As part of my volunteering for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) I'm travelling from London to northern Norway and back to co-facilitate a nonviolence workshop and help a local group to establish AVP in the country. If you have nowhere else to be and have no other things to be doing then follow the journey's progress here, each day between 20 June and 1 July.

Win a great, yet small, prize

Predict the number of legs on the London-Trondheim-London journey - door to door and back - and I'll send you 'A Sense of the World' by Jason Roberts - an extraordinary and beautiful book about voyages.
a) Make a small (or big) donation to AVP at
www.justgiving.com
b) Leave a message on the blog by
clicking on the 'pobbledockets' link beneath any post in the blog.
c) In the comment box write something like 'I have given, honest!' and leave your name and your estimate of legs i.e. the number of individual vehicles (excluding walking) involved in the whole trip from central London to the flat in Trondheim and back again (excluding the week's work in between).


Rules: 1) Jokes like 'You'll only need two legs' etc., even if funny, will result in instant disqualification. 2) The winner is whoever's prediction is closest and, if shared with another, made earliest, so get your pobbledocket in early.

Thursday 30 June 2011

Trondheim to Oslo

Oslo, which ought to feel like the small, breezy town it is, feels like a noisy and dirty metropolis after quiet Trondheim (yesterday I should have mentioned the northern silence - not a dead void but a breathing calm of natural sound and the sudden shriek of the gulls... but no, there's only so much of me going on about the north that a person can take, I understand that). But Roswitha, Yousif and I enjoyed our AVP workshop with Quakers here. Afterwards Yousif and I met his friends for a beer. A beer here costs about 8 pounds - 8 pounds of one's leg with one's fist as one weeps over the bill. Generally things cost about three times as much here as in Britain; a loaf of bread is 2 to 3 pounds and a McDonald's burger (that staple international comparator) is 8 or 9 pounds, depending on whether you want 'cheese'. (I don't go to McDonald's, by the way, but sometimes I like to glower at the window). Sipping our drinks we ranged over various topics of shared interest. I managed to get answers to important questions like whether Norway's downsized army was still big enough to stop me if I wanted to invade; why there are holes in some of the coins here yet holes in different coins in Sweden; and whether this could this be put right. The answers are probably, just because and not really.
Oslo's fjord is home to several islands so I spent my day there exploring and riding on the ferries in the sun. People are almost all blond, tall and healthy-looking. I've not noticed anyone overweight at all (I haven't weighed anyone, though). The men have a fashion of wearing trilbies at the moment.
Walking along the harbour I happened across The World: a cruise ship I've read about for the super-rich. The ship has its own defence force armed with automatic rifles, state-of-the-art perimeter alarms and probably one or two big red buttons on the bridge whose function is not yet known. Each cabin is the size of a small flat and has its own balcony. In one near the top a man dressed in white (rich people of a certain age wear white, I've noticed) was impatiently tapping the rail, perhaps a little bored. I waved heartily and eventually he waved back in vague, imagined recognition. I do like to rub shoulders with the uber-rich from time to time. A stream of perfectly turned-out individuals streamed towards the gangway, including some very short, quite round men and tall, thin women with sunglasses so dark and so large that they might contain their own quantum singularities. A brief break in this pageant allowed me the opportunity to approach the staff at the bottom of the gangway. Although these were my fellow plebeians, sharing our place beneath the mighty stiletto heel of the world's billionaires, I knew they wouldn't see things the same way and I had only a few seconds before I would start to blight this confected perfection. 'Hello, how much to buy a place on this boat?' I asked. 'Millions of dollars,' he said. 'Ah.' I said I only had 200 kroner at the moment but I might come back another time. At the back of the ship I found its poo-pipe and I pushed my camera through the railings to take a few photos to celebrate this thing that we all have in common and which helps in its way to unite the world. Unfortunately I must have looked like I was casing the joint for an assault on the ship (and I probably could have shimmied up the pipe if I'd wanted to) because a young security guard came over and shut the gate next to me in case I tried anything smart (that's his arm in the picture). I struck up a conversation with him but this made him uneasy and he answered all my questions with 'I don't know.' He did know, though, and he knew I knew he did, and I knew he knew I knew he did, so to avoid getting trapped in an infinite loop of mutual knowing we traded wry smiles over the fence and left it at that.
That outsized bathtub for billionaires, that trumped-up trinket for our Trumps and Buffetts, that gated gulag of gluttony, that floating, foie-gras fortress (etc.) is an ugly boat. Calling any boat The World is a crime against good taste, especially a dull, square boat that sits flat in the water without a line of grace to it. That it gets called The World while billions of people go un-nourished in The Actual World adds a whole extra layer of ugliness. I'll still wave at them all, though - it must be weird being so far away on that sea. And I have to wonder: how far away am I from the world, living in wealthy Europe?
At this point my friend Jo would caution me against too much moral tone and she'd be right, so that's enough from me for today.
Trondheim to Oslo: a train and a bus.

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