Coincidences - Two

Last Saturday I was talking about Stockholm with Marthe and her friend Frøydis. We were standing in the kitchen, making coffee and discussing the Swedish capital. Of the three of us, I was the only one who had never been there, but I was saying that for a long time it had been a city I'd wanted to visit. 

I've actually wanted to visit Stockholm since long before I ever really thought about Norway, ever since hearing the album Dynamite by Stina Nordenstam in the late 90s. (She made the record in her flat there). I thought aloud that I might travel to Stockholm alone when Marthe and Frøydis are on their planned road trip across America next year. 

At the same time as we were having this conversation, someone I had never met was sitting in Stockholm and writing me an email. I sat down with my coffee, opened up my computer and got a message from Jonas Alexander David, telling me that he was going to play one of my songs on his radio show at 6pm that day.

The show, which is called Explorations, goes out every week on Stockholm College Radio. Each broadcast focuses on a different area of the world. It's a kind of journey through music. Last week's Explorations was about North Norway. I became the UK's unoffical musical representative in the far North!

You can listen to all Jonas' shows after broadcast on his blog. The North Norway show you can hear below. It's in Swedish, obviously, but if you don't understand the language you could still enjoy the music. It's a selection of pop, modern folk and electronic music from Bodø, Tromsø, Nordreisa and beyond. My song appears around the 20 minute mark.

Sometimes the internet seems like a tyrannical force in my life—some kind of time-sucking black hole that I can't escape. But then something like this happens: Just when I'm thinking of a city I'd love to visit, someone in that city is thinking of me.

 

The Sound of Ice Melting in the Arctic

The snow and the ice are melting. Blue skies have come to the arctic, the days are crisp and bright, and there is no real darkness anymore, only a navy-blue submarine midnight.

Last week I walked along the edge of the fjord with an audio recorder, to capture some of the sounds of the thaw.

I stood between two small streams of water flowing over rocks and pebbles into the fjord.

I lay on a flat slate-like rock, so smooth it almost felt soft, and recorded the melting of a large slab of ice. The sound is very musical. There was some water dripping into the cavity between the ice and the rock, but most of these sounds were coming from inside the ice itself: an invisible polyphonic thawing process.

From Sun-up to White-out

People in the arctic spend a lot of time looking forward to the midnight sun, so it can be tough when for half the summer it is obscured by clouds. The end of the dark time was an eagerly anticipated event this year. But when the sun first returned, back in February, it did so under cover of a snowstorm, and it stayed there for several days. When the weekend came, Marthe and I went out for a walk on the mountainside and finally saw the light return. I got my shadow back and the world went technicolour once more. Now the days are only a little shorter than the nights. It's incredible, how fast it turns around.

The weather has been serious of late. Whole weeks of near constant snowfall, broken up by wonderfully clear, cloudless days. Sometimes the wind and the snow together contrive to blot out the whole world. Last weekend we were driving home and the road disappeared completely. You were lucky if you could see as far ahead as the next roadside visibility marker. We drove into a couple of snow banks, but managed to make it home, unlike one unfortunate soul who had abandoned a car at the edge of the road. When we passed it, it was already half buried. 

The road on a good day.

One side of our house is now mostly hidden. The view from our kitchen window is a wall of snow that reaches up to meet the stuff sliding down from the roof. From above the porch hang icicles the length of swords. When the wind gets up it sometimes throws things at our metal roof, and they clatter across into the trees behind us.

Note: Since these images were taken, it has snowed a lot more.

My friend Bill came to visit recently, and I was hoping he would get to see the aurora borealis, but he mostly saw vast amounts of sleet, rain and snow. I haven't seen so much of the Northern Lights this year in general. This is partly because our house doesn't look out into an expanse of sky like the old one did. I've recently realised that on clear nights they are often directly above our house, so I need to go out and check more often. 

Bill Kenny and me cooking lunch with petrol.

I just finished a long Norwegian project on Knut Hamsun. Everyone has to do some self-directed coursework in the third year and I chose to write about three of Hamsun's early books: Hunger, Pan and Victoria. Although Hunger is the most famous one with English speaking audiences, and is an excellent book, I really recommend Pan. It's quite unlike any other book I've read, especially from that period. It was interesting writing at length about literature in another language. I'm hoping now that I've got that out of the way, I can update here more than once a month.

In other news, young goats are being born! Marthe doesn't work in the barn in the winter, but she went to visit the little ones. I suppose this means that spring is close at hand.

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.