Norway - December 2001

But it's all ranting, she said.  
Yes, cross-country skiing gives you a lot of time to think, 
so that's what I have reported.  
If you are easily bored, please just look at the pictures and captions.  
Don't say I didn't warn you.  

Go to Norway and go by boat! The survival suits they promise to give you if the boat sinks at least look like they'd work, unlike the rotting cushions you'd get given on a British ferry if they leave the doors open and roll over because they were too cheap to install a lightbulb in the bridge to warn the captain that the barn doors had been left open. Our lives are just not as "cost-effective" as their bottom line. If you want good survival kit in England, you should bring your own. That goes for the food too.

The weather was so rough on the way across that we didn't eat, and the bingo was cancelled. At least if you go by plane you fly above all this trivial Climate Chaos and don't notice it.

As a reckless rebel, I try to reject and spit on my notional culture that has been passed down and refined since way back in the nineteenth century. Possibly the worst expression of our dominant western culture is Christmas; so embarrassing now that serious Christians are expressing the idea that Christ's official birthday should be moved somewhere else in the year. Of course, his actual birthday must be January 1, year 1, the start of the calendar because they hadn't invented the number zero yet, god or no god available to assist people with their mathematics.

We call ourselves the pinnacle of civilization. But visit a museum: can you find anything there throughout the ten thousand years of human history and infinitely varied cultures that is as tasteless and crap as the choss that's strung up all over the place for Christmas? Goddammit, it's unbelievable. It's the pits, big time. And what of the ritual. "Home for the holidays," was the theme chosen by Laura Bush as she went on and on about the White House preparations for an hour on Fox Nuisance TV. You're supposed to spend a day with your family, and that's meant to be special, and good. If it's so good, why don't you spend a lot more time with them, then you wouldn't bother with a special day in the year to be with them. Maybe the ritual would then be to spend a day away from your family and do something interesting like dance around with funny masks on the rooftops. That would have more to it than sitting and eating and eating and eating.

And just where the hell did all this presents idea come from? Hours of sheer misery and stress shopping for them, for one or two seconds of feigned gratitude. Just say no, as Nancy Reagan told us to do. No cards, no presents, no family, no brain damage: go somewhere else where you don't understand the language while the rest the world goes to hell.

The colour is authentic and it's the middle of the day. This is the bridge over the river at Voss. Why the hell did we come here?

Our new-found environmental credentials meant we weren't going to do any frivolous flying involving the laying down of incredible trails of tax free carbon dioxide and other chemicals in the stratosphere merely for entertainment when there is an alternative. I wanted to catch a ferry down to Spain, then use trains south and west towards Portugal. But there came the usual excuse: We don't have enough time.

We'll be travelling three days there, and three days back, and that would be more than half our holiday wasted. Oh dear. Someone appears to have been educated by the rapid transit industry. The fact is, the holiday begins at exactly the time when you leave the front door of your house, if not when you quit work the afternoon of the day before. The travelling is integral to the holiday, or we'd just stay in the hotel across the road and visit all the local tourist attractions we've never had time for. But we don't, because we want to go someplace else, defined by the fact that there must be travel between here and there. Unfortunately, the airplane companies have monopolized and rendered the standard means of long distance travel so goddamn miserable that you want it to be over with as fast as possible. Speed is of the essence.

Also, since the economy must grow two percent a year to stay the same, because it has been engineered to exist in a perpetual state of debt where there is never such a thing as a surplus, we all have holidays that are too short. Economic growth is proportional to work achieved, and for most jobs this means more hours. Becka is a university lecturer, so she increases her productivity by lecturing to more students in bigger halls per hour, even as the pace of the material that is being lectured must slow down because with so many students it cannot be so well targeted. But if you pretend this effect isn't happening, her work efficiency has doubled in three years according to accountancy nobheads, although it makes marking essays not so fun. Me: I don't subscribe to my civic duty. Sooner or later the work required will exceed the lifetime available, so I try to run back down the escalator as fast as I can because there's no point in being near the top.

This is good. For once they are reporting exactly what the war is for. I also like this shot because it illustrates the class war too. That number in the bottom right hand corner of the screen is a meaningless report on the value of rich people's "investments". Not, for example, the number of peasants inexcusably massacred so far: up 276 to a total of 4502 for the month. Their lives are not counted because they just don't count. Period.

Portugal was still too far away, she said. Norway, however, was just a brief ferry ride from Newcastle to Bergen. About 27 hours. We paid for the cheapest cabin on deck 1 of an eight deck ship. Becka was so looking forward to settling down into our fumy windowless box that I didn't want to spoil it by mentioning what the weather was going to be like. Six metre swell, broadside. We could just about cope with it lying down and sleeping.

The last five hours of the journey was along the fjords and barrier islands of southern Norway, away from the weather. I managed to read a whole book and get bored. Becka read the guidebook and got enthusiastic. We arranged for 40 Krona in change that would be needed for the bus trip to the town youth hostel by buying a tin of kippers with a fiver. The duty free shop sold as much frozen meat as it did booze. Now why would anyone want to buy frozen meat on a ferry?

The city of Bergen has its attractions. We caught the first train out the very next morning. The toilets at the train station are five krona for admittance. (Krona? Isn't that a type of margarine you're supposed to spread on Alan Whicker?) Public lavatory fees are the first sign that a country is sliding into barbarity.

The train line runs over the mountains to Oslo in about four hours. We got off at Voss, the first skiing location along the way, and headed for the tourist information where we were told that the skiing season was not quite open yet. Try a little farther along the line. The next trains were due in 5 minutes and 5 hours away. We didn't make it. We crammed our bags into the smallest left luggage compartment and headed across the river and up to the Bordal Gorge. This well-advertized attraction was not listed the Rough Guide. The snow sprayed down onto a road that was nothing but sheet ice. What a surprise: the gate to the gorge was padlocked shut for our safety due to ice on the path. That was a wise move. We carried on up the hill in a blizzard until it got dark at around three.

Ha bloody ha. I'm sure we've got a few signs that are funny to them.

Over in Geilo, things looked a bit more like a normal ski resort. Shops selling skiing tat, expensive bars, bare concrete architecture with wedges of frozen slush on each step. We tramped down from the train station looking for the youth hostel that was supposedly near to the tourist information in the town centre, according to our Rough Guide. We could find neither. The place was completely dead with not a single useful map posted up anywhere.

The first person we passed said that the former owners had sold it and bought the pizza restaurant in the centre, but it used to be somewhere in that direction. After half an hour of fruitless searching we came back to the train station and called the number we had been given by the Bergen information office. There was a hostel, but it was actually two kilometres down the highway. The office was shutting at eight. There was no sympathy from the person who informed us that we should have known better than to follow our Norway 2000 guidebook; we should have asked directions from a taxi driver.

Cross country skiing is not like "ordinary" skiing. There's a lot more variety. You don't just have the swing left, swing right, swing left, over and over again. You also have the forward skid, the wishbone waddle, the shakey snowplow, and a lot of new ways to fall.

It was twenty to eight. We ran (unable to face paying six quid for a taxi for such a distance) Becka dumped her bags and I carried them both. They were plenty heavy. At five past eight she returned up the icy footpath having not found it. We turned to Plan B: Geilo camping (a shut and locked set of wooden sheds by the river). Plan C: Geilo apartments (deserted with one very drunk person at the desk only just able to spell the price). Plan D: the other Geilo apartments (no vacancies). Plan E: a "proper" hotel (a tariff of 2000 krona each for the added value of having your bags carried by someone dressed as a performing monkey would have really pissed us off). Plan F: catch the train back to Bergen (costly, and the last one had gone).

We didn't panic. We were carrying an emergency tent, carry mats and two good sleeping bags, so plan Z could have been kicked off at any time were the convergence criteria been met. But we'd never camped on snow before and our feet were wet. Then Becka realized she'd lost her wallet. It was going to be an expensive night after all. She ran back to the train station where she was sure she'd left it by the phone, and it was locked. But she did manage to discover a budget hotel (Ro Hotel) above the station while she was there looking for a way in. The desk man didn't do much english, but understood the concept of "cheapest room please", and found us one overlooking the tracks with mile long freight trains rumbling long in the night. I slept like a log until I was shaken awake at eight. It was still dark and much too cold outside. Where did we get the idea that we could have survived a night out there? Becka found her wallet by the phone. We discovered that Norwegian breakfast came with the room, and filled our bellies with cheese and pickled fish.

Road to nowhere with nobody but us and the snow.

The sun has still not risen when we hit the Tourist Information Office to see about some other accommodation. Opening the glossy brochure, the lady said, "I recommend this hotel for only 1640 noks each, including breakfast and dinner." That's 250 quid. I was getting cheesed off with this overpriced country. The hotel we had found by luck without the help of a map at 9 o'clock at night in was 440 noks a room for the two of us. We had specifically asked the "Information" woman for cheap accommodation, so why was she showing us this?

Outside, in the cold of the night before, we were actually practicing this much vaunted the "Free Market Economy". Nobody else was. You never see any of those professional free-market economist thinkers out there on the streets testing reality by searching for sensibly priced accommodation to pay for with their own money. No, when they travel to conferences and meetings they get their secretaries to book their hotels and it is paid for from expense accounts. At these conferences they make speeches proclaiming that the people on the other side of the argument just want everything handed to them on a plate. The mathematical economic models which they propound, and which they use to prove that their system will give everyone greater wealth in the long term, assume at the start that knowledge is perfect. They don't account for the fact that there may be appropriately cheap accommodation out there, but the man on the street just can't find it in time before he freezes to death. If he winds up in an expensive hotel, he must have freely chosen that level of service, they concur. But if there was anything approaching adequate knowledge, there wouldn't be so much goddamn advertising all over the place as there is. Once a hotel can get away with overcharging, it has the spare cash to build bigger signs and make it more difficult to locate the alternatives. It gets disproportionately more customers, gains more money with which it converts into the power to mislead yet more people, until the alternatives that were once there go out of business because they weren't "competitive" enough. This vicious circle -- which is a fact at every level -- is not a part of the standard economic doctrine, where advice to the politicians tends to dictate that establishments such as the Tourist Information Offices should be privatized, and used as tools for the wealthier hotels to further disseminate their lies.

Becka likes this photo of incredibly crusty snow being further melted and crusted by the morning sun to guarantee a rocky skiing experience from which you can't get up once you have fallen down because it's like going through the ice on a deep pond.

Not that I could work out what was behind the Norwegian Tourist Information Office, except to believe that they were not as good as they could be with all the resources that were clearly available when it came to kitting out the buildings. Sometimes they have internet terminals for which you must pay through the nose. I mean, what do tourists normally use internet terminals for? Sending emails home to their friends telling them where they are and what a great time their having in such-and-such a place, that's what. Now why would the Tourist Information Office want us to pay to have to do this. Down at the public library (which you can find if you are lucky) there's tonnes more information about the town you are in, not just glossy hotel leaflets. And there's free papers, magazines and free internet. It is possible to provide.

Meanwhile, for our independent travel needs we are supposed to turn to our Rough Guides and Lonely Planets who are scrupulous with their material in that they do not take bribes, they say. All their researchers are fully professional and properly paid by the hour. Unfortunately, due to requirements of commercial publishers to make obscene profits in order to afford to advertise and compete (ie push anyone out of business who might be providing value for money), this doesn't add up to very many hours per town, per country, for work. I don't care how skilled these researchers are supposed to be, guide book writing takes time. Without enough of it spared, it's no bloody good. Add to that the fact that they force all the information into their standard branded guidebook template so that no matter which country you are, no matter how different and unique to all the other countries it is, you always know where you are with the book, because it's always the same. What is the point of that!

The best guidebooks are a labour of love. With encouragement and availability for sale, such a dedicated author could keep one up to date and out there, live. He would answer your letters. There would be a community of people using that material. But the book sales today have become so corporatized that there isn't any room for that. What we are offered now looks good, but is less handy than a trimmed down yellow pages directory for the country of destination together with a set of road and town maps. The rest you can see with your own eyes in about ten minutes of arriving in a place.

More of nowheresville. We've got lots of pictures like this. The grooves don't work so neatly on corners because the skis are straight and long. Perhaps the machine should make them wider when it's doing a bend.

I've always wondered why the Tourist Information Office network of, say, Norway, can't make itself tax-funded and accountable to the central government and nobody else. If, in a town, the best advice is to get the next bus out because it's a dump, they should be able to afford to tell it like it is. Tourists bring in export earnings and pay taxes, so it would be wise to give them a little back in terms of improving their holiday so that they will come again and send their friends. The officers in the local offices could actually be out searching for useful information, as opposed to acting merely as a repository for advertising brochures and leaflets. Not only could they post information onto the internet in a consistent form across their country, but they could have one employee who acted across the whole organization as the official editor who gathers the stuff together into a non-trashy serious guidebook with real opinions about stuff (us travellers don't have time to make up our minds; if we go somewhere rubbish we've wasted our time) and publishes it widely enough to beat the crap out of all these useless corporate offerings. If the corporations won't accept it, they can do a deal to take the whole text, add an introduction and wrap it in one of their good looking branded covers. Their "added value". Then they could market it, and we could get some decent information for a change so that worthwhile establishments which we want would not go out of business leaving behind the profitable dregs that is the economy today.

We stayed in Ro Hotel till they closed for Christmas, and then moved to one of their excellent self-catering apartment units across the road for the same price. Since we had come to realize that accommodation was a difficult issue, we stayed in Geilo for the week.

This is the cross-country ski trail tractor. Why is he only making one trail instead of two?

Cross country ski hire is done in the same shop as for downhill, except that it is considerably cheaper. You wear a pair of lightweight shoes and carry a poxy pair of skis that feel as though they are going to snap in the wind. Then you stand in the way of the lifts like a pillock while all the proper skiers come swooping down the steep slopes with their expert speed and skill. They looked like they were having a lot more fun than we were going to have. I was jealous. Becka bought tickets for a single ride up a single lift for three quid each. This took us to the plateau at the top. We put on our skis and tripped over them. Then we studied the signposts for a long time, arguing. The mistake we didn't want to make was wind up on one of the downhill slopes because that would be a disaster. We located the head of a cross country trail about twenty metres away, freshly cut by some sort of a machine. From then on we did not see a single person till the afternoon. The ski grooves were pretty good for the most part except on downhill sections where you'd pick up speed but be trapped and unable to snowplow to slow down. Normally, at this point, the groove machine driver will have inserted a small wobble in the track which would throw you flat, like a man stepping off a moving bus without looking.

The ski map, in common with most examples of the genre, was pretty ridiculous. The background looked like it had been sketched in watercolours, and the trails you are trying to follow are painted over it in the clearest ink. This makes them easier to see: on the map. But that's not what is important. In reality, the context in which the trail sits in relation to the background is what counts. In complex areas, where the trail becomes difficult to follow on the ground, drawing a big red line right across the map in no way helps you solve the problem.

Frozen lakes were quite good. You were no better with skis than without them and the poles only worked if you found a crack to push the point into.

We took a shortcut to a different trail and fell over hundreds of times into the crusty snow. Lack of balance notwithstanding, the crust was very good at letting your pole push in real deep and grabbing the ring thing that is supposed to stop it going in too deep when you tried to pull it out at a different angle.

Perhaps ungroomed icy trails were not for us. We found a nice smooth way down through the forest, and got back to the hotel in time for it to be really dark. Our room was squalid. That's what I liked about this hotel. None of this room cleaning nonsense to mess you about. Their apartment, when we moved into it, was even better because it had a kitchen. Unfortunately, there was no cutlery. The youth hostel back in Bergen had no cutlery either, and there was a sign informing guests that some ding-bat government regulation had forced them to confiscate it because it was considered unhygienic in communal areas. We were reduced to eating our first meals from spatulas until we found a bag of plastic spoons in the supermarket. Next year they'll probably take away all the toilet seats and expect people who have forgotten to bring their own to sit directly on the china rim.

Becka studied the XC ski map and worked out a plan. At the tourist office they displayed a list of the trails that had been groomed. We wanted to stick to them. There looked to be a great route which took you over the mountains into the next town called Ustaoset. The network of valley trails around the two towns (some of them floodlit for evening use) did not quite join up by about five kilometres. Surely there must be a pavement or a cycle track beside the road which we could ski on. According to the map, there were lots of houses in between. These people must be able to get around a little without a car. Negative, the tourist information lady insisted.

One of those handy sets of signs. The one post ones are less reliable because they're more apt to fall over or change direction than these two post ones.

We didn't believe her. An hour later the sun rose and spent the rest of that short day preparing to set. Becka tended to count on there being useable light until 4:30, which is really an hour after sunset. Inevitably we wound up in Ustaoset at about that time after an excellent day, and hit the road. There really was no pavement. Had the chossy snowbanks pushed up by the snowplows been any higher, we would not have made it. We got home rather late and sat around talking about what we were going to eat for so long that the supermarkets shut. The cheapest takeaway pizza was about 15 pounds, and it wasn't very good.

There was snowfall on each day, but the ski authorities were obviously worried it wasn't enough and were running their artificial snow machines over the slopes all night. We took a chairlift up that went right in the path of one and discovered that what they do is spray water which freezes as it flies through the air and on contact with things. The temperature was -14C in the valley. We were wearing all our clothes, exercising quite hard with the skiing and were still not warm.

We were becoming considerably better at this cross country skiing game over the days. We did two days on the main hill on the sunny side of the valley and two on the opposite side where there was only one ski lift. We saw a few more skiers there, but most of them took their cars to the top and went from the road. When we tried to come down into the valley the first time, there was nothing for it but to slide down on our backsides. This is quite a good position because you can actually sit on your skis with your feet still attached, and steer for a bit.

There were many patches of yellow snow along the popular trails because a lot of the Norwegians took their dogs for a walk with them when they went skiing. The leash always attached to a harness instead of a collar so that the dog could pull them up hills when it was keen and not busy burying its nose in someone else's yellow snow. Unfortunately, dogs aren't for hire in the same way that horses often are, and you're not allowed to whip them. Norway thinks it's a rabies free country, so they don't let you bring your own dog on the ferry from England, which just happens to be another rabies free country. Logic never the strong point of officialdom.

Sensible cross country ski bindings in contrast with ridiculous armour plated downhill bindings. There's this clever groove in the sole of the cross country shoe which lines it into the ski when your heal is down so that you do have some sideways control.

For Christmas day we converted to downhill skiing. There was much whinging from Becka until she remembered how to do it. She slipped off an unbelievably steep button lift at one point and fought her way through the deep snow and trees to get back to the piste. Then she refused to go up it again until she discovered that it was the only way out of that section of the resort. After getting up just that one last time, that whole area and set of ski runs accessed by it was considered out of bounds to us.

The Geilo ski patrol survey their domain and studies where they should drill the next hole and put up a sign which says "Stengt".

The ski lift tolls were automated and you had to feed this ticket into a machine like you do in the London Underground. You had to take your gloves off for this just in time to shiver your way up on the T-bar in a vicious cross wind. Two days was exactly enough to fulfil our quota of downhill skiing for a couple of years. Better still, the lifts shut at 3:30 so we didn't have to do it until we collapsed in order to get value for money.

Downhill skiing did not give so much time to think. While exchanging the skis I imagined how great it would have been to have been one of the early inventors of cross-country skiing in Norway four thousand years ago. You wouldn't waste time with patents or manufacturing companies or anything like that, you'd simply perfect your art of ski building, take your tools and head across the country in the winter showing it off to villages on the way. If anyone was really interested, you stay in their house, eat their food, drink their wine, listen to their stories, and show them how to build and use skis. People would think you were a great guy. After you had moved on, they would be able to use your new technology to collect wood and hunt reindeer without sinking up to their waists in snow. They would also have to be aware of a handy device called a backpack because it is impossible to carry anything in your hands when you are holding your poles and trying to ski. There are many people even today who have not got the idea of the backpack and insist on busting their arms carrying carrier bags every time they go shopping for vegetables. Why do they do it? Maybe introducing a new invention to people would not be such a breeze after all. They'd probably be perfectly happy using snowshoes, and blame it on you once everyone had started breaking their legs attempting to ski.

This is the Flamsbana line, photographed from the train on another part of the line. The descent is 500m in 30km. Since trains can't do hairpin bends, as required by the topography here, it overshoots into tunnels, turns the corner underground before coming out into daylight again.

The skiing was pretty standard. The crowds were thickening out. I have always been amazed that collisions are so uncommon. Tiny toddlers were getting skiing lessons down in the creche, and six year olds were flying down the slopes in hard hats like the future addicts to fast cars. Wonderful speed and reflexes they are developing, but I'd have thought that sledging round the back of the school was a more effective way of getting children exercised and socialized properly.

At the end of two days we could do black runs and had been up every allowable lift half a dozen times. If we had been there any longer we would have had to move onto snowboards to give ourselves a hard time. The trick now was to work out how to ride on the Flamsbana train line, the one must-do tourist attraction in the district. This is a spur that juts off from the line between Geilo and Bergen and handily deposits you nowhere useful. Sometimes there is a ferry that takes you from Flam, along a fjord to Gdenger where there is supposed to be a bus back to Voss. Being stranded in any one of these places would have been a bad mistake. There was a good chance that with all the special timetable changes around Christmas, the system wouldn't work. But Becka sorted it out and we had a good time sight-seeing until the sun set halfway along the fjord and we couldn't see anything. We caught the late train to Bergen from Voss where there was going to be more chance of accommodation.

Downtown Bergen from the hill.

Touristing around a city always seems like a good idea until I actually do it, when I find it doesn't quite live up to expectations. There's no clear thing you're supposed to do, once you've done (or rejected on grounds of expense) the cafes and you've walked up and down and around the old quarters of the city. The tourist information office was shut till the new year, as were half the museums. The obligatory aquarium was open (well, you gotta feed the fish anyway), so we tried to put it off until the afternoon when we inevitably wound up at that.

Sponsored by the fish farming industry, it seemed by their video presentation and half their displays, we were a bit put out that we had to pay so much to get in. Fish farming is pretty evil because you feed other fish caught out at sea to the fish in the pens, so it doesn't actually cut down on marine exploitation. Add to that, the serious fish parasite problems in the pens (which are open to the sea) dealt with by dumping very toxic, technically legal chemicals into the water over them. The problem is, it's very profitable, and the profits get diverted into politics and the promotion of lies rather than towards honest research and better technology. Nevertheless, some of the useful chemicals have been banned in Norway and the salmon farming industry has simply opened up a bunch of farms over in Scotland where the government is somewhat easier to mislead and bribe, possibly because there are fewer people running that country who know anything about the sea and can stand up to the industry and their bullshit.

You could buy seal fur handbags as well as these seal fur seal toys from the Bergen aquarium. You get a lot of propaganda about how environmentally friendly fish-farming is to the environment from there too. The cafeteria wasn't open so I couldn't see if they were selling some of that nutritious whale meat from the South Atlantic as well.

Aquariums are often sad places for me. I see all these fish and seals that I have met out in the sea, free, while diving, living in such tiny tanks. How do they get used to this glass wall on one side with all these weird faces staring into them from the air?

We walked up the hill to the north of Bergen where, from the bottom, it looked like the houses were perched on the cliff. The path went up hairpin after hairpin and, at one point, a hoard of children on sledges came hurtling down on the ice. The sledges had very good brakes made of metal claws they pressed with their feet. At the top of the hill is the funicular railway. Like most things here, it's costly to ride. Luckily the walk was free or we wouldn't have seen the view. This was why the sledgers came in packs, they were too lazy to walk up for themselves.

In researching more background for Norway in order to get the rant quota of this article up to beyond 80%, I found a website called the Nordic News Network. As I recalled, Norway and in particular Sweden have come in for a lot of condemnation from the economic schools I most like to hate. You occasionally read an article or hear rumours about how the Nanny state in Scandinavia is bankrupting the nations. That everyone is living off the state, devoid of entrepreneurial spirit, and hating it. Pretty soon they're going to have an economic and social collapse. You left wing people fighting for a health service and free education and welfare, you don't know where it will lead if you get your way. It would be a disaster for England or America. You want us to wind up in a hellhole like Sweden or Norway where, granted, there is very little poverty, but everyone is poor because they do not fear poverty enough.

Far better, in Thatcher's game, to give all the wealth from north sea oil to the rich. That always stimulates their wealth, which is what counts in the economy. And it's morally right because the rich people are responsible for the oil being out there in the first place. Only they have the means to organize oil rigs and drill for it, so whatever they get out must belong to them. They can make their rigs as cheaply and as dangerously as they like, because it is their private property and it wouldn't be right to meddle with that any more than you would like people to camp in your garden and tell you what to do. I remember the Piper Alpha disaster when the news reporters afterwards visited one of the Norwegian rigs and found out all the safety features (like putting the living quarters as far away from the dangerous machinery as possible) which the British rigs did not have because our operators did not care about anything but profit. It is part of our culture that British workers don't value their lives so highly as these inefficient foreigners, we were told. Or, more factually, British workers have no real say in their working conditions. As it should be. They are just not qualified to balance the equation between their risk and Occidental's gain. They suffer from this irrational, emotional attachment to their lives. If they were allowed to run things, there would be not enough profits, and no one would build any oil rigs, the oil workers wouldn't have any jobs, and would die of starvation instead. These Scandinavians were just too stupid to understand these economic fundamentals of life when they insisted on building safe oil rigs even though we told ourselves that it simply was not possible.

The architect of this so-called Swedish model of society (spread to Norway) was Olaf Palme, the Prime Minister, who was assassinated on the streets of Oslo in 1986. The police investigation of his murder has been bungling on ever since with no sign that they are interested in finding the killer. It stinks. The result has been the same as with the death of John Smith, the Labour party leader, ten years later in Britain: an organized right wing coup at the executive level in the leading left wing party. They turned it around in order to bring through two aims in life: align the country with NATO and the promotion of US state violence, and sell the whole country out to private corporations in the name of neo-liberal reform designed specifically to redistribute the wealth from the poor to the rich where it belongs.

By giving the rich all the wealth, poor people were supposed to benefit by a "trickle down effect". They are, unlike the rich, not responsible enough to cope with being given wealth directly. Unless these people were forced to work hard for what they got, they would simply squander it away. This is a psychological weakness within human beings, the politicians tell us, while at the same time they take advice from economists who are assuming that in the market place free agents -- these same people -- have superhuman powers of perception and rationality and would never spend up to one tenth of their meagre income week after week on lottery tickets for which the expected return is 15 pence in the pound, if anything in their lifetime -- compelling proof that the economic theory is permanently bunk if there ever was one. What are they supposed to do? Borrow six thousand pounds from the bank and pay to go to university to learn about the psychology of probability and hopefully gain the mental equipment required to not be a sucker in this way any more? No one has ever explained to me how a person squanders away the availability of free health care, descent housing and a properly funded education system -- just three effective ways to benefit the poor in the way that cutting taxes so that rich people can spread their money on fast cars and spoilt children. The poor people are supposed to get out and earn their money from the rich by working for them in hotels, bars, mowing their massive garden lawns (no wonder there is a shortage of land), cutting their hair, driving their cars, massaging their egos, walking their dogs, cleaning their children and shining their shoes. In other words, doing all sorts of utterly unproductive labour for their idle masters. No wonder it leads to a recession. That was the service economy that was. As the Russian saying goes: The rich need the poor to feed them since they can't eat their money. You can always make real money in accountancy after university where the aim of the game is to move money out of other people's accounts into your own account without them noticing.

Norway was recently in the news because one of their cargo ships picked up about 400 Afghan refugees out of the sea near Australia last year. The nearest landing point was Christmas Island, an Australian piece of property much nearer to Indonesia than Australia, but which would have nevertheless permitted them to have claimed that they had entered Australia proper (although I think they have now changed the rules -- they want the privilege of owning bits of land all over the place, and the free resources tied to them, without conceding anything back, of course).

The Australian government told the Norwegian captain who steered the ship into their terroritory (sic) to Fuck Off, in about as many words. If you were so stupid as to collect them out of the sea, why don't you take them back to Norway then? they hollered. This problem really had nothing to do with Norway, so the Australians' next brilliant suggestion was for them to be sent to Tuvalu. Now, due to the effects of Global Warming (and Australia has played as good a hand in thoroughly wrecking the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol as anyone), Tuvalu is receiving many times the number of Typhoons as it used to and is sinking under the rising sea levels. The people of Tuvalu need to move from their islands within a generation or two. They looked to Australia, enormous continent in the Pacific, virtually empty, and were told: Fuck Off, It's All Ours. People say that most of Australia is a desert and uninhabitable, but even when you take this away, there is a hell of a lot that is left over. The idea that they need to keep people out in order to preserve their pristine landscape is a rude joke. They'll flatten any rainforest in a gnat's wink if it gets in the way of a Uranium mine. The fact is, nobody goes to Australia for the culture. Ever. If there is one thing that would improve it a whole lot, it would be the immigration of a couple of million grateful Afghanis. Their ability to scrape a living in a harsh environment means you wouldn't have to give them the best land. They would take poor land and make it valuable. They would enrich the nation's culture no end. They would retain their connections with their homeland and spread peace and enlightenment back into the heart of Asia where it is needed most. They would also retain a viable claim to the mineral resources of Afghanistan which the Yanks are preparing to thieve by getting concessions from a puppet government. Some of that wealth would flow over to Australia, and it wouldn't get destroyed by war. But the white Australian bastards can't imagine this because the primary symptom of an impoverished culture is the inability to consider the idea that it is impoverished.

At all costs, the Afghani claim to their land and their natural resources such as oil must be neutralized. They must either be killed, or sent into exile where they must not be allowed to prosper. If they prospered they'd be in a position to challenge this theft of their land. And there's no point in stealing something if someone's going to tell you to give it back.

One of the many reasons why the Australian Aborigines were "backwards" in relation to the Europeans is they didn't have horses. You can't ride kangaroos. If they could have ridden those bouncy things, they could have had an empire because it would have been possible to go from one town to the next not on foot without needing to survive for days just living off the land. And if you can survive on the land directly, you don't need to build any towns. Also, kangaroos are no good for pulling ploughs even for the crops that they don't have, so you can forget about any agricultural revolution that might have happened it it could, so don't blame it on them being inherently thick.

I'm idly thinking sometimes that it would have been nice if property rights of people who didn't happen to have guns were respected for a change. The Europeans should have dropped off horses, cattle, wheat and sheep in Australia and left the Aborigines in charge. In ten thousand years they would have a nation able to stand up to our own. Maybe it would be better. It couldn't be less peaceful. Maybe they would respect the land and be willing to share it with others who need it instead of being veritably selfish bastards who act as though they have a divine right from a God that told them it was wrong to share anything, particularly if you have stolen it. Sharing is the devil's highway straight to hell and poverty.

These economists make me go mad. The idea that you can generalize the economic effects of a street lemonade stand on a hot summer's afternoon to the to the machinations of the Exxon Oil Company whose innovations in the political, not the technical, sphere of business made it the most profitable corporation in history is as ludicrous as trying to generalize the destructive effects of a hydrogen bomb from a cap gun. Yet if you read the economic literature, that is what they continually do without apology.

The whole concept is a sham. It is a psychological human weakness to believe in certain harmful ideas like numerology, gambling, religion and jingoism. There are con acts that are as old as the hills, that we still always fall for because we were born that way. Our mind is like a wheel that gets trapped in certain particular shaped cracks in the pavement and hold us in a fixed direction. These cracks represent convincing lies. The free market does not maximize the efficiency of the world so that we can wheel about it with total liberty, freedom and ease, it maximizes profit. Profit comes from control. Control comes from breaking up the landscape beneath our wheels so that we get stuck in certain places and in certain directions where we can more effectively be screwed. Innovation today is not about making the world a better place, it is about constructing more fiendish ways to entrap us by our psychological design weaknesses that are there because we were built for the trees. That is the search for the superbrand, the more addictive junk food, the perfect political lie. The endgame of this current incarnation of capitalism is a system of culture that is designed to screw you faster and more thoroughly through your own faults, not to treat you as a human with known weaknesses that can be conquered if given a positive chance. A strong person, we now concede, is someone who can find the weaknesses in others. That goes for politicians, lawyers, military chiefs, advertising operatives and stockbrokers.

Back to the news we were watching in Bergen. The shoe bomber non-event was getting saturation coverage. But I was reminded of the air crash in New York last November. Three days after it had happened and everybody was killed, they decided that it wasn't communism, I mean "terrorism" (ie not the type of event they wanted us to be afraid of), but a technical fault. Bombs aren't usually capable of shearing off tailfins, you see. Apparently the planes were taking off too close together again. This one left one minute and forty-five seconds after the previous jet instead of the recommended round two minutes, and might have got caught out by the turbulance.

The news item disappeared and was erased from record. One thing for sure is it's going to happen again. Whether you die from an avoidable accident or from a "terrorist" incident you are still dead, which is a bad thing if you don't believe in an afterlife. No one, of course, asked the question: Why are these planes taking off so close to the wire? The state of the air changes from day to day with the wind and the pressure, so the behaviour of the invisible turbulance is also liable to vary. Do the airport managers send the planes out closer and closer together until the pilots start complaining that it's getting a bit rough, and then ease off a little? It only takes one vortex not to blow out of the way in time, and one plane to be slightly weaker than the others, and you die. They've deliberately played with your life, and lost. Do they care? No. Was I ever given the choice to take this risk? No. You know, the pilot could come down the aisle and say, "The wind's a little uneasy. Give us another ten bucks and I'll hold the plane on the runway for an extra minute to let it settle down." Choice? There is none. Sure, fifty different air-travel companies with different flight times, foot space and ethnicities of their ladies and plastic trays, but for the one thing I actually give a damn about -- my life -- they are all exactly the same. How can that be? Maybe they all got together and decided that the one thing in the world they were never going compete on is safety. They might have to make it better. Free market, my rat's foot. Put that big one in your laissez-faire economists' pipe and smoke it. Just why is it not okay to deregulate and let swing crucial stuff like medical care, education, and pension provision, and it's not okay to deregulate airline safety? Why do we have the qualifications to choose in one field, but not the other? Why doesn't the WTO go and do its economic liberalization experiments in that sort of area rather than messing with poverty control programs whose demise will kill a lot more people a lot more painfully. Useless damn lies, all of it.

Castleton Fell in Yorkshire the day after we got back. Arguably more striking than the scenery we experienced in Norway.

The Fiske Museum beside the boatyard is well worth the visit while you are waiting to catch your ferry. And it's cheap. They have all sorts of whale harpoons and glass models of the sea showing how the fishing boats encircle the schools of fish with their big nets and haul them in. It's a good one. If it's empty, the man shows you round.

The ferry home was not bouncy and we had more food. I bought a lump of interesting Norwegian brown cheese which Becka won't touch. We still got off with bad headaches, and I think it must be the fumes on the lower decks. The view first thing in the morning was of oil rigs spread everywhere across the sea. We sat around in the largest indoor public space, the Viking Bar on the sixth deck, until we were told off for daring to bring our own drink. Then they started playing bingo and we left and sat on the stairs for the rest of the day.

We stayed at a proper hotel on Sunday night in Newcastle for 25 quid (some cheap deal Becka's parents dug up that worked if you booked through the internet). We went out for a curry that was expensive and not very good. The bridges over the water are amazing. Then we bounced back to Liverpool for a few hours before driving to Yorkshire to spend New Year with a bunch of cavers on a farm. New year is always a tough time. Now it is 2002.