wait to get back! Slàinte mhath, everybody!

(And by the way - "Alba" and "Uisge beatha" is Gaelic for "Scotland" and "Whisky". "Slànte mhath" means "Health good" and is often used when toasting someone.)

Lingo time

Why I am blogging in English, when it's not even my native language? I'm Norwegian through and through, at least where language is concerned. But I speak, read, listen to and write Norwegian every day, so I hardly need to practice it more than that. English, on the other hand, is something I need to practice to keep my brain tuned in to it.

Some people will tell you that English is pretty much second nature to Norwegians. That is a rather grand overstatement. Most Norwegians younger than 45 will now SOME English, as they got it taught in school from age 10. Quite a few of those younger than 35 will speak pretty good English, but have a harder time reading it, not to speak of writing it. These days, English is taught from day One in school, which hopefully will make good English speakers out of more Norwegians. At least, we hope they will be better than infamous Norwenglish speakers like Kåre Willoch (ex-Prime Minister who greeted the US on "Good Morning, America" back in the early 80s with "Good day!"), Erik Solheim, Jens Stoltenberg (our current PM) and Nils Arne Eggen (Norway's most successful football (yep, still "soccer" to you Americans) coach).

As for me, I did ok in English at school, I guess, but didn't start finding it very useful until I was about 14. Then I got myself my first computer! Back in 1985, that was a pretty big deal over here...still got it stowed away in the basement...hmmm...I wonder if any of those games still work...?

Anyway, owning that computer meant that I needed to read up a bit on how it worked and stuff (meaning games reviews), so I started buying computer magazines. At the time, they were almost exclusively in English, and for us Amstrad users, there was only ONE magazine available - in English, of course. So, with determination and a dictionary, my basic vocabulary grew pretty rapidly.

Back when I was about 19, I finally started reading novels, and quickly found that quite often works that were translated from English into Norwegian lost a lot of their flavour during translation. Since then, I've pretty much insisted on reading books in their original language if I am able to read it (which basically means if they're not written in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English, I'll need to find a translation into one of those languages).

So, for about 18 years, I've made a point of always reading at least ONE book in English at any given time (I'm usually in the process of reading two or three books pretty much all the time - no, NOT simultaneously!). I try to go abroad for about a month every year so I practice speaking English, but I also need to practice writing it. That's one of the main reasons why this blog has come into being, but also as a teacher of English, I need to keep the English clockwork in my brain greased and ticking.

So. If I make any glaring errors, please point them out to me. Please, be nice about it, though.

What the...?

Yep. You're right. There is a binder hanging on my satellite dish. Breathe easy, though. I haven't gone completely off my rockers.

When I got my satellite dish installed some years ago, I quickly discovered that rain or snow causes absolute mayhem with my reception quality. Especially when it lands on the receiver head. So I went out to buy myself a protection screen made out of plastic. It worked famously for 2,5 years.

Until this winter. One day reception was totally shot. I looked out my window and saw that snow and ice sliding off my roof had destroyed the screen. I just brushed the snow off the receiver head and had perfect reception again. Forgetful person that I am, I never remembered to buy a new one when in town, so I just resorted to brushing off the snow and rain for a few months.

Then the European Football (soccer for you Americans out there) Championship came along. I'll admit to being a football fan. Not a rabid one, but a fan nonetheless. The international championships are always a big fixture in my book. So, I sat down for the opening match and switched on the TV and got....nothing. Looked out the window. Yep, raining again (a very common feature of the weather around here). Raining quite heavily, actually. It didn't take just a sweep of a brush to keep the receiver head clean, I had to find something to protect the receiver from the downpour.

After several futile attempts with lampshades, dinner plates, toilet paper roll cores, jumping up and down in the rain in impotent anger, I finally found something that worked. A binder. It looks weird, but hey, it works!

It'll have to do until I'm back from Scotland - then I'll get myself a new protective screen.

80 ways to die...

On the right, you're looking at a certified death trap. It officially offers more than 80 possibilities for a kid to get killed. How, you say? Believe me, you'd be amazed.

Our school and kindergarten (I'm the head of both) got a visit from Lekeplasskontrollen ("The Playground Control") about a month ago. Our local authorities are making an effort to make sure that the playground installations are in accordance with Norwegian law and EU standards, so they contracted Lekeplasskontrollen to come and have a look around all our schools and kindergartens. And boy...did they ever find enough material for their reports...

The main hazards are spots up high where kids can get their head trapped and places jacket cords might get caught, causing danger of choking. Then you have the danger of falling onto sharp or hard objects, and so on and so forth.The depicted apparatus has about 30 spots where a kid's head might get caught and more than 50 spots where jacket cords might snag. Brrrr... Luckily, all those things can easily be corrected by our janitor.

Some of you might think this smacks of hysteria (and I know a lot of parents think so). After all, we survived childhood, didn't we? And wow, did we do crazy things, eh? And we lived to tell the tale(s). All very, very true. But for people of my generation and older, there's at least two significant differences to then and now.

a) Our playing and the games we played were rarely defined by some playground installation. Hey, we hardly knew what a playground was. Sure, they existed, but there weren't all that many of them around. So we used what we could find - nature.

b) In nature, no one is liable to charges if you fall off a cliff or from a tree. In a playground, someone is.

So, we get checked out and try to make sure that we've got a safe playground. "Hey! If you make the playgrounds safe, kids will never develop a proper sense of what danger is!", I hear you say. I couldn't agree more. And that is not the aim of making our playgrounds safe. We want the kids to be safe from death, not necessarily from bodily harm - everyone needs to learn what is clever and not-so-clever to do. A broken leg or tooth might teach you a valuable lesson for later. Dying won't.

Mow, mow, mow your lawn...

Right. Just done mowing my lawn, or rather, mowing my attempt at achieving world domination through cultivating moss and dandelions. When they coined the phrase "horticulture", they definitely didnt' have me in mind. Nope, I'm not one of humanity's natural gardeners.

Actually, mowing my own lawn is a rather novel experience to me, even though I've been living here for the last nine years. I really don't enjoy gardening. As in "at all". I see why some people do, but to me, it's all about sweating profusely, swearing and batting away flies and gnats and mosquitos and horseflies and what-nots while praying you will spot the viper in the flowerbed before it bites you.

If possible, I'd get a goat or some ducks to keep my grass nicely cut. But knowing me and goats (speaking from experience here), it'd turn me into a prisoner in my own home (I really don't have a way with goats). As for ducks, well, I don't have a pond for them to stay in, and with my luck, they'd probably turn feral on me. Imagine trying to explain how you got those bill-shaped hickeys to your coworkers...so nature's way is obviously not for me.

But no, I haven't left my garden all to itself for the past nine years. The beauty of being a teacher/headmaster is that you've got a pool of kids who'd just love to earn some money. So, for the last 8 summers and all up until this spring, I've had kids from comprehensive school (14-16 year-olds) doing all my gardening chores for me. Mowing my lawn throughout the summer has been worth 2000 kr ($400), provided the kid in question got hold of a lawnmower with which to do the job - ie his family's. It is a system that has worked beautifully for the said 8 years. I get my lawn mowed and the flower beds weeded, they earn money for mp3-players, mobile phones, clothes, CDs and whatever teenagers today want.

But not so any more. That neverending supply of kids has just run dry. In this small community, some day there will not be kids in that certain age bracket living within walking distance of your home. Which happened after this spring. The neighbour girl who's been doing the job for the last two years, has gone to stay with her father for the summer. And no one moved in to take over the job. Aigh.

So. As we say - when in direst need, even the Devil will eat flies. Which in this case meant I'd have to start mowing my own lawn. For which I had to buy myself a lawnmower. Which I did three weeks ago. My first motorized, selfpropelled vehicle ever.

No, I don't own a car. Never felt the need to have one. Hey, I haven't even got a driver's license. The only things I've got a license for driving are fork lifts...which comes in very handy for a headmaster. Right.


I have to say, though, I like my new lawn-mower. Having used it three times, I'm quite happy with it. It cuts the grass nicely, it goes where it is supposed to go, and it does what I want to make it do (except trimming the edges of the garden...hmmm...maybe I'll get one of those trimmers, too?). Now, I just hope that today's cutting of the grass will be sufficient so I won't need a scythe to cut it when I get back home from Scotland in 18 days time....even here at 65N 12E, the grass grows something wicked during summer.

Wildlife

This place is teeming with animals of all sorts - not just the domesticated kinds like the sheep and cows that routinely wind up in my garden a couple of times every summer after jumping the decrepit fence between my garden and their field. I've even had the pleasure of waking up to the sound of a bleating sheep on my verandah (wtf was it doing there?) at 0530 in the morning, getting out of bed, out the door, grabbing two hefty handfulls of wool and chucking the beastie back across the fence before going back to bed.

More fun the wildlife, then.

Foxes and roe deer regularly visit my garden and the nearby fields. Moose are a regular road hazard during winter - I don't mind being close to nature, but with the bumper of the car you're in missing 500 kg of moose by 10 cm on a slippery, snowy road, that's actually a little too close for me.

We have a sea eagle that comes gliding up our fjord looking for lunch just about every day. Then there's badgers and beavers, martens and lynxes and all sorts of rodents (pests and not-pests). Several sorts of woodpeckers driving people crazy by pecking the metal plate on top of telephone poles in the spring, owls and goshawks, and all sorts of other birds. All these we see pretty regularly. The rather more intimidating wolverines and bears are also to be found in the area, but I have yet to see any of those.

Some I can do very well without - like the flies, gnats, wasps, horseflies and mosquitos. Anything that flies and bites or stings is rock bottom of my "lovable" list. The most annoying insects we've got around here are the daddy long-legs. "Hey, what's wrong with those fellas? They don't even bite or sting!", I hear you say. True. But I HATE having one of those inside my bedroom at night. As soon as the light is out, the useless thing is aloft and endlessly banging into the walls, making "frrrrp!" noises as the wings hit the wallpaper. Annnnnnnnnnnnoying!

Some are downright cute - like the squirrels; we had one of these little fellows trying to pick our local gas station clean after someone, while topping off their car, introduced it to hazelnut chocolate. The little rascal was pretty quick in figuring out where the chocolate originated, and would sit outside the gas station door - like a cat wanting to get in from the cold - looking to sneak in as soon as someone opened it. It succeeded in getting inside a couple of times, one of those times I was there to bear witness, and it did nothing of the wild careening about and messing up stuff that its fellow squirrels usually do when they get inside houses. No, it went straight for the biggest hazelnut chocolate bar it could see, got it down on the floor and started pulling it (or rather, tried to pull it - 300 grams is pretty heavy for a squirrel) across the floor.

I walked up to it to shoo it out the door again, but it just looked at me, teeth deeply embedded in one corner of hazelnut chocolate heaven, with a deadly serious "Wha'? Can't you see I'm busy here?"-look. No obvious fear, just pure desire to have that c.h.o.c.o.l.a.t.e. bar. It looked so serious about it, it had us all in stitches, so the owner let it have the bar and held the door open for the furiously hardworking squirrel. Bet there was a very happy nest of small squirrels that night!

For some reason, every now and then I stumble across wildlife that behaves unusually tame or unfazed by the fact that they've just run into a human. Like the other day, I was standing in the rain, knocking on my neighbours' front door, a hare came skipping idly through their garden. As it passed the stairs, it just looked at me in a very suave manner, like it was saying "Oh, it's YOU, is it?" It had me pretty amazed, because every hare I've seen around here has been a grey, vanishing smudge on the horizon as soon as I've become aware of it. Not so with this one. It took its own good time exploring the surroundings, headed into the carport on the other side of the road and obviously decided it wasn't a very hare-y place to be. Then it came back onto the road, sat down and looked up and down it for a while, before finally slowly making its way out of my view. It behaved so much like a cat in familiar surroundings, it was uncanny.

Did I learn anything from this encounter? Yep. I've got to be the least scary person on the planet. Either that, or I just looked like the world's sorriest excuse for a carrot to that hare.

So, where you from?

Just about the hardest question you can ask me. You may get two sorts of answers, depending on my mood. The slightly philosophical, yet "oh no, not again"-answers:

1. "Everywhere!"
2. "Right here!"
3. "Haven't got a clue!"

...but none of them do anything to make the matter any more clear. Then there's the encyclopedic approach:

1. "Now let's see. I was born in XXXX, then moved to YYYY, then ZZZZ, then WWWW, ...." (and so on and on and on and on....)

...which usually have people looking for a polite way of leaving my company by the time I've reached the 15th place I've lived and still am not done...

The list includes
2 farms (quite remote ones)
6 villages (200-1500 people)
1 hamlet with less than 15 people
2 towns
1 city
1 island with 13 people and 50 sheep
2 army camps

...and truth to tell, I have no roots in any of these places. I am from where I am right now. Period.

A dysfunctional rural urbanite

Yep.

That's me.

Always caught in the inbetween.

I've spent most of my life living out in the semiwilderness of rural Norway (which probably translates into something like Yukon or Siberia to most civilized people - not too far off the mark), and while the countryside has so much going for it, I'm always pining for something or other that only cities provide.

Like other people. *Warning! Gross generalizations ahead!* Ok, I don't live all alone in a shed on top of a mountain, all wise and guru-like, I DO have neighbours. They even live close enough that I am able to irritate them by practicing on my guitars or singing loudly along to the stereo in the middle of the night. There's actually a couple of hundred people living within walking distance...it's just that...not all that many of them are MY kind of people.

It's not that I'm picky or snobbish or anything. I just like to speak with people that I see eye to eye with. People that I at least have some marginal interests in common with. Hmmm. This is going to be a tough one to explain properly.

Let's try this angle, then: I've always been of a "want to know" nature. I want to know what's beyond the next rise. I want to know what life's like for other people. I want to know how things taste, feel, what they look like, what makes a certain society tick, how things became as they did...just everything! And here in the countryside, the majority of the people seem to be content with just where they are in their lives. Nothing wrong in being content, it just doesn't make for very creative and daring thinking.

And then there's city people. Lots of creative and daring thinking there, but very few have a relaxed attitude to life in general. It IS possible to be creative and daring without having to kick up a storm as soon as you get out of bed in the morning...

Sigh. Yep. As we say here: cutting everybody over the same comb. Generalizing. I guess we're all there every now and then - feeling so singularly unique that our minds boggle at the fact that other people actually live valuable lives and contribute significantly to society...just that they are so...different.

So, anyway. That's why I'm heading for Scotland next week. Going to the Highlands, Isle of Skye, the Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys and Edinburgh. 3rd summer in a row. Why? Three reasons:

1) I've yet to meet another Norwegian there.
2) I just love going there - the history, the scenery, the people, everything (ok not all of the food).
3) They invented whisky.

Arrr...want to go NOW!

Ok. This is it.

So, finally I'm venturing into blogdom. Seems a bit overdue, it's just that the urge hasn't been all that strong to make what I guess will develop into a "Me! Me! Me!"-thing. I'm already pretty good at that...

What to expect from me here? A lot of random stuff, I guess. And quite a bit of it contradictory of nature. Like the title of this blog. No, I don't live on the North Pole, not even north of the Arctic Circle (although it's not THAT far north of here). It has more to do with living smack on the boundary of what is considered the northern and southern parts of my country. Strictly speaking, I'm about 2 km south of that border, which means that there's hardly any "southern" left to go before everything is "northern". So now you know.

Like most Norwegians, it takes me a while to figure out where I left my manners. Hang on...*sounds of chairs and odd items being moved*...yep...finally found them underneath the dining table. So here's a big Hi! and Welcome! to whoever you are who've had the ....erm... honour of dropping by.

Just adding quickly that we Norwegians aren't generally rude - it just takes so long between every time we see someone we don't already know in this sparsely populated country, we've totally forgotten how to great people in a proper manner when new faces finally appear...

Right. At the moment, there's not all that much here (obviously, as this is the first post), but knowing me, there will be heaps of WORDS here within a short while. Some of it might even be readable. I hope. If I ever happen to write something you actually find interesting, please let me know. It won't happen again. Promise.