going for cold

I hate being cold. Yet here I am in Norway, in January.

[Finse station, 1222m above sea level, truly in the middle of snowy nowhere]

This is the first time I’ve written this newsletter whilst on the move. We are taking the seven-hour train from Bergen to Oslo - one of the best in Europe, I’d read. I’ve just jumped down from the train to take a photograph at Finse station which is the highest in Norway, and the place where real would-be explorers and service personnel go to practice being in the cold and snow for longer than the two minutes I spent there.

I may not like being cold, but I am very drawn to the idea of the cold, the culture of the cold, the sheer awfulness of extreme cold, reading about it and imagining it. During the lockdowns, I used to look at the live webcam at tiny, waterside Henningsvær in the Lofoten Islands as a way of travelling a long way from home. Also, and I may have mentioned this before (obvs, I have), I am perennially fascinated by Antarctica and the stories of exploration, Scott and Shackleton, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and my favourite, Dr Edward Wilson. Amundsen, not so much (apart from his tactics). And this is probably as close as I’ll ever get to him, Nansen, and the rest.

We have stayed a couple of nights in Bergen which is small, friendly, and has the excellent Fløibanen. Yesterday, we did a fjord trip, with the landscape looking very different to the sunny, green and blue images in the cruise adverts for cruises in the newspapers I read when I was growing up (what was it with all the fjord cruises in those days?).

In January, however, you see see the black and white version: black water, walls of black granite, white frozen waterfalls, and scatterings of fresh white snow. The boat turned back when we reached the ice, towards the top of fjord, which was probably just as well as we didn’t want to be stuck like Shackleton and his men who had to abandon the Endurance and watch as it was crushed by the pack ice.

No, we were on a nice, comfortable vessel with a snack bar, so we could listen to bursts of Grieg and drink coffee inside in the warmth, although we did do the right thing and go in and out of cabin into the driving rain to admire the scenery and get very wet. It had the desired effect of making us feel like Norwegian explorers for a few minutes or so.

[Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930). As Chandler Bing would say, could he be any more Norwegian?)

Although we could have pretended we’d done the real Arctic explorer thing, by dressing up like Nansen and Amundsen.

[Nansen]

[Roald Amundsen (1872-1928)]

I’m vastly amused by these studio portraits; I guess it was asking too much of a local photographer to trek or ski all the way across a glacier or two with a tripod etc just to get the right photo.

The boat and train journeys reveal the truly incredible isolation of some people’s dwellings: wooden houses perched on the vertiginous slopes, huddled round a tiny landing stage, almost buried under snow on a mountainside.

How do they manage? Catastrophising as usual, I wonder what happens when you cut your finger and need stitches or a baby arrives early or you slip and break a bone? It’s so quiet, so cold, so far to a hospital, never mind a bakery or cafe or bookshop.

Speaking of which, Bergen is good for books. Its 250k inhabitants must read a fair few, and not only in Norwegian. Proust has been translated into both Bokmål and Nynorsk (the two official standards of written Norwegian), and I bought the lovely new soft-back/cloth-covered Nynorsk edition by Skald of Swanns kjærleik (Un amour de Swann), mainly because I understood the title (love is kärlek in Swedish) and I’m enjoying the similarities between Norwegian and Swedish, and yes, thank you, Swedish lessons are going well even though the speaking is improving at a somewhat suitably glacial pace.

[Norwegian Spirit]

There are also at least two amazing yarn shops in Bergen. I found one which was full to the brim with gorgeous yarns, including the largest range of cashmere colours I’ve ever seen. But even better, partly by dint of its location, is Norwegian Spirit at Bergen station. What an inspired move, to open a sizeable, brilliantly stocked shop for knitters right by the platforms. Knitters who commute, go off for skiing weekends (lots of those this morning), and those, like me, who are in for the long haul. We can’t even sustain a good bookshop in King’s Cross, so there’d be no hope for a yarn shop in, say, Birmingham New Street or Manchester Piccadilly. More’s the pity.

So if I had to move to a house clinging to the side of a fjord, I think I’d be well stocked with books and yarn. To survive a long, dark winter I’d bring Yorkshire Gold tea bags and a box of amaryllis and prepared hyacinth bulbs, smuggle in my sourdough starter, have a list of Cary Grant films so I could be a Cary Completist, reread Proust, learn a mash-up of Norwegian and Swedish (Swegian? Norwedish?). It would all be a long way from the pemmican, frozen sleeping bags, and frostbitten fingers of my early C20 explorers. But at least I think I’d survive.

[Utasoet]

We are past the total white-out of Finse now, and slowly making our way down to Oslo. Ustaoset (famous for cross-country skiing) currently looks like the last scene in Anna Karenina, but a lot more jolly with typical red-and-green station buildings, skiers, blue sky and even some weak sun.

[‘Vinterlys’ (1981), by Olav Herman-Hansen]

Two and a half hours to go and the scenery has changed into a pale blue, gold, and white landscape like many of the winter paintings in the National Museum.

Almost there, with the prospect of a new capital city to explore, a wonderful modern library, the huge new National Museum building, and some more sock-knitting. (I bought the yarn in Bergen for the journey and decided to knit a non-traditional-colour Norwegian ‘lice’ pattern.)

God søndag!

PS The Persephone Festival programme has just been announced. I’ll be speaking on The Decorative Arts and Persephone Books, taking part in a panel discussion on The Domestic in Art and Literature, and giving a talk on The Gentle Art of Domesticity. Hope to see you there!