Borderlands

On the road to Tromsø it is possible to take a left and drive instead to Finland. That's what we did last Monday. On the way, I bought two CDs from a petrol station: A Rock n Roll box-set and the second album by Norwegian band Harrys Gym. I had never before noticed how unbelievably middle aged and straight Bill Haley sounds on Rock Around the Clock. You can virtually hear the cardigan the man is wearing. Harrys Gym on the other hand, I recommend for any time you might be crossing a Nordic border. 

Driving into Finland really demonstrates the essential weirdness of national boarders. The road is long, the landscape doesn't change, but you drive past a large sign and a small cabin and suddenly the language on the signs is totally unintelligible and the notes and coins in your wallet are of no use to you. The speed limit suddenly goes up to 100, which is exciting for those of us who live in Norway and are usually supposed to drive at 80kmph. I put my foot down immediately.

To the right of the road there is a large, frozen lake and a flat expanse of snow. People ski across it to get to the point where three countries, Sweden, Norway and Finland, all meet. This meeting point is marked by a raised concrete circle which has been photographed many times for use on postcards.

A little way into Finland there is a tourist centre where they sell burgers, souvenirs and postcards. No such thing on the Norwegian side, I noticed. I think they make their money partly from the fact that snow-scooter regulation is much less strict on that side of the border, so people travel there to ride around in the mountains. It's also a good area for skiing and snowboarding. The man behind the counter spoke Finnish and English, but not Norwegian.

 

Outside, people took off in hang gliders from the frozen surface of the lake and flew off into the distance. We travelled further up the road to where there is a supermarket which is much cheaper than the ones in Norway, though I'm reliably informed that it is way more expensive than anywhere else in the country. We stocked up on a lot of frozen food and I bought Finnish chocolate and some mustard, which I hope is hotter than the stuff we get here. I also bought a Led Zeppelin CD for the journey home.

And then that was it. There was nothing more to do in Finland that day. We got back in the car and drove a few minutes until the ice, snow, rocks and trees around us were once again Norwegian ice, snow, rocks and trees, and the signs said we had to slow our speed right down to 50kmph.

All this just brings home to me the imaginary status of countries. How is it that I walk or drive past this little roadside house, and suddenly I'm in a completely different place? What about a fox crossing through the snow, or a bird flying overhead? Does this madness apply to them too? 

Arctic Safari

   

Last Thursday some friends arrived on the Hurtigruten from Trondheim. We met them when the boat came into the harbour in Skjervøy at about 11pm. Skjervøy is an island town, and connecting it to the mainland is a bridge with a long single-lane road across it. I remember being in the passenger seat across that bridge in high winds on the day we first set out to find our new home in North Norway. That day it seemed we were driving insanely high up. This time I was driving, and though the bridge isn't quite as altitudinous as I recalled, you certainly wouldn't want to fall from it.

The weather is getting warmer now. The road surface is turning from a layer of ice to a blanket of slush, so careful driving is required. The sun sets late, but by the time we left Skjervøy it was dark out. A little after the bridge, I was rounding a corner when I sensed some movement out of the corner of my eye. To the right of the road, on a snow-covered slope, some dark shape was heading downwards. I slowed the car as a massive animal loped into the road just metres ahead of us. It's difficult to be objective, but this thing seemed bigger than the car (and we drive a Chrysler). Its head was enormous. Where antlers would normally be it had a pair of stumpy horns.

This was the first moose I've seen since I moved here a year and a half ago. Marthe reckons it was a young male. I've been waiting impatiently to see a moose for some time now, so any shock I might have felt evaporated with gladness. There are loads of them up here. 16 have died in car accidents on one local stretch of road alone since the start of this year. Yet somehow, until last week, they had always avoided me among the trees and out in the darkness.

The moose turned away from us and looked around. It seemed confused to be in the middle of a road. It was perhaps a little lost. Then, clumsily, it clambered off the other side of the road and disappeared into the night. I drove on, unsure if the moose's mother, brother or friend might suddenly throw itself in front of the car.

Another 20 minutes down the road and we saw two more! One moose was waiting for the other to climb out of the road and join it in someone's garden. Then the northern lights grew visible in a patch of sky beyond us, and the closer we got to home, the larger they grew. On the long road to our house, I pulled the car over and we got out. Two shifting pools of green light were visible above us.

On the final stretch of road, a bright white arctic hare jumped out and ran through the light cast by the car. It was close enough to clearly see, but far enough away that we were in no danger of hitting it. I have been wondering recently when the hare would come back. He used to visit our garden last spring, and turned from white to brown to suit the summer when the snow was gone.

If I hadn't been there to experience it with them, I could almost have been jealous of our two visiting friends. It was as if this whole place woke that night to welcome them.

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. 
 

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. 

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.

Lars

My driving instructor has a moustache. His name is Lars. He drives me out to the edge of town and then we get out and switch sides. I start to drive a car for the first time in my life.

How did I get to 30 without learning to drive? Something to do with an accident I was in, a dislike of motor vehicles, a lack of cash or time, a love of train travel, rather a lot of drinking, a lack of necessity, a deep disinclination...

Lars wants me to drive up into the valley. He says we don't worry about what others are doing. He tells me I need to practice shifting gears. He says I should take my foot off the break just before the car stops. He seems surprised at the way I keep killing the engine. He doesn't enjoy it when I start driving in the left lane.

Oh, you drivers. Are you aware how difficult it is, this thing you do in open traffic?

Lars says I need to demonstrate independence. He wants me to gear up and gear down of my own free will. I can't do it though. I don't like it. I want to focus on keeping the car in the middle of the road. We are driving through a cutting at 80 kilometers and hour. He tells me I'm too close to the edge of the road, that my wheels are on the white lines. I look in the wing mirror to try to straighten up, but instead I start swerving off to the side. Lars grabs the steering wheel and gets us back on the road. He tells me never to do that again.

We drive across a small bridge and up some country roads. I grip the wheel and look straight forwards. There are times when I seem to have total control, then others when I suddenly start driving like a drunk. My driving instructor is singing a song. He's building a cabin somewhere around here.

Lars has had many jobs in his life. He drove long distance lorries, he's worked as a plumber and as a mechanic. He didn't learn much English when he was at school. I doubt whether he knows much English at all, which is reassuring in some strange way. He's nearing retirement and firmly believes that it is important to be happy in the morning. He's talking on his mobile now and I shift gears carefully, as if he might not notice. I still don't really understand what the point of it is, this shifting of gears.

Back at the driving school Lars asks me how I feel. We've finished our sixth lesson and I'm still living in fear of the car. I talk for a long time in my patchy Norwegian. I tell him I think I finally learnt how to use a clutch. "You did do that," says Lars.

Lars says he has plenty of time, so long as I have plenty of time.

Thaw

When everything is covered in snow it's sometimes difficult to remember that snow is made of water. In Nordreisa snow and water are each as much a part of life as the other, but in my mind, until now,  they have been two separate things. Water is what lies between us and the mountains opposite. It's what comes down from the spring behind the house for us to drink and wash in. It's what turns to light-blue ice under the bridge or on the road into town where your car goes into the ditch. Snow is what falls from the sky and paints the landscape white. It's what you hike through or ski on. It's the thing that sometimes hides the whole world behind a wall of falling fragments and settles on the roofs of houses and the branches of trees.

We're well past the equinox and the sun makes itself known around 3.30am, setting some time after 10 at night. There aren't many clouds up this way at the moment and the snow is starting to melt. Most of the ice is already gone, but months of snowfall takes longer to thaw. It turns into a blanket of brittle glittering crystals before it finds its way back into being water. Where days ago I could walk on the surface, I now fall through to my knees. Sheets of snow which have been hanging like awnings over the edge of houses fall away. Massive clumps come sliding down off the roof and thump on the wooden boards of the house's veranda, where I sit writing this, wearing a jacket, a hat and fingerless gloves.

Everywhere there is the sound of running water and falling droplets. In the distance I can hear sea gulls laughing. These last two weeks there have been birds everywhere. Snow sparrows have appeared, little black and white birds which flit around in groups, and there seems to have been an increase in eagles. All types of water fowl have appeared in the fjord, including some mallard ducks of the kind I used to feed as a child in Swindon's Queen's Park. In the fjord last week we saw either some kind of small dolphins or very large fish which kept breaking the surface of the water around sunset. There was also a theory that they might have been otters, because our neighbours have seen an otter making its way through our garden. So I guess I'm not much of a naturalist if all I can tell you is "there was something down there in the water," but it was quite a sight and that night I dreamt of porpoise and otters the size of sea lions. 

All this and the light constantly refracting on the water tells you winter is truly over. We've made it through our first arctic winter. And you know what? It really wasn't that bad.

Alta: Finnmarksløpet

Finnmarksløpet is the world's northernmost sled dog race and it ran for the first time in the year I was born. There are two routes, both starting and ending in Alta, the longer of which goes across to Kirkenes, a town which lies north of Finland and just west of Russia. People come from all over to take part in the race, and this year we were in Alta to see it start too.

We booked a suite in the Park Hotel, a place so nice we decided to stay an extra night, and it turned out that our hotel room had its own roof-terrace overlooking the main street. On Friday night and Saturday morning people brought in and laid extra snow, cordoned off the street and made a track for the dogs with a big inflatable starting gate. Just around breakfast time the race officially opened and a warm-up man came out and did a set of weird and unfunny, somewhat adult oriented jokes to the child-heavy waiting audience.

At around 11 the sledges and dog teams made their way out from the nearby car park, crossed a road and lined up along the track. One thing was clear: while the atmosphere was pretty good on all sides, nobody was quite so excited as the dogs were. These dogs really wanted to start their running. I was surprised at how normal they seemed. Some of the dogs looked like you might expect a husky to look, but many others looked more like a dog I would expect to meet in a local recreation ground than in the pages of Call of the Wild.

For much of the afternoon the competitors took off one by one. I can't claim we saw them all, but we watched a fair few. The longer race went on for around a week and was won this year by Inger Marie Haaland. This made her the second woman to win. You can see a couple of pretty amazing images from one of the chekpoints on Jan Georg Svane's Flickr.

Ben Washington and the Mystery of the Buried Treasure

Just over two weeks ago we had our first visitor from England. My friend Ben came to see us and to find out what it was like up here. It made sense to me that he would be the first person to come and visit, since he spends his life on little adventures. They often find their way into pieces of sculpture.

Ben arrived at night, and I was excited on his behalf that he would wake up alone in our house and step out into this landscape in the morning. Later in the day, when I was back from work, we spoke about the environment here. "It's not really anything you can talk about," he said. "You just go out there and you look at it, and you just get it. It's not something you can express." I said I thought it was something that changed with time, that when I had come here I hadn't really understood it at all, having lived so long in the city, but that I felt I understood a little more about it now, and that it was something I was constantly learning.

Ben and I hiked over the hills, from where you can see the mouth of the fjord to where Marthe and I live. The sun went down as we passed the place where I lost my keys and we walked the last stretch through the forest in darkness. We talked about England and how things are there; I felt very much that I might never move back. When I've lived in other places and people have come to visit me I have often seen my surroundings afresh, but that didn't really happen to me this time. Perhaps that's because I haven't been here long enough for it to feel normal yet. But I do feel very at home here now, so perhaps it's just not a landscape you can take for granted.

To celebrate having a visitor, Marthe and I decided that we should try to eat some of the many crabs which our landlord keeps stored in plastic bags in the cellar freezer. Until then I'd had an idea that they would be whole crabs, normal crabs, perhaps the size of a fist. When we got them out of the bags they turned out to be amputated king-crabs' legs, still connected to each other in groups of three - massive bright red monster claws the size of a human head. Frozen, they looked terrifying, like severed alien hands. Ben said they would give him nightmares, but once we'd put them in the fridge to defrost overnight, baked them and hacked our way in with knives, they turned out to make an incredible meal. If you come here, that's what we will offer you. 

The day before Ben left, the three of us went out for a walk along the shore of the fjord. At the high-tide point I found an empty bottle with a scrap of paper inside. When we got it open it turned out to be a map showing the location of some buried treasure. We decided to leave the hunt to somebody else, so we put the note back in, screwed the lid on tightly and cast the bottle back out into the fjord.

 

 

 

That night the Northern Lights came and lit up the cloud cover. We stood in the snow and watched the sky changing colour. 

The Ice The Sun The Horse and The Dog

We woke up in the morning and the pipes were frozen. The temperature outside was -18, and the snow hadn't fallen for some time, so it shouldn't really have come as any surprise, but as a child of the late 20th Century I never fail to be appalled by a lack of hot running water on demand. We did all we could to heat up the cellar, where the pipes enter the house. We left all the taps on and we headed out for a walk. Our neigbour, whose husband is away with work, had invited us on a trip up to the frozen lake where the kids go skating at this time of year.

Our neighbours live on a farm with a horse and many goats. When we got over there we found that they had also temporarily adopted a dog. One thing that worries me about farm animals is the way that their faces are like human faces but arranged a little differently; in the case of a horse the head seems much too big and bent out of shape with the nose pushed forward and the eyes to the sides, but basically there's a clear resemblance to a human head. About dogs I only know what I have read in books by Konrad Lorenz, which includes the idea that there are two types. One type is related to the wolf and will accept only one human master in its lifetime (the husky is of this type). The other will naively accept anyone who seems friendly. Our dog, Sheba, seemed to be of the second kind, and she nominated me as her master for the day. With our neighbour's daughter on horseback and with a dog running around me, we set off into the hills. 

When we were walking through the the small valley behind our house, Marthe called to me to stop. "Listen to the mountain," she said. It was true that you could hear it. Shortly afterwards the sun broke over the horizon for the first time this year. The first thing I noticed was that I got my shadow back. The next thing was that there were colours I didn't know had gone missing. I had noticed that throughout the dark period all photographs came out looking blue, but I hadn't realised quite what a limited palette I'd been seeing. Yellow and orange were were suddenly everywhere, but also red, some pink, about half the green spectrum, most shades of brown... and that was just looking at the heather on the ground. There was colour everywhere; it was like I'd had my sight partially restored. 

When we got to the lake it was a light frozen blue. There were deep cracks in the ice, but I wasn't worried about it breaking, because the horse was walking across it. Other neighbours came with their children and built a fire in a circle of stones. Kids skated, people cooked sausages and we looked out at the view. 

The sun was soon gone and it grew colder. I decided to go a little further up a nearby slope and look out across the fjord. The dog, Sheba, came with me. She was faster than I was over the snow, but patient with me. When we got to the top she sat by my side and looked out across the landscape and I understood why it is people go walking with dogs.

The journey back down was not a success. Somehow I took a lot of the slope head-first and after falling for a few meters I hit a tree. I was lying in the snow, the dog was jumping on and around me worriedly, and I heard myself saying, "Man, that really hurt." When I stood up I was pretty dizzy and there were different shades of pain in my jaw, my neck and my back. I found Marthe and we decided to head back to the house and to take our neighbour's daughter with us, as she was crying from the cold.

It wasn't until we got back to the house that I became aware I was missing my glasses and my house keys. I don't think there's any need to lock your house if you live where we live, but city anxieties are hard let go of. We'd left the place intruder-proof. Marthe took our crying six year old friend home while I headed back up into the forest.

The fire was still burning, but the others had left. I made my way up to where I'd hit the tree and I found my glasses sticking out of the snow. I think I might have made a deal with God on the way up without realising it, because the glasses were what I was more worried about. The keys were nowhere to be seen. Marthe arrived and we searched some more, but it was too dark.

We stayed the night at our neighbour's place, where she gave us porridge, we had showers, Marthe drank red wine and I slept for around twelve hours. This morning there were icy gales blowing in across the water and the temperature had dropped to -21. We went up to look for the keys one last time. The winds pushed us across the frozen lake like hockey pucks, we could hardly stand up when searching around the remains of the fire, and the slope where I had fallen was frozen hard.

Back at the house we smashed a window and let ourselves in, just as any self-respecting thief would have done, door locked or otherwise. The pipes were still frozen. We nailed some cardboard over the hole we'd made in the glass.

The winds are still tearing across the fjord. The fire is burning in our stove. They say that the temperature will rise to around Zero on Wednesday, so we hope the taps will then start working.

Djupvik

This week it has been light. No sun yet, but light still. And this has changed where we live.

On Wednesday I went and took a biology course in Norwegian at the adult education centre. I found out I knew woefully little about the workings of the human heart. Walking back into town, I saw an eagle circling up above the mountain and I stopped to watch it for a time. They can move such a distance in such a short time. I felt very earthbound for the rest of my walk. 

Living out here, you would think we would be surrounded by wildlife, and we probably are, but we've seen very little because of the time of year. Even the reindeer are elsewhere for the winter. I fully expect to meet more animals as the spring comes.

Today we drove to visit a woman I work with and her husband in a small village called Djupvik. When she was giving me directions to her house she said, "You just follow the road and keep going until you come to a sign which says Djupvik. It's the last house on the left." There is only really one road here. It's called the E6.

We stopped a couple of times on the way to take pictures around a place called Rotsund, which seems like a fishing village. I was using a broken camera and could barely get it to work. In the end it didn't matter so much that I hardly had the chance to take any pictures, because it's difficult to make an ugly photograph there.

Boats Outside Rotsund

Mountains Outside Djupvik

Then we drove a little further down the road and found the people we were heading to see. They live in a place where the tourists always stop to take pictures. They have a boat and they go out on the water, where whales swim over to inspect them until they switch off their engine. Moose live behind their house. (I am jealous of anyone who has seen moose in the wild, but everyone assures me I'll see one soon.)

They come from Alaska, but lived in Finland for many years. They welcomed us to their house and gave us coffee and soup. It was a good way to pass a Sunday afternoon.

Alone in Storvik

Marthe went to England a few days ago, to attend a conference on Arctic photography. It's the first time I've been alone here. Without her I'm reliant on the school bus to get to and from town. I'm usually the only adult on there, watching Daffy Duck and getting carsick with the kids. On Thursday I missed it and had to get a taxi home, which cost 500 kroner (50 pounds). Yesterday I skipped a meeting at work and sprinted to the bus stop as fast as I could. There is no bus at all at the weekend.

I went a little way up the mountain this morning. Not far, because nobody knew where I was. I found a place on top of a rock where I plan to have lunch tomorrow before dark. It's not such a bad thing having no sun when you have a few hours of cold blue light.

Tonight I went out for a walk again, down to the water, to look at the stars in the clear night sky. With the snow on the ground and the lights from the road above, it was bright enough that I could see quite well, but I decided to steer clear of the Ghost House by the shore anyway. I started to wonder why it is that we are automatically scared of old and empty houses, in the same way as we have an instinctual aversion to rats. And why, if ghosts don't exist, do people of all cultures have some concept of them? Basically, I started freaking myself out. I think this is because I'm aiming to write a ghost story soon. Anyway, I started heading up towards the road and just as I was nearing the fence I came across a sheep's skull, half buried in the snow.

The Ghost House in lighter times.

It feels really remote here now. It would take me a day to walk to the nearest shop. Since I have more than enough food, that's quite an enjoyable feeling.  I tend the fire, read, catch up on emails and letters and play the guitar. I've written a simple piece of music to try to evoke the place where we're living. You can listen to it below.

Storvik by Vince Stephen

Darker Still

Driving back from town today at around 2.30, the road was nearly invisible beyond the falling snow. As we rounded a bend the house on the left hand side of the road suddenly disappeared. I looked across in time to see the lights in the windows of the house opposite turn dark orange before that house too fell into darkness.

Power cut.

The streetlights were gone, the porch lights were extinguished and the moon was hidden behind the snow clouds. The only light then was what came from the headlights of our car. Any houses close enough for our lights to hit them looked uninhabited, abandoned and cold as we passed. Like humanity had disappeared with the electricity. It was the first time I'd thought about how people might have dealt with polar winter not so long ago, before electric lighting and under-floor heating in the bathroom were common.

My computer tells me it has thirty minutes of power left. I don't know how long the battery on the modem will last. It's actually quite nice sitting here in the candle light, listening to the fire burning. 

Outside very little is visible: The streetlamps far away on the other side of the fjord, where the power must be on another part of the grid. Out on the water a small boat is scanning the shore with its search light, maybe trying to make its way in to land.

Marthe in the dark

The view from my house now