Happy Christmas

This is just a very quick post to say Happy Christmas or Winter Solstice to readers of this blog. Thanks for a good year. I hope 2013 brings you new experiences, interesting discoveries and wonderful events.

I'll be back in January.

V.

x

Arctic Dusk

This is proper winter now. The sun has gone. No more sun this year. We still have some hours of light each day, but the sunrise bleeds into sunset which fades into darkness. 

I was driving home at 11.30 and looking at the unreal light-blue of the fjord and pink wash of the sky. I thought to myself that these were colours which ought really to have their own names. I never saw them before I moved here. I went outside with a camera to photograph what I could, slipping twice on the ice at the edge of the fjord. From next week until spring all pictures will come out in shades of blue.

By two o'clock the moon was high in the sky, reflecting in the fjord and lighting up the snow. Streetlights reflect in the water opposite us, making our cabin feel a little less remote. 

We've been burning up a good deal of our wood supply. Last night we lay in bed with the door open, watching shapes from the flames in the living room dancing on the bedroom ceiling.

When most of the day is dark it often feels much later than it is. You keep thinking it must soon be time to go to bed, but then you look up at the clock and discover it's 6.30 in the afternoon. Still, you get very little done. People go into semi-hibernation at this time of year. Life gets quieter. Sleep is your friend.

Dying For Bad Music

Today Marcus, who runs Dying For Bad Music, wrote a very nice piece about an album I recorded last winter and spring in my house in Storvik and which I put out online recently. This man deserves a great deal of respect for dedicating time and energy to finding and writing about obscure and interesting music.

His site and label are both full of wonderful and challenging discoveries. I sent him a link to my record and he was generous enough to listen to it, to understand it on its own terms and even do some research on me. You can listen to the record and can read his review here. You'll also find a lot of other music which is available for free, alongside all the label's releases. I recommend taking a look around the site. 
 

Snow and Time

It started to snow over a week ago. First there was a thin layer over everything and everyone said it would soon melt, but then there came snow storms so heavy I couldn't see a thing when driving home in the dark. Pretty soon everything was covered, the car was frozen shut and difficult to extricate from the driveway, we saw other people's cars in the ditches on the way to work and everybody started wearing their winter boots again.

The view from our porch now

After the first batch of snow

In this part of the world my relationship with the seasons is turned on its head. In England I love the autumn but fear the winter. Here the winter seems like the natural state of things and the summer a weird hiatus. Already the moon is massive in the sky, even in the daytime, and the landscape glows in a dark blue colour all night. As many challenges as the ice and frost bring, I'm glad that I'll be here for another winter cycle.

There are no street lights where we live now. To get to our house you have to leave the road and walk down a small hill to the waterside. If we don't leave the lights on it can be difficult spot our home in amongst the trees.

In other news, today is my birthday. That means it's one year since the events I talked about in the first post here on this blog, and very soon it will be a year since we moved here. If I think back to those days before we set off on this trip it feels like a lifetime ago. I think one way to make life seem a little less short is to make sure a lot happens between one birthday and the next.

Lofoten

From the Hamsun centre we drove a little further South and boarded a ferry towards an archipelago named Lofoten. A couple of hours later we arrived in Svolvær, where the ferry's lights picked out circles of rock in the darkness. Just over a year ago we came through Svolvær on our boat trip North and had an hour or so to walk around the harbour. At the time I was really impressed by the look of the Lofoten Suite Hotel, and a year later this was where we stayed the night. Checking in, I thought I must be exhausted, because I found the receptionist helpful but very difficult to understand. Marthe explained afterwards that this was because she was speaking Swedish.

Lofoten Suite Hotel is the one in the middle.

A red-brown cylindrical building studded with massive windows, sitting above two restaurants right by the waterside, the Lofoten Suite Hotel is weird. The rooms have their own bathroom but they share a living room and kitchen with another hotel room. This wouldn't be so strange were it not for the fact that a lot of the walls are made of glass (one of the main views from the balcony was the interior of our bedroom.) It's a bit like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, except you don't need special permission to draw the curtains. It was the off-season so we had the whole suite to ourselves, which was unbelievably luxurious, but if I ever stayed there again I'd want to be in a group of four so that I would at least know the people in the adjoining room.

All the towns in Lofoten were or are fishing towns and Svolvær is a mix of a modern port and a National Romantic painting. It's so much a place of water and boats that it made me wish my Dad was there, since he has more of a connection with the ocean.

On Saturday we drove through the middle of an enormous mountain and on to another fishing village called Henningvær, which sits on a constellation of small islands at the end of a long winding road and over a long narrow bridge. When local guidebooks compare it to Venice what they mean is that there's far more water than land. 

Driving back we kept stopping to try to take photographs, but the scale of the landscape in Lofoten really defeats amature photography. Even the sky seems bigger. 

Hamsun

Last weekend we drove South to an area called Nordland, where one of Norway's most famous writers, Knut Hamsun, grew up. Since 2009 there has been a Hamsun Centre in his home town of Hamarøy. I remember reading about it at the time it opened: this architecturally unique tribute to a writer, lying in a small village in the far North, where even most Norwegians never travel. I've wanted to go there ever since.

I seem to remember reading that the architect wanted the experience of moving through the five floors of the building to echo that of reading the writer's prose in some way. The structure is an asymmetric box with a staircase climbing through it at strange angles to platforms which are partly open. There is a small library, and each of the other floors is a multimedia installation dedicated to a different theme in Hamsun’s life and work, so you piece together some kind of picture through a series of fragments. 

Nature was profoundly important to Hamsun and one thing that definitely works in the centre's favour is the the way the outside landscape is incorporated into the experience of walking through the building. There is a roof terrace which gives a kind of overview of the region, though a clear view is deliberately obscured by a perimeter wall of tall cane. Then on each floor there are carefully placed windows and different types of terrace from which you get a "framed" view of an aspect of Hamarøy. 

Because the doors to these outside areas are open, cold gusts of air blow through the rooms in certain places. This slight element of discomfort sits quite well with Hamsun's history.

 

Until a few years ago Hamsun was relatively obscure outside Norway but he influenced a lot of 20th Century novelists. His first book, Hunger, foreshadows much of what Beckett and Auster would write and, published in 1890, is considered by some to be one of the first Modern novels. He would be a national hero, were it not for the fact that he collaborated with the German occupation. Although, unlike some other writers around this time (I'm thinking of Celine and Pound, maybe Eliot too), he claimed never to have been anti-Semitic, he was very pro Nazi. He went so far as to encourage Norwegian soldiers to desert. Even when the writing was quite clearly on the wall for the German war effort, Hamsun wrote and published a glowing eulogy for Hitler. The top floor of the centre is dedicated to a discussion of how one might reconcile Hamsun's work with his political affiliations. Projected onto two walls is a fascinating film featuring a series of Norwegian intellectuals taking a range of positions on both Hamsun's literary worth and his legacy.

What's most interesting to me about Hamsun's collaboration is how he got there, especially given that his early books were initially classed by the Nazis as degenerative literature. In the 19th Century he was in many ways radically left wing. Yet Hamsun didn't exactly become a collaborator through the proverbial reactionary drift. Like many European artists and radicals of the 19th Century, he detested Britain and its Empire. He looked instead to Germany as a country in touch with the traditions of the soil and as the home of the Peasant's Rebellion. Germany was the great European alternative.

By the time of the Second World War Hamsun was an old man, but he held on fiercely to the ideas of his youth. For him, his enemy's enemy would always be his friend. The rise of Germany had been his life long dream.  

Autumn (Høst)

 

Spring came late and it lasted a week. Some time in June the whole landscape here turned green in a matter of days. Then fog hung heavy over the fjord for a lot of the summer until three or four months later the seasonal tide began to shift again. Patches of red and yellow broke through the green.

As amazing as all of this can look on a sunny day, it was the first time the seasons here felt harsh to me. The plants have hardly started to grow before they have to start dying all over again.   

Autumn seems a good deal longer than the spring, but each day there are fewer leaves on the trees. The streams in front of and behind our house have returned. Night falls earlier every evening. Moths appear out of the darkness and alight on our windows, drawn by our electric light.

I've started night classes for the equivalent of Norwegian A level. Unbelievably, I also passed my driving test, so I drive myself home in the dark listening to The Knife, judging my position on the road by the high-visibility markers the council put out.

The sheep have been herded home and most of the birds have disappeared from the water. Across the fjord, snow has started to fall on the tops of the mountains. It won't be too long before it comes down to ground level. Last week our winter firewood arrived and we stacked it up outside the house. It will be a shame to lose the sun, but in many ways I'm looking forward to the winter. 

Ancestors

Around 60 years ago, a man was out ploughing his field in Alta when he found a large rock with an ornate carving of a human female on it. Over the course of the next few years people discovered a massive amount of local rock art dating from between 7000 and 2000 years ago. Much of it is concentrated in a place called Hjemmeluft, right at the edge of the Fjord, where the creators congregated for thousands of years. There's a museum there, where you can walk out along a raised wooden causeway and see for yourself.

As ever, you can click on these images to enlarge them.

Up until quite recently the carvings were painted red to make them more visible. Now this is considered bad form, so any newly found carvings are being left untouched and there is a project underway to remove the paint on the others. Without the paint they look like this:

Many of the images depict animals, people and boats. Although some seem a little cryptic, it's amazing how easy it is to recognise many of the motifs. These people could communicate a lot of information with only a few lines.

My favourite was this image of a man catching a fish (below).  It has been suggested that the bear and the fish are meeting in another world, to which the water is the gateway.

When you think about how long this style of art was practiced in comparison to the later more "realistic" European style of painting and drawing, the latter seems like a tiny anomaly. Especially when you consider the return to abstraction in the 20th Century. That people were meeting up here in the same small area of the arctic and practicing this tradition right through from the late Neolithic period to the start of the Christian calender is mind-blowing.

Even weirder is that I drew those same stick-men when I was a child. You probably did too.

Spildra

From the island port,

The gravel road curves

In the cliff's embrace

To where the clouds kiss the mountains

In a Conan Doyle world

And three birds swim silent

On a hidden lake. 

Through brush and tree branches 

We choose to fall

And fight our way downwards

In an endless dusk.

The beach is empty 

Save for us.

Crows cry our coordinates from above.

On Goats (An Interview)

Marthe has a full time job as a photo-curator, but has started working part-time on a remote farm looking after goats. I decided to find out more about why she wanted to do this and what it is like. 

You already had a full time job, so what made you want to start working with goats in a barn?

I think there are two reasons. The first one is that although I like my job and I enjoy what I'm doing, it's quite nice to do something completely different. With the goats, I go in there and I'm working 100% the whole time. It's very physical. I have to constantly make sure that all the goats are alright.

Apart from wanting a job that was more active, I remembered that a few years back I actually applied to become a budeie for a summer job. Traditionally, a budeie used to be a young girl working up in the mountains for the summer, living alone and taking care of the cows or goats on summer pastures. I went abroad that summer instead, but there's obviously been some interest in me to work with animals.

Can you give a quick description of what the job involves?

In the summer, when the weather is good, I come to the barn and the goats are all outside. So I go up in the mountains where they're roaming around, and I've got a bell I can ring so they can hear my bell if I can't see them. I also yell for them to come. Sometimes there can be a bit of walking involved, but so far, this early in the summer, they haven't been walking so far away from their house.

It's a really gorgeous feeling when I spot the goats and they start running towards me with their "baaah"s and the bell going "ding-ding-ding-ding-ding." We're both really happy to see each other. I'm happy to see the goats, that I don't have to go trekking to find them, and they're ecstatic that someone has come to collect them.

Then we go back to the barn and it's the milking with an automatic milking machine. I get 12 and 12 goats up to be milked. I have to make sure I don't milk any goats that are ill. If they're on medication I can't mix their milk in with the others', and I also have to make sure that none of the goats have become ill or got hurt whilst they were out. I give them some "power food" whilst they're being milked. It takes quite a long time because I've got 87 goats that I milk. Obviously, there's that little bit of excitement when I get to the end of the shift and it's like, "Have I got the right number of goats today, or did I leave some in the field?"

I also have to make sure that the barn is nice and clean. I feed the hens and rabbits, clean equipment and so on.

How would you characterise goats as animals?

Cute! They're really trusting. They are possibly not the most clever animals in the world, but they certainly know what's going on. They've got their habits. When I milk, I know which goats come first and which are the last ones, and it's always the same ones; my three last goats are always the same three. There's one that likes to run up to the milking ramp first, but then she gets really confused because she always stands there second, so she has to run back and forth a bit so that she can be second. So they're animals of habit, but they're also very trusting and quite cuddly. 

Has working with goats changed your relationship to this place or the animals around us here?

I'm not sure that it has. I guess I'm more conscious of how few people there are left that keep farm animals. There used to be loads of barns here where we live, but now there are only two that keep goats and a couple of sheep farms. There's room for many more.

I think the first time I went into the barn I was afraid that they might bite me or run me down, because 80 animals: there's quite a lot of power there. And they have sometimes crushed me a bit, but I'm not afraid of them. I think in the beginning I was kind of nervous about how they would treat me and how I would treat them, but not anymore. They nibble a bit but they don't bite.

What's your favourite thing about the job?

My favourite thing is when I see them coming towards me, running down the mountainside, all happy. But also, just being physically active and taking care of someone who's dependent on you for their wellbeing.  

Anything else to say?

Only that I would recommend to people to work on a farm for a summer if they could. It's hard physical work, but you learn a lot that you never thought you would learn about, and it's really fun. 

 Many thanks to Marthe for the photos, video and interview. 

Riddu Riddu

Riddu Riddu takes place in Kåfjord, in a valley between two mountains but well above sea level. It's a festival of Sami culture and aboriginal art and music from around the world. This year it was 21 years old. Riddu Riddu is small. It's one of the most important festivals of its kind, but is spread out across only three fields and has just one stage. The main event takes place at the weekend  but throughout the preceding week there are workshops, films and performances.

In a money-raising exercise for the local choir, Marthe and I agreed to volunteer as night security for the festival on Saturday. We started work at 6pm and worked through until 10am. Everyone took turns doing different jobs throughout the night, including watching a roundabout and providing backstage security. Marthe and I were lucky enough to end up working together in a group with one other person.

The first band to play were a Chinese (I think) three-piece who played an intense, repetitive gothy music in weird time signatures. I got the chance to watch some of their set, which was performed to maybe 150 people. They'd come a long way up into the Norwegian mountains for the show and there was something quite wonderful about being one of the few people to see it. On the whole their performance seemed to create quiet confusion, but I really liked what they were doing. 

Harpal, Bill, if you're reading, I miss you gentlemen.

Later there were a group of rockers from Greenland, whose vibe I couldn't get with, and a high-profile Sami band who mixed their folk music with 80s romcom soundtrack stylings. These acts were followed by Narasirato, a band from the Solomon Islands, whose instruments were all made of bamboo. Wearing what looked like traditional tribal dress, they played a lively dance music in which all the notes came from different sized panpipes and tuned percussion. It rained while they played and at that point it was our job to watch the VIP bar, where I was given a dressing down from one of the organisers for not recognising a famous Sami singer who wanted to come in, but that job didn't require three people so I got to see half of the Narasirato performance. They had the crowd with them all the way. I felt happy that I had earlier let one of their members into the backstage area even though he'd forgotten his pass.

Mist settled over the valley for the last act of the night, a group called Totalteatret. I get the impression that these guys played Riddu Riddu around 10 years ago and this performance was something of a homecoming. They mixed storytelling with punk, rap and agitprop, something like an arctic Chumbawamba. Some years ago they had regional hit with a tune about people shooting holes in Sami street-signs. This reminded me of similar battles in Wales, so I guess street signage is often a major issue in areas where a language has been suppressed. The song shared its drum beat with Walk This Way by Aerosmith and Run DMC, and the audience liked it so much that the band played it twice. 

Totalteatret

After Totalteatret were finished there was an exodus from the main stage to the camping area and we were unlucky enough to be stuck on the gate checking wristbands for entry. Marthe was good at this because she's good at smiling, but I struggled somewhat. It's interesting to me that it was mostly older drunks, those of my own age and beyond, who needed to make a point of such mini acts of rebellion as refusing to show their pass and just scowling at me while walking on into the camping area. It was past 2am and I was beginning to get irritable. "Fine, ignore me," I shouted after one of them. "I don't know what you're so proud of. I've been to better gigs on a Tuesday."

But our night was still young and the sun doesn't set here, as you know. We were yet to go litter picking in the camping field, where people played drums and tried to make conversation. Later, around 5am, we were sent up the hill to check any coming cars for festival passes and watch people wandering lost, one foot at a time, out of the gate and down towards the village. Two people found themselves a car to make love in. One man called a taxi and when it arrived he climbed into the front seat and just said, "Drive me home." 

By this point time was like syrup we were swimming through. Minutes expanded while mosquitoes made endless attempts to suck our blood. The end of the final shift found everyone gathered in or around the lavvo, a large tent with a fire in the middle and smoke in the air. Marthe went to sleep and I wandered round in circles.

When it was all over I felt too tired to sleep. The music and festivities seemed a long time ago. On the bus home I tried to jot down a few images in my notebook, but the bus entered a tunnel, I lost my reading light, and that is as much as I recall of the journey.

Backstage Security