66 degrees 33 minutes

Driving over the Saltfjellet one meets an unimposing road sign...

Welcome to the Arctic Circle

Now in late August - early September it's a bit thin on snow, Father Christmas, polar bears, or any of the white ice-bound mental trappings that we British associate with anything using the word "Arctic" As it happens, I was clothed comfortably in a T-shirt at the time, and if I had brought that great British ice-cream and sponge dessert delicacy, an "Arctic Roll", with me, it would soon have melted. Oh, and a few yards further up the road, you can pop into the 'Arctic Circle Experience', have a coffee and a hot-dog, buy a postcard, nip to the loo in comfort... (handy when there are no trees around!) Apparently the railway route across here (known as the 'Road of Blood') was constructed in 1942-45 by Russian PoW's of the occupying German regime. That's documented in humbler circumstances at the local museum. How these chaps must have longed for a hot coffee and a schnitzel. Unfortunate timing.

Just up the road from here the Saltfjettet opens out tundra-like into an expanse of sparse birchwood and bilberry struggling between ice-smoothed rocky hummocks and shallow dark pools. Many years ago we had camped here for several days, and I'd regaled my children with tales of 'Nøkken', a Nordic water spirit who lurks in such places. Spookily, we passed the spot and after a bit of wandering around the fell, I located the pool we had camped by. Nøkken was still there in his pool, the pale top of his head just visible in the gloomy waters. Shapeshifter he may be, but he hadn't apparently shifted from there in the last decade or so, not on my evidence, anyway!

The Iceman cometh...

Not far from Galdhøpiggen, (considered to be the highest point in Norway), is a little glacier that's pretty accessible by road. I discovered when we got there that (amazingly), I'd been there once before, fifteen years previously. I have an almost identical photo sitting at home (with a red Nissan rather than a green Jeep). I'm also firmly convinced that 15 years ago, it was a whole lot bigger.

Or maybe that's just the current contemporary angst about global warming... Only time will tell.

Bjorn again

Lake Tyin is a strange place. When the clouds come over, its God-forsaken landscape is harsh and uninviting. On the other hand, its Icelandic stillness in the sunshine is exhilarating. This is the first place I had ever climbed up to a glacier from, many years ago. Glaciers until then, for me, had been the stuff of textbooks, but sitting here and watching the elements at work that shaped this landscape over the millenia makes it anything but so. How surprising, then, that whilst soaking up this eerie atmosphere, along should stroll a young couple pushing a pram... Now, I understand that the Romans had a practice of leaving their youngsters out on the hillsides to toughen them up a bit, but Bjorn and Eda (with whom we shortly became aquainted, but that's another tale...) were just doing their normal "popping up to the glacier with the wee one" thing.... in much the same way that one encounters elderly folk on Zimmer frames, and chaps ski-ing uphill, in the heights and wilds of this place.

Home of the Learning Object Model

LOM. I knew I had heard of it before. It must be the home of the Learning Object Model. In not quite the same way, I believe that the bicycle bell was invented in Tring...

And the animals came in two by two...

Bergen University has an astounding natural history museum. Clearly the Victorians were not the only folk to have a passion for stuffing the fauna from far and wide and sticking them in a glass case.

Well, I initially thought that Norwegians of the late 1800s mostly cruised about with harpoons and clubbed seals, but how wrong I am. Not the case at all. Just like the UK's Victorians, (General Pitt-Rivers, for example, to name but one) whose capacity for collection clearly overwhelmed the capacity of their garden shed), they clearly had no aversion to popping across the odd continent and bagging a giraffe or two. (Well, I assume so... I didn't come across any zebra or giraffe on our Scandinavian travels, either. Perhaps they all got bagged and stuffed to extinction here, as well.)

By far the most astounding part of the museum, though, is its whale collection. There are 22 complete skeletons and 3 skulls from 18 different species. Accompanied by an incredible display of other marine inhabitants, there's something rather awesome about the scale and atmosphere of the place.

Now that's something hard to achieve on the web. You can classify and catalogue stuff like this, you can sort it and search it, hyperlink it and email it. But it's really just no subsitute for being there.

Awesomeness

How do you encapsulate awesomeness on the web? There doesn't seem to be an HTML markup tag for it. Well, someone clearly needs to work on this...

Takk...

Troldhaugen, home of Edward Greig, here in Bergen. Well, I say home... but the guy spend a huge part of his life wandering Europe... So, the Grieg pied-a-terre might be a better description.

He died of emphysema, it seems. The cocktail of sodium bromide, and a host of other turn-of-the-century concoctions that he consumed to keep body and soul together in those last years, was impressive.

The house has some wonderful photos of him wandering the mountain sides with walking stick, greatcoat and trilby hat. No Berghaus fleece, Craghoppers, Karrimor, Nike or whatever.

Apparently he created a bit of a stir by breaking with Norwegian tradition of the time, and being (a) cremated, and (b) buried at the bottom of the garden. He's still there, in a hole in the rock, a few yards below the septic tank.

Wandering around Bergen, we find monuments to him everywhere. But nothing to beat that humble resting place.

An unmistakable landscape appears from the gloom...

30 hours later the mists cleared to the unmistakable shores of Scandinavia. Well, Stavanger, to be precise. On my last visit here, 14 years ago, I was asked ...

Why do you come to visit this dirty old oil town?

"Dirty old oil town"? Hmm. Clealy the enquirer had never visited Ellesmere Port, never savoured the wonders of Widnes, the nuances of Newcastle, the subtleties of Southampton.

But this year we didn't loiter there. We'd done the tourist stuff of Stavanger a decade ago, and we stayed aboard the ferry northbound up the coast to Bergen. More tomorrow... watch this space...

And the Fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine...

Well, the Tyne was actually crystal clear as we left North Shields today, bound for Norway and all things Scandinavian.

It didn't last. A mile offshore and we disappeared onto a misty emptiness...

This was to be the first step of a journey to the North Lands, the storytale stomping ground of Noggin the Nog, Thor Nogson, and Graculus... the apocryphal home of Eric Bloodaxe, the real roots of Thor Heyerdal, and just up the road, no doubt, from Abba's retirement home. Gosh... interesting sagas ahead, one hopes. Beowulf, eat your heart out...

The P is silent, as in 'swimming baths'

Here is the zenith of my summer. I spent about £40 on gardening stuff earlier this year, what with seed trays, compost, chicken wire, bamboo canes, twine, and the like. The sun beat down and scorched them, so I watered them. The rain lashed down and ravaged them, so I pampered them, strung them up, supported them. And here they are.

So far, we must be running at about 25 pence per pea consumed. And that's discounting my labour costs. (Still, it's supposed to be a labour of love.)

I go on holiday in a few days time. The likelihood of the residue of my pea crop being there and edible when I return is slim. Bad timing, I guess.

This photo is the evidence. I'll put it on Flickr.com for posterity. Now of course I'm taking another chance there, aren't I? I know my pea plants won't be there in another month's time. I trust my pea photos will be there in another year's time. Nice of Yahoo to give us Flickr, to stash away and share these gems. I've chosen to entrust it with the custodianship of this monument to my £40-worth of peas.

But why did I put it on Flickr? There must be many other places where one can offer this sort of legacy to the vegetable-curious community... What about Wikimedia Commons, perhaps?

True. But in the case of Flickr I feel in control. Who moderates it? I do. It's my repository... and I am the gatekeeper. (Well, so long as the Gods at Flickr are OK with that)

I suppose I could have put it on Photobucket, but I didn't. The clue is in the name. Sometimes one feels judged by the company one keeps. Fotki , the same applies.

DropShots , well, it's a different business model - not about public sharing, but a closed network for friends and family. Picasa , a clever Google blend of personal and public photo submissions, but where's the gravitas ?

OK... I wanted the world to see My Peas. And I wanted them to feel like serious peas. In this case my peas are not silent, unlike the Ps in swimming baths...