Continental Dips: notes on a Scandisaster

Behold! I have returned from the continent.

Hi!

Hello! Before we start! An important message! If you were thinking of becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter, something which I would heartily encourage: do not do it via Apple’s in-app purchase/iOS/whatever you want to call it! They’ve just launched this new feature which technically allows people to subscribe using more channels but the Apple route takes a 30% cut - which, by the way, feels insane - and crucially pushes that cost onto you. By subscribing via them you’d pay more money for no reason, and that extra money wouldn’t even go to me. Just do it directly via Substack. Urgh! The modern internet! Anyway.

---

As promised this is Continental Dips numero dos. You may remember that, at some point, I said this would be a monthly feature but please understand that I am very enthusiastic and that enthusiasm sadly isn’t always backed by fact or, say, planning. As it turns out, I absolutely cannot afford to do one of those every month.

Well I guess I could if, say, around fifty more of you spontaneously decided to take out paying subscriptions all at the same time, but that feels unlikely. I guess we’ll have to settle for “whenever I have both funds and free time for now”.

In any case: I was in Oslo last week! I had a, er - I had a time. I sure had a time, in Oslo. You can read about it below. Thank you. Good bye.

A column

In columns as in love, it feels uncouth to start by bringing up the recent past. I wouldn't open a date by discussing my ex but still, here I am, temporarily shunning Oslo to talk about my beloved Budapest instead.

Somehow it turned out that I had a lot of friends of friends there, and I've been a freak for Hungarian literature for many happy years now, so in some ways I sort of knew what to expect. I'd never stepped foot in the country before but I felt, pretentiously, that I had a decent sense of where the Hungarian soul lay.

Amazingly, I think I was at least partially right. That's what made my despatch a piece I ended up being proud of. The place I'd landed in had been the right amount of foreign and the right amount of familiar. It worked out well for all involved.

What personal connection did I have to Norway before going? Well there was that one Norwegian girl I really fancied when I was at university, and who seemed to feel neither here nor there about me as a potential squeeze. We kissed precisely once at a house party, very drunk, then she broke it off because she needed to go pee and we lost each other for a while and by the time we found each other again the moment had passed. That is the extent of my connection to Norway.

It was all going to be fine, though, I told myself. There's an election in a couple of weeks! I know elections! They're my safe space! I did some research and I reached out to some people. I was instinctively drawn to Jens Stoltenberg, the finance minister. He was Norway's Tony Blair a while ago; became Prime Minister in 2000, was on the centre-left, and he was popular then he wasn't, then he was again.

After that the paths diverged; Stoltenberg was the head of NATO for a decade, instead of shilling for dodgy regimes. Last year, his party was in power but struggling, and so the Prime Minister brought him back into government, and that made Labour climb back up in the polls again. Somehow this one guy, the son of diplomats and politicians, an establishment centrist who'd feel outdated in most of the world, is still pretty much beloved by his country. That's a story, right?

I got in touch with one journalist who's spent some time covering the guy, hoping to get some insights into his popularity. He replied, snippily, to point out that, as I'd mentioned myself, there was an election on, so of course he was too busy to meet. I got in touch with someone who used to work for him and he also turned me down. Stoltenberg is a famous politician though, he added, lots of people know who he is. Couldn't I just go down into the streets in Oslo and ask passerbys about him?

The suggestion was so patronising and rude it made me laugh out loud. A few days later I brought the whole curtness thing up with Camilla, an engineer and researcher I had a coffee with in Oslo. She immediately knew what I meant.

"Research is very international and I had to learn to write in emails "I'm not rude, I'm just a Norwegian" because I realised that the culture is different in other countries", she told me. "You can't just say this or ask that, you have to do the whole "oh, how are you doing? Oh, I hope I'm not interrupting!" bullshit". Please imagine, at this point, a short pause in the shape of a dramatic sigh. "I will also spend so much time writing these very polite emails just to get the message through and I'm just like "why are we writing all this shit?", I don't understand!"

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. I was still in London and slowly coming to terms with the fact that the election was perhaps not going to be the ideal feature idea I had in mind. The polls showed that Norwegians were either going to go for a coalition of left-wing parties or, perhaps, a coalition of right-wing parties, but there wasn't much there. It felt like business as usual.

I scanned the papers and wrote myself some notes as I went. One of them just reads "more oil and gas found lol". Thank god the Norwegians are finally catching a break! After all this time! Again, the whole thing just made me cackle. Another thing I enjoyed, since we're here, is that their national anthem translates to "yes, we love this country". "Bit defensive", I wrote down.

Elsewhere, I collected a few stories which I felt could be relevant to both my interests and yours. Norway suffered from its worst heatwave in decades this summer; it shares a border with Russia, and Russia hasn't been at its most predictable recently. Surely I could, between those two, figure something out? Ah, what a naive and hopeful child I was. I sorted out some chats with people, picked more or less at random and because they seemed broadly interesting, and I checked in for my flight, which would take me to Oslo (Torp).

Now, when I'd booked my tickets, I'd not put any thoughts into Oslo (Torp), in the same way that I wouldn't blink at London (Stansted) or New York (JFK). I should have blinked, however! Oslo (Torp) is in Oslo in the same way that Margaret Qualley and I are similar, in that we're both human women! Oslo (Torp) is 110km from Oslo, meaning that, in a very real sense, Oslo (Torp) is a lie!

As a result, what I thought would be a day and a half of interviews - a lovely time, an ideal little window into a different world - turned into into a solo evening followed by one neverending day of running around Oslo. That first day didn't even start off well, as I got to my Airbnb, roughly two months after landing in Oslo (Torp), and found myself immediately discriminated against.

"The key's on the windowsill on the front door!", my host had told me, and I realised what she'd meant once I got to said front door. The key was, to use the technical term, "up there". The one slight issue was that my arm - the elegant, reasonably-sized arm of a 5’4” woman - absolutely could not reach all the way "up there". Those fucking Scandis, man. Is it a crime, not to have legs all the way up to your armpits, and for those armpits to be hovering somewhere around the top of Mount Olympus?

I fumed and laughed bitterly and after a few minutes of undignified little hops - google "twerking racoon" if you would like a visual aid - I eventually managed to get into the building. I threw my bag on the bed and went back out again, in order to walk around and get a sense of the place. The first two notes I wrote myself that evening were "no one looks louche", followed by "FIFTEEN POUNDS FOR A PINT".

In hindsight, I suppose those two can be linked pretty easily. You just won't come across many charmingly shady people in a city centre where consuming precisely one drink of alcohol will cleave your bank account in half.

The other notes all had a common theme. I can share them with you here, we're among friends. They read:

Their parks have massive slides and also trampolines???

Places leaving entire terraces out overnight? Insane high trust society

Thought a park looked a bit too dark at dusk then the lights turned on as I walked through and I mouthed oh fuck off

You can probably see what I was getting at. Within hours, I'd found that Oslo had made me a meaner, smaller person. I looked at all those nice things they had and I found it hard to be happy for them. It reminded me of that one time I went to the housewarming of an acquaintance and their house was just so large that I honestly couldn't be pleased for them. I couldn't be happy about such nice things happening to nice people (with dirty rich parents). I spent the whole evening walking around that massive gaff and wanting to hiss like a cat, and maybe break a vase or two.

Oslo did the same thing to me. I didn't like the person it made me become. In the morning, I saw a little group of people slowly kayaking in the sun, gliding past on the beautiful, dark water, and my reaction was to mutter "oh piss off". I'm not sure why I got such a strong, negative reaction to it all. I have, in the past, been able to go to beautiful and compelling and exciting places and to be pleased for the people living there, even if I never would or could move there myself. Somehow, Norway was different.

I didn't even need to talk to people to be able to tell that they were quite smug about it all. They know they have it better than most of us: it's obvious. I shouldn't hold it against them, I told myself, but sometimes it's tough to be the bigger person.

That came up again in the afternoon as I asked Camilla, who has spent her whole life either in or near Oslo, if she'd ever considered moving anywhere else. "I love travelling, and I've travelled a lot and I love experiencing things, but I also realised that things are better here", she told me. "I know it's awful to say but it's very hard to see yourself living somewhere else". Ah, that Norwegian bluntness! Of course she's right, though, that's the problem. Why would you leave when everything's fine?

That's what I found on that one endless day, by the way. Everything is fine in Norway. I tried to needle several people into panicking about the effects of global warming on their little Nordic paradise and all they said was either "oh yeah, it was nice and warm" or "25 degrees was a bit too hot for me". I asked person after person if they were worried about their neighbour in the north and all of them said: why on earth would Russia choose to invade us? And they weren't wrong! It would be mad! It's unlikely to happen! You shouldn't worry about it! They're not worried about it!

In fact, they're not really worried about anything, as far as I can tell. I brought up the fact that the deputy mayor of Oslo is from the hard-right Progress Party, as they often work with the more traditional Conservatives, and I was met by a conga line of shoulder shrugs. "Deputy mayor of Oslo" isn't a real job anyway. Who cares? Who cares!

I had a coffee with Will, a British middle-aged gallery owner who moved to Norway in 2008, and he told me about this book he found in a second-hand shop, and which was meant to act as a guide to diplomats and other foreigners hoping to understand the country. "It makes it very clear that in the early 1970's, the mythology here was that Norway was poor, it was a nation of poor farmers and therefore deserved to find oil and be saved".

Norway, if you were wondering, had the 15th highest GDP per capita in the world in 1970. It was doing fine. There really was a point when it was quite poor and quite weak, but it was a while back. Still, you can tell Norwegians want to hold onto that part of their history. For a long time they were a vassal state of Denmark and Sweden; for a long time their two closest neighbours were these massive, powerful empires. Norway never had an empire.

It found oil at a point when it already was going all steam ahead on social democracy, and suddenly it was able to have a great time, making everyone equal, making sure everyone had a part to play, and everyone had a good enough time. Norway became a nation of do-gooders. It still sees itself that way. Should it?

"We're at the very last point in human history when we can stop burning fossil fuels in the hope of changing our destiny, that ought to be a central election question", Will pointed out, and obviously he was right, but it just isn't. Only the Greens would like to maybe, probably start winding down oil and gas straight away; even the other left parties pussyfoot around the issue, and argue anything happening should take a while to do so. There's no rush, is there?

One thing people are talking about during the campaign is the breadth of the welfare state, and whether taxes should be higher or lower. I talked about it with Carl, an unemployed writer. He's on the dole and once upon a time he was able to have therapy as part of that, but that got cut recently. In Norway as everywhere else, the state is shrinking.

Because Norway isn't anywhere else, his life is still alright. He's trying to finish two novels right now - that's his main priority - and no-one seems bothered by the fact that he's doing that while on benefits. "My meetings with them have very much been like "oh good, you know what you're doing, so we're just going to let you be, and focus on the people who need more help", that's been nice", he told me. I struggled to think of what unemployed people in Britain would do to get that kind of treatment.

Similarly, I asked Camilla about inequality in Oslo, and whether she'd noticed anything changing in the last few years. "I would say that in a Norwegian context there is inequality, and poor people", she said, "but those people wouldn't be considered poor in France, for instance". Ouch! Correct - but ouch!

I mentioned this to Ali over a drink, at the end of the day. Originally from Pakistan, he lived in Britain then Germany for a while, and moved to Oslo three months ago. It was, quite literally, a dream come true for him. "When I was 16, I saw a story in the Pakistani news saying that Norway was one of the best countries in the world to live in, and I thought "aspiration!"". Once in Scotland, he learnt Norwegian, and he plotted his course to Scandinavia. Now, at 32, he gets to live the life he's always wanted. He is, as you'd expect, quite defensive of Norwegians as a result, but even he admitted that "they are, in some ways, quite sheltered".

That is, for the avoidance of doubt, not a bad thing. Take Sylvi Listhaug, the particularly execrable leader of Progress. Despite her political inclinations, she's always been quite critical of Donald Trump, a fact which, once again, made me laugh mirthlessly. Of course, even the populist right is reasonable in Norway.

Ali corrected me; it's not that she genuinely dislikes him, he told me. Instead, she just wouldn't be getting anywhere with the electorate by supporting him, or being more overtly bigoted. "Public standards are very stringent", he explained, "even her racism can only go so far here". Oh good for them, I thought but didn't say.

After that, we talked about everything from the oil fund and the election to the Lutheran church and sexism. It made for an interesting conversation over a glass of wine but none of it really passed the "man bites dog" test. All of it was what you'd expect. As I read through all my notes and quotes at the airport the next day, I found one amusing juxtaposition.

In that bar, Ali had made me laugh by exclaiming that he "will fight for this country - if there's an invasion tomorrow, strap me to a rocket and fire me at whoever!". Hours earlier, I'd been walking around and looking at the people and the buildings, and had concluded that it felt "like a one night stand with someone demonstrably too beautiful for you; empty because it obviously won't last". He and I had experienced the same thing, the same country, and we'd had the two reactions you can possibly have when confronted with such smooth perfection. He fell in love and I rolled my eyes.

I stood up a few minutes later to walk to my gate and spotted a man in a hi-vis jacket, holding a little dog in his arms. I walked past and he said, in flawless English, "would you like to pet him? He's a therapy puppy in training!".

Two things happened simultaneously at that point: I plunged my fingers in his soft white fur and I thought "oh come on".