Christmas & New Year

Christmas may be a holiday, but it is certainly a busy one! The blog will be back shortly, it just needs to celebrate New Year first.

Hugs to all who have been good over the past year!

Funny Winter

It's December, and the Russian bears are sleepless. Around here, winter is threatening to arrive,
but we are still waiting. Funny or not? The climate changes we are witnessing have to be real. Even extremist liberalists have started believing so, though they probaby think it ludicrus to demand any change in policy or individual behaviour just to save the planet.

Today, while walking my neighbour's dog with a former classmate, her baby girl and their dog, I witnessed about four kinds of downpour, ranging from hail through snow, sleet and rain. The snow actually stayed on the ground - finally - covering the green, drowning grass for a moment.
I'm not sure this relieves my fears that something very odd is about to begin.

Klimaangst

Eg tel. Dette er minst 3.toreveret på Leikanger i november/desember. No sit eg på jobben, klokka er nesten ti, og det er stupmørkt med lyn ute. Det er ikkje for ingenting at eg har begynt å drøyme om vondsinna torevêr og kulelyn som følgjer etter meg

Beijing

The project on which I am working is about bringing Chinese and European researchers involved with Green Electronics together - through for instance conferences. So, it did make sense that we would go to China. This was my colleague's first time in Asia ever, and my second time in China. Just some quick photos from our even quicker trip

My colleague Otto and I with a very Chinese-looking tower behind, or so we thought



The Beijing Olympics stadions are practically rising out of the sandy ground as we speak! Our hotel was right next to the "Bird's Nest", a marvellous architectural creation in tangled steel



Otto before the presentation he gave of our project. It turns out my name too is now on a conference paper..!



Our "reactionary" logo, designed by a certain Silje (bottom left)



Researchers capturing the moment



Finally, I got to eat proper Chinese food again, in contrast to "Norwegian" Chinese food. Otto was a keen student of this new universe of food&drinks. Here, with a pot of heavenly tea.

Overhanging Dangers

A rock the size of three office blocks falls down on the only road out of my town



After a near death experience last night, flying in from Oslo in something so exceptional and freaky as a winter thunder storm, I decided to dodge danger and declared a day of "home office". This was a smart move as the road authorities decided to secure the mountain side by first making it very dangerous: An immensely huge and risky block had been discovered - and they wanted it down.

Curious as we are, my mum and I snuck out in monstrous rain for an extended home office lunch break to enjoy the wild heralded scenes of explosion and devastation. My mum decided to test a path she remembered having tried in the past (no doubt in bright sunshine and with no previous month of daily rain). Horrendous mudslide was the viscious result, but our shared desire to see the fantastic explosion saved us from another intra-familial quarrel. We got there just in time to have our ear drums shaken from behind a tree a few kilometres away from the spot ("in case of stone splinters"). Guess what: there was fog. But the bang was fun.

The tiny orange spots in the first picture are the wackos whose job it was to climb about 200 m up the vertical mountainside to place dynamite on the danger spot. They were still looking alive when we left. At the foot of the mountain, we ran into a bunch of former journalist colleagues who were also waiting for the horror scenes. My mum managed to get interviewed, while I kept a lower profile.

Summer...

November in Norway. No words can describe the darkness, the cold. Horror.

But luckily we have photos to remind us that life can be different. And then, how we long for the wonderful times when this (photos) was the colour of our skin. And the days when London was too hot to exist indoors, and life along the canal, in an air con building or under a tall tree in the park were the only viable options!

Our PhD Princess

Friends... You are looking at a photo of someone we may now refer to as Dr. Sultana Pavlou! Tania passed her university's grilling session - without having to make a single change - just a few days ago.


This basically means that her PhD is made of gold, as is her brain and entire self. Tania...I'm incredibly proud of you.

Congratulations!

Is Small Ugly?

An example of how small places may simply get too small

I was in a taxi. Not one for just me, but a huge big shared maxi one. The other passengers, like me, had flown in from Oslo and Bergen half an hour earlier. All of us were going to Leikanger [where my parents live], and all 13 of us were employed at some state, region or independent office or institute [Leikanger being something like a mini Brussels, where about 1500 out of 2000 inhabitants are "bueraucrats"].

It was pitch dark as the taxi approached Leikanger, and this is where it gets exciting. In any other case, the young man driving the taxi would have inquired about where the 13 individuals wanted to get off. But not in my teeny-weeny town. This is where the driver simply slows down his vehicle, swithces on the interior car light for about five seconds and scans the back of his taxi. Then - one by one - we politely get dropped off in front of our homes. Directions, [God forbid!] are seen as superflous; after all there is not a soul in town whose life is not to some extent monitored by the silent We.

Incredible as it may sound in our security scandal-haunted times, this mechanism of instant identificaton still allows all 2000 of us to dial the bank's number and ask the clerk to make payments and transfer money between our accounts, based on pure voice recognition. To be honest, I am not sure whether I like it or not, because this also means that news travels fast. The downside: Puke in a person's flower bed today, and (you can be damned sure) you feature in the jungle telegraph tomorrow. (Not that I ever did that).

This is FOOD

You may think I'm joking, but I'm definitely not! My friend Sunniva and I were visiting a farm nearby to have a hundred kilos of apples transformed into pure apple juice, and suddenly found ourselves standing right underneath these poor wooly creatures' former heads...

Grilled sheep's heads are immensely popular as autumn and Christmas food in Western Norway. I've never had one, but friends of mine boast about having swallowed the eyes. Yikes! Whoever wants to have a go is welcome to visit between now and Christmas...

Highlights from work I: I'm a Trainee

(Photo: T.Bickhardt)

My job is not only about research conducted from a tiny office (luckily). The photo shows me rowing a boat with the eight other trainees taking part in this year's trainee programme in my region. On the agenda is personality development and cross-institutional network building. For the purpose of becoming more of a team we spent about two hours rowing an old church boat to a tiny, roadless farm where we ate locally produced goat meat. Being a trainee is not bad!

Postcard from Idun/flying in from outer space

My darlings everywhere - how are you all? Me: busy, too busy to even begin to locate the telephone to phone you. Living is just so demanding right now, or (and this scares me) is this just my first taste of Life After Studying?

That was the excuse. Here comes the news. Or...there is none. Jeez, I am exceptionally scatterbrained today, but at least it made a nice rhyme. Oh, yes: I started my new job. It's great - great colleagues and interesting though sometimes peculiar tasks (nanotechnology). I am being taken care of in a zillion ways - I now have one mentor for every finger on my hand. Two days into my employment I was sent to a conference. Nice, I thought. Then, this week, nanotechnology in Stockholm, and the coming week, a trainee seminar. Also, my first application deadline is coming up. Life IS a deadline; life moves fast. So, I've never slept so little in my own bed before! But still nice.

It's unbelievably pleasant to be home. It feels like a holiday, but one that never ends. The fire place is lit at night, someone bakes an apple cake with Aroma apples from Husabø (it's a farm our ancestors once ran, and the trees remain). It's oh, so silent (No Murphys, Toby, isn't it great?) and you every morning you wake up with the mountains still outside. Examples:





Today is Sunday. I landed in Bergen on Friday, intentionally as a transit point between the work journey and a modified hen's party on Saturday. Somehow, my friend Silje talked me into not going to bed. This always happens, probably because I am weak and she is convincing. At 6 am we texted someone with whom I was to take the train at 8.40 am (for some reason in Finnish) to say that I would have to take the next. After three hours of deep sleep, I travelled to the next party, which began at 11 am on Saturday and ended early this morning. Buenanotte, brainpower! I can feel my body's "no battery" sign flashing...so long, my dears!

Important postscript, all ye foreigners reading this: In ancient times, Nordics believed their Gods, worn down by old age (plus, no doubt, drinking, fighting with swords and having Viking sex) could rejuvenate themselves through eating apples. Not just any apples: The apples of Idun. I am planning to have a bite right now, to see if it works.

Do not despair...

...the blog is only having a little break. It is exhausted after all the partying, and promises to be back any day now.

The Realisation of the Promised Vestiments

(or, catch-up number 1)



Next stop, West-End costume designers

Don't worry, the bananas didn't get it.

Catharsis III: Finishing My Beans

One of my most hilarious character flaws is a perpetual need to stock up on food. Normally, I am unaware of this phenomenon. But the minute I decide to move houses and start checking out my cupboard contents, there it is! Enough food to keep a family of five alive for a month.

This time, the amount of bean types hit me particularly hard. In my cupboard, I found no less than 8 kinds of beans distributed in 11 cans and two bags: soy beans, mung beans, chikpeas, green lentils, kidney beans, canneloni beans, berlotti beans and, of course, baked beans. Through ingenious smuggling techniques, I have now made my friends help me consume most of these. I do, however, have 5 left, and only two days to eat them. Don't warn Toby and Maria! Hehe

Catharsis II: Library Returns

Post-Dissertation Catharsis

Finishing a big piece of work requires serious celebrations. This is the moist side to the ongoing process of riddance. Please don't feel sorry for my liver - I am flying back to the Kingdom of Imposed Teetotalism, Norway, in only two days.

Thursday
2 Stellas
2 Leffe
- memory gap -
At least 2 beers of unknown type
1 Malibu Pineapple

Friday
Water x 10

Saturday (Oh My God)
An unknown number of glasses of wine,
spread out in time and interspersed by
gypsy dance

Sunday
I thought white day,
but as Sunniva aptly reminds me, we had:
2-4 Erdinger and Stella
at least 2 glasses of rosé

Monday
Another white day.
Max. 2 glasses of red wine

Tuesday
1.5 can of exciting beer on the roof, then 1 cup of rosé
- time gap -
1 glass of white wine
2 glasses of red wine
2 Erdinger
1 Malibu Pineapple
1.5 Tequila

Idun in the Sky with Extremely Many Diamonds

I am done. I am done. I can't believe it.



(Photo: Hans-Marius Foeleide, Sandane. Nicked from NRK Sogn og Fjordane)


Toby, who patiently helped me print my four coupies of about 57 pages each before doing his, is also done, or better still: he is running for his life just now to UCL, which closes at 5pm, with his bound dissertation in hand, just as I ran to SOAS to try and make it before our closing time, 4pm. The last text message read:
"At Russel Square now, 20 minutes to go!".

The drama, which was not that real since the deadline is tomorrow, was still memorable: We printed, found mistakes, printed again, found mistakes, and then printed without looking, and eventually ran to the binding shop in Angel where the colour pages were printed and the darn thing was finally bound.



This was at 3.30, and I tried to calculate if it would be possible to get it in today. Then I ran to the bus, ran from the bus, bolted up the stairs at SOAS past sweaty professors who have forgotten what writing a dissertation is all about - and made it by about 30 seconds. I have to add at this point that I had no less than 20 books from the SOAS Library in my backpack, so this was not only running, but running with a certain edge to it. I could feel people staring at my sweaty chest, messy hair and pathetically flushed face, thinking "My God". This did, however, not affect me to any mentionable extent, as I had arrived on the second floor and caught a distant glimpse of the door to the promised land.

Just as I stepped in, the lady went "Oh, it's four" and shut the door (behind me, luckily). And so it was done. I know it's only Thursday, but more importantly, it is NOT Friday, and in this fact lies a personal victory of unimagiable significance. Now I will go and swim in a barrel of beer.

The Pact

Kids' screams down from the market pierce my hard-pressed head like sharp needles. I'm drinking tea as if tea was magic potion with the ability to magically reduce my scandalous word count. The deadline is Friday, but I have pledged to hand in my dissertation by Wednesday. Below, the co-signer of the pact, Louise, one month ago, about to discover how little time she had left for writing. Like me, Louise is notorious for her time consumption. But we can do it! See you Wednesday, Louise!

Recent Events III: Python eats pregnant ewe

So far, this picture has been the only good thing about the ongoing newspaper war in London, which entails that about 20 people will attempt to force LondonLite into your bag and another 20 will throw the London Paper at you (in a single afternoon).

The memorable caption goes:

"A python sits on a road after swallowing a pregnant ewe (ei søye) in the Malaysian village of Kampung Jabor, about 124 miles east of the capital Kuala Lumpur. The six-metre reptile [after this I will NEVER walk barefeet in the woods or visit Malaysian villages, I repeat, NEVER], weighing in at 198.5lb, was too full to move, making it easy for firemen to capture it.

Epilog
Biletet har sett meg så til dei grader ut av spel at eg heldt på å døy av skrekk i dag tidleg då eg skulle dusje og mistok kjønnshåra mine for ein enorm edderkopp. Pistre!

Recent Events II: More about the Canal

By some beautiful coinsidence, I discovered a notice one day for a canal festival in Islington, went there on the day, and, two days later, hitched a canal ride through the Islington tunnel with a woman who turned out to be the organiser of the event.

This wonderful enthusiast used to work in an office next to the canal at King's Cross, and told us (as we travelled through the Islinton tunnel underneath Chapel Market and all the rest of it) she had rented a boat for seven years on which she lived half the week. From her residential docks, she set out every morning to her workplace, tying up her boat by the canalside. After seven years she had saved enough money (from not renting a flat and commuting) to buy the boat. Having retired, she can now puff along Britain's waterways all year long, at the pace of a trout, having coffee, watching the geese and chatting with other life-indulging narrowboat owners - while the rest of us lead fast lives right nextdoor.

Canal people are nice people. As you can see from the photos, they know how to relax and enjoy a nice, sunny day.

Recent Events I: Fire!

Don't we just love nightly events that, despite waking us up, will add spice to our breakfast conversations! This fancy fire engine decided to pay Chapel Market a visit one night at 3 am. For a while we wondered if we were in fact on fire, as the van seemed to park dangerously close to the bakery downstairs. But we were not, a rubbish bag was. Any action, though, is good action in times like these.

Living With Men

It's funny, isn't it, how women just seem to take on all the boring tasks that prevent kitchens, worldwide, from turning into stinking garbage pits?


This seemingly harmonic photo from the kitchen this morning, of Toby and my father contemplating breakfast, actually conceals a darker, more inconvenient truth: active avoidance of dishwashing.



Both of the depicted individuals claim that on several occasions in the past year, they were actually quite close to doing the dishes. Unfortunately, both have yet to produce any substantial supporting evidence of this, which begs the inevitable question: Is this what living with men is always going to be like?

Double-speak?

Toby's fed up with kitchen papparazzis. Or is he?

NEWSFLASH: controversial dissertation photograph released

This exclusive picture shows what is believed, by experts, to be someone actually working on their dissertation.

The grainy photograph was delivered to our office earlier today in a sealed anonymous e-mail. Speculation over who could have taken the photograph and for what purpose has dominated the conversation in the kitchen.

In response to calls to act, government Minister for Misinformation, Kermit T. Frog, this evening poured scorn on the claims saying: "This is a load of codswallop. Someone idiot has taken a photograph of an innocent blogger, and faked it to look like they're actually working. I can't believe anyone would fall for such a load of nonsense."

Sources close to the Chapel Market intellegence agency, Darrel the fishmonger, indicated that bosses do not believe that anyone in this country is currently working on their dissertation, and that the public should remain calm.

"In a break from our normal programming...

...we bring you the Notting Hill Carnival."




With far too much time on our hands here in Chapel Market (ahem!), we thought we'd use up an afternoon down at 'ole Notting 'ill. Little did we know*, someone had arranged a giant party with lots of barely-clothed people dressed up in colourful feather outfits.



"What the 'ell is this?", said we.



"Why, 'tis the Notting 'ill Carnival, mate", said the kindly police man. "Enjoy the show...!".

So we did.

(NB: if you happen to be the person depicted in the above photograph : please contact Toby immediately at t dot wilkinson at lineone dot net, I repeat, immediately, thank you.)

(Hi, yep, um, just a reminder, if this is you, I'm still waiting, um, right...)

---

*(Actually that's a lie: we did know it was on, but why spoil a good story with the truth?)

It is said to have advantages

Rain, rain, go away,
come again another day.
Little Johnny wants to play.

Rain, rain, go to Spain,
Never show your face again!


But listen to this: The origin of the lyrics of Rain rain go away are said to date back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). During this period of English history there was constant rivalry between Spain and England culminating in the launch of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Spanish Armada consisted of many Spanish galleons and was sent to invade England.

The Armada was led by Duke of Medina Sedonia and the the fleet numbered over 130 ships. The English fleet, under Admiral Lord Howard, totalled 34 small Navy vessels and 163 armed merchant ships. But the great Spanish Armada was defeated. Only 65 Spanish galleons and just 10,000 men returned to Spain. The attempt failed, not only because of the swift nature of the smaller English ships but also by the stormy weather which scattered the Armada fleet.