Playing in a band in London, however fantastic it was in most ways, was like swimming in a pool of anonymity. You play a series of good shows, you get continually better, yet you watch your audience shrink. The people who know you have all seen you and hardly anybody new ever hears about you. The thing to do in a place like that is to focus on the experience you can create for whoever is in the room with you at any given time, just forget about any egocentric idea of your work becoming well known.
When you're in a small place, on the other hand, people quickly learn who you are.
We had been in Nordreisa for something like a week when a journalist called Marthe to ask for an interview. This was for the newspaper Nordlys, which is a regional paper rather than a local one. It's one step down from the nationals. The journalist wanted to write a story about how difficult it was to get a house in the area, and somehow she knew that we'd had some problems finding a place to live. I went straight upstairs to hide. Around fourty minutes later the journalist turned up at the house, spoke with Marthe and took her photograph.
At work two days later, at least five people told me they'd seen my wife in the newspaper. They told me where they lived and asked me about my house. Today we got a text message from somebody offering us a flat. The article, which explains who Marthe is, what she does and who she is married to, serves as much as a notice of our having come to the area as it does an investigation of housing problems. As one of Marthe's colleagues told her, "I've lived here all my life, and I've never had that much space in the paper."
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