Number Seventy News

Brasserie St Louis, Musee de Cluny, Cafe de la Place in the Marais, Flea Market, and a wonderful tiny flat on the 4th floor on the Ile St Louis.  April in Paris may be marvellous, but February is pretty good too.  Like most big long-estalished European ciies, it’s so rewarding to just wander almost at random, and come up with little gems round every corner.

Eurostar on the way back was delayed leaving by British passport officers understaffed and working to rule so we found out that, provided you are at the front of the Eurostar and make a prompt exit, you can get from St Pancras arrival to King’s Cross departure in 7 minutes, at a very brisk pace, having originally allowed 31 minutes for this transfer.

Golden days beside a Norwegian Lake.  Long scarves of cloud halfway up the mountainside in the morning, suddenly turned to fire as the sun lifts over the opposite ridge.  First flakes of ice at the edge of the lake.  Frost staying most of the day where the sun doesn’t reach at this season. Forestry tracks, as always, made for foresters, not walkers. A paraglider swooping into the valley. Sitting at Sunday lunch in a house halfway up a mountain watching the snow swirl and coat the forests. My daughter’s cosy small house – obviously insulated way beyond anything we build in the UK, and heated by a woodstove or an air source heat-pump (warmpumps, they are called over there).  Grey days too, beautiful in their own way, time to hunger down and eat cake.

Apart from the stupidity of having to stay overnight at Stansted because you can’t get there from the North in time to chekc in for a 10.30 am flight, journey there went quite well.  Note however, that the bedroom decor in the Stansted Airport Radisson hotel (and, my spies tell me, in the Oslo one too) is absolutely the most hideous assemblage of bad taste in lighting, decoration, carpets, furniture, mirrors etc etc you have ever seen.  Part bad enough to be kitsch, part just demented. Who stays in these places by free choice one wonders.  Anyway, Ryanair behaved itself and showed up the rocky coast of Norway nicely as we descended to Torp.  Then the Telemark Express bus rolled us through golden woods and past autumnal lakes to our destination (of which more separately).

Returning, the bus ploughed through heavy rain most of the way, but Norwegian roads seem to be designed to shed water rather than retain it in puddles, so no problem.  Again Ryanair did Ok and with only 40 minutes between touch-down and train departure we nonetheless made it.  At this point puzzlement sets in.  The Cross Country Stansted to Brimingham stopped for signals outside Stansted, waited at least 5 minutes for a platform at Cambridge, dallied at Ely and March, and yet got into Peterborough on time. Another example of the totally absurd timing practices on Britain’s railways, whereby everything is so generously timed it’s almost impossible to ruin the company statistics by being late.  But realatively troule-free there and back again.

So far, I’ve only read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson so am not fully qualified to pontificate, but this Swedish thriller is brilliantly plotted, the characters satisfyingly bizarre, though not one-dimensional, and the detail convincing.  A very slight acquaintance with Sweden is sufficient to be able to visualize the type of location.  The main female character, Salander, has Bond-like, superhuman powers, which are not totally explained (or not yet) and the author does seem to have an unhealthy fascination with sadistic sex (though to oppose it for its violence towards vulnerable women).   And thoroughly 21st century in the use and abuse of IT to both commit and solve crimes.

I’m always astonished at how Vesaas gets inside the thoughts and feelings of his characters- usually young people, adolescents. In Spring Night the main character, a boy, is on the brink of sexuality, without knowing it himself.  His older sister is all too aware of her sexual power, with which she teases her suitor.  And into the household (their parents are away overnight) erupts a dysfunctional family, the parents at war with each other, a younger pregnant woman, a ferocious son, and a pubescent girl, the counterpart of the main character.  The boy barely knows what to think, can’t identify what he’s feeling, has to interact with all these people and steer through the vicious family tensions and unstated sexual tension.  It’s brilliantly done.

The Viking ship museum at Roskilde is fascinating, as are the replicas that sail on the fjord outside,

but the real Viking age experience was at the National Museum in Copenhagen.  In Denmark the Iron Age goes up to 1050AD or so, which includes the entire Viking period.  You have never seen such a cornucopia of objects.  Makes you wonder how careless all those ancient Danes were, losing so much stuff, or how rich they were, to be able to afford to bury such costly objects with their dead.  Or to acquire such wonderful foreign goodies from the Mediterranean world.  And it’s all so brilliantly displayed and lit.  All the text is in Danish and English, in equal size type.  Astonishing volume of finds.

It seemed we could have a comfortable, hotel style room with two single beds, triple glazing and air conditioning, but with no ensuite and a little way out of the city centre (Stockholm), or ensuite facilities, and extremely central location, and no ventilation except an open window onto a 05:00 to 01:00 bus route, an 04:00 bin collection, and beer deliveries to the two cafes opposite between 6 and 8 am. (Copenhagen).  But the Copenhagen one did have a very nice little cafe on the ground floor where you could get an excellent German weissbier so it wasn’t all bad.  As an aside, you might think the Carlsberg in Copenhagen would be superior to anywhere else but actually it’s just as dreadful as in the rest of the world.

I really liked Stockholm. Good fish to eat in the restaurants and surprisingly good beer to drink.  We wandered trhough the old town and found an eccentric bike shop which sold and hired out Bromptons, had a poster for the 2009 Brompton Championship in the window and also had things like Brooks saddles and leather saddlebags.

Swedes have a very positvie attitude towards sunshine , they adore it, especially it seems, near water.  The city is on several islands between Lake Malar and the sea and everywhere beside the water there were busy sunbathers.  On a hot summer Saturday it seemed like the entire  city decamped onto the ferries out to the enchanting rocky, tree covered islands which stretch for miles between Stockholm and the sea.  They varied from tiny rocks to islands just big enough for a house, a hammock, a jetty, a summerhouse and a Swedish flag, to islets about a kilometre long and/or wide with tiny coves and beaches each with a complement of bronzed bodies.

In both Sweden and Norway, they really DO summer.  They embrace it, they revel in it, they bask in its brevity.

A 7.30am train from Oslo to Stockholm – some rather quaint and elderly Swedish Railway carriages – big windows you could drop down and a loco hauled train.  Seemed rather odd for an international service but then the Norwegians and the Swedes have a famously arms-length relationship.  Lots of lakes on the Norwegian side of the border – picturesque as ever – pity about the number of trees between the track and the water sometimes.  Southern Sweden quite flat. Rail entry into Stockholm crosses the harbour on a low bridge – suddenly spectacular.

A very few hours in Oslo poses the question of what to do.  Walking on the Opera House roof is fun, watching the harbour is fun, getting lost around the castle is a bit trying, so we headed for what I have always felt to be one of the most amazing places anywhere – the Vigeland sculptures in their parkland setting.  I was bowled over by these when I first saw them in 1966 and they remain totally impressive, from the circle of baby figures, to the avenue of active figures to the quieter groups round the amazing central pillar.  I still find some of the pieces incredibly moving, particularly those showing older people or family groups

And so it got to early evening, and we went in search of the restaurant in the park, near the sculptures.  Alas, the terrace was empty, the pavilion closed, but a handy sign pointed us round the corner to a new location, another, west-facing terrace, where I had one of the tastiest meals I have ever had in Norway, not a country normally famed for subtlety in cooking. (Bland and tasteless or very strongly fishy or cheesy).  But this roast salmon on sweet potato with capers was absolutely wonderful.  And not vastly expensive, either.