At Trondheim

If you imagine the few minutes of late afternoon when the sunlight loses its hot, midday glare and slants across the sky so that everything glows in its true colours and suddenly you notice things you couldn't see before - chimney pots and the textures of bricks and the shapes of the mountains - and everyone's faces seem softer; and if you can imagine the light staying that way all day long, then you can start to picture the world this far north. During the day Trondheim's huge skies are a luminous white-blue.  Sunset, when it finally comes, lasts for hours; at around midnight the tufts of high cloud turn rose and ochre while the sun slides below the mountains for an hour or so. The light level shifts so gradually that time seems to slow down. The soft, oblique sun and long, light-filled shadows show up the spaces between things and draw out their edges in a deepened field of vision - in this sharpened perspective you can feel the depth and diversity of the landscape and everything seems to stand out and invite attention. The low sun rises and sets in the north so it circles the whole horizon as the day passes. This full solar gyre doesn't allow for only one perspective on a street or tree; every hour the scene has been made new again. Trondheim's fleeting light-alchemy working over everything while time seems to wait... the gentle warmth of the sun and the cool breeze... the city rising over the fjord up the forested valley... the quiet streets with their painted wooden buildings... and the unrushed, friendly people, especially those I've been working with and becoming friends with over the last few days... This is the Trondheim I'll take with me - my dream of the North.

Had I been visiting in winter, I'm told, I would have found a very different sort of north: people closed up by the darkness, but here I am in summer days that have forgotten how to end.

It has been inspiring working with Mikael, Omar, Tobias and Yousif, who invited us out here to support them in setting up an  Alternatives to Violence programme. The group are calling themselves Mangfold og Glede - Diversity and Joy - and have made setting up AVP in Trondheim their goal with some imaginative practical support from Norwegian Quakers in Oslo. The Trondheim group has worked long and hard to organise a training programme for nonviolent activists to become AVP group facilitators. Roswitha and I ran the first three-day workshop at the weekend, focusing on practical tools for approaching and handling conflict. 14 people started and finished and there were 12 nationalities in the room. Most of those participants will now go on to facilitator training this weekend. There is still a lot of work to do to get things off the ground but the goal to establish AVP here is achievable and well worthwhile. It has been a joy to meet such generous-hearted, engaged people who want to help build bridges between their communities here.

Trondheim has a cathedral made from the local stone, which turns shades of sea-green and blue in the sun. The thing is huge - it's puzzling that people decided to build such a big stone building  this far away from power and people. Tobias says that monks used to walk from Santiago de Compostela in Spain all the way here. 'Vámanos a Trondheim, hermanos!' and they'd hitch up their robes and go. If they arrived in the last 150 years or do they would have found about 50 stone saints to greet them in the statuary arranged around the rose window of the facade: all the big names are there - Christopher, Joseph, Paul... - together with some Norwegian ones who earned their place by putting Viking heads on sticks for God. I don't want to overload you with Christian images and symbols in this blog - you've already had the candles in Cologne and of course there was the fish in Delft - but I'd like to show you the statue of St Sunniva. You can see her in the picture above - she's the good-looking one between the Christian with the axe and the Christian holding the arrow, and just above the Christian holding the severed heads. Sunniva is said to have fled from Ireland to escape the heathens there to arrive in Norway, where she is associated with various miraculous events, including dying in a rockfall that she prayed for and then not decomposing properly. The Sunniva picture is for Sunniva.

The cathedral is covered with gargoyles by Norway's favourite sculptor, Vigeland. Each of the gruesome creatures is unique, with a visage and personality entirely unlike any of the others. One clutches its own baby gargoyle to its breast; another has the head of a newly hatched reptile; one has turned its own head right round, and so on. They are sinister to the point of being disturbing and also ludicrously comical, which creates a strangely enjoyable effect in one's soul. The artist must have had so much weird fun dreaming up all these nasties. The angel statue on the tower is also Vigeland's doing.Confidentially, the guide told just the three of us, away from the main group, that the sculptor gave the angel Bob Dylan's face, and it's so high up that no-one notices.  (Please don't pass this on - it's a secret.) I suppose even Vigeland had to stop short of giving him a guitar as well but he MUST have wanted to - I mean, you would, wouldn't you. I wonder if Bob knows that in Norway he has wings and catches lightning. Unfortunately the terrifying gargoyles weren't quite close enough for my camera but I can show you Tobias and Hella instead. They are not terrifying at all (sorry) but I so enjoyed our day off with these two that I want you to meet them here (and read in their faces, perhaps, the easy-going, north-light happiness that seems possible here). Hella did all our vegan food for the 17 of us at the workshop, staying up til four in the morning one night preparing our next day's meal, and Tobias provided everything that Roswitha and I needed to live in the city for a week.

Then late for the early morning train to Oslo, putting out the rubbish in the rain: bright light beyond the showers - great, blue-grey layers of cloud and so much light, the sun stabbing through with luminous, crepuscular rods of blue-white over the city, then the run to the bus stop.