there seems to be a lot of glum virtual faces at the moment in sinister. All with broken hearts and broken things to mend. So I thought I'd cheer you up with a joke I can remember, which seems strangely fitting right now. What with all the water and depressing references floating (excsue the pun) around at the moment. This is for anyone needing a smile. Q. Why did the dolphin commit suicide? A. Because it had lost its porpoise in life. Ahem. Well, while so many of you have lost your smiles, I lost my voice. I'M ON HOLIDAY! and guess what happened? as well as my hayfever going mental I got a heavy cold. Yesterday I was squeaking. Today I am coughing. And I got ill on my holidays. Ach well, I'll have more holidays. And probably more colds. Just ideally, not together. **************************************************** My parents are about to go on their annual trip to the North of Norway. For those of you who don't know, my mum is from the North of Norway. If you ever get out a map, you'll see it, its a place called Finmark. You want to find an island called Loppa. Her village is near there. I guess the easiest way to get an idea is if youlook at this map. http://www.ansi-turistservice.no/kart_ansi.htm I guess, I take a lot of things for granted. I was e mailing someone off list the other day, and telling them all about Norway. About the things you can see. Reindeer sitting at the side of the road, watching the cars go past. Sometimes you see a white reindeer, with pink velvet antlers. Or all the tunnels, going through the mountains. And the fiords. And the houses. The houses made of timber, and painted, usually in contrasting colours, with thick tar over the roof, rather than tiles (mostly.) so you might see a red house with white trim around the windows and roof overhang and the doors. And how you get some houses, in the south, which are maybe only one storey. And n the roofs, grows grass and small bushes or evn trees. And in the summer you can see goats grazing on the grass, cos hey, you wouldn't take a lawn mower up there. Or if you go up high in the mountains, and you get runners, and cyclists, and hikers, going up mountains higher than Ben Nevis. Through the snow walls, which even in summer might be over 7 foot high. And the glaciers you see, and the hotels. Some of the hotels remind me of the kind in James Bond Films, in ski resorts in the Swiss Alps. And then you get the old fashioned toilets, which I never liked. They're in these huts, you see, which are usually beautifully decorated, with hand painted wooden carvings and such, and a little net curtain over the window to hide your modesty. But these toilets. Basically, its a unit, like a wooden unit, across one side of the little hut. And it has a hole in it. And this hole goes into a pit. And sometimes you get communal toilets (Ally McBeal? pff. The Vikings were so ahead of their times). with lots of holes going into pits together. Anyway, me being me, I resented the fact that really, there was no flush mechanism. And the fear of falling through didn't bear thinking about. And the wildlife. The Elk, or moose, as people sometimes call them, get drunk. And go charging into cars. They eat rotten apples and this ferments in their stomachs. Thus, they get cider. And they get drunk. My mum is from a tiny little village in the far north, where people make their money from fishing mostly. You have to drive there, even if you flew to the nearest airport, you'd have to drive for about a day or so. And take the ferry, becuase its too mountainous to reach by road, and theres too many glaciers anyway. Then theres the 15km drive from the harbour to my grans old house. None of the buildings are old up there. The Nazis burnt them down, when they fled from the Russians at the end of the second world war, leaving thousands of people without a home. My aunt was born in a shed, and christened immediately, in the cold winter, beucase they didn't think she would survive. I think I read somewhere about a hundred people had to shelter under an upturned fishing boat that winter. There were no houses. No possessions. Nothing was left. So all the houses are pretty much of the same design, and same age. Sometimes, we'd go to my grans old childhood home.All thats left is the stones where the building was, and melted glass. And theres a rusting old German landing ship there too. I've never been brave enough to look inside though. So what is there to do in this tiny village? Theres one pub that seems to accidentally burn down every couple of years. No police. One health visitor. A post office, based in someones cellar, that is open between 10 - 4 week days, and closes at midday on a Saturday. It takes 5 - 10 days for post to get to this village. 5 days if its national mail, 10 days if its international. A little church yard, where all my ancestors are buried, and the graves face out to sea. In the winter, the clergyman puts a little candlelit lantern on the graves on Christmas Eve. well if you've got cable tv, great. If not? One channel. Comes into service at 6pm every night. NRK1. It shows all those wacky Brit hits, like Allo Allo! and Waiting For God. The presenters look stuck in the 1950s. Saturdays, as I recall, was Lollipop! which was this show, where people, usually older generations, got dressed up in teddy boy outfits and came onto the show, which had the set of this American 50's diner. And they did their best Norwegian Elvis impressions. After a while of no decent TV, it became a staple part of viewing. We used to go fishing. My uncle would take us out in my grandfathers rowing boat, and my cousin, who was a meanie, would dangle flapping fish in my hair. Or berry picking, in the mountains with my mum. And get eaten alive by the mygg (mosquitoes) and clegg (horsefly). Or swimming. I remember when I was about 15, me and this girl, Silje, cycling down to the lake at midnight. This was midnight sun territory, and in such a tiny vilage, there was no danger or crime at all. So we cycled down to the lake, and it was incredible, we sat on the decking, built by the local council for sunbathing, and wondered whether to go in. Just watching the steam rise from the lake, in the shadow of an enormous mountain, and you can see a glacier, glistening behind you in sunlight, the midnight sun that seems to bob on the horizon of the North. Being there, at midnight, when it is still warm enough only to need a t shirt and shorts. And realising that this is all 500 miles north of the artic circle. Thats a pretty incredible thing to consider. Silje was my childhood friend. Although I say friend very loosely. She was another kid who went to the same place, at the same time, and her mother and my aunt were childhood friends. She was a right old bossy boots. She used to come over, and I would try and bore her to death so she wouldn't drag me along on one of her ideas. Sometimes I'd go and hide in the woods. Or even the cellar if I was desperate. But she sought me out, found me, and it never dawned on her I was hiding from her. Her cousin was Pal in A-Ha, and she would always go on, and on, and on, and on, and on about him. When we got to fifteen though, her English had improved. And we found things in common to discuss, like boys, and music. She lked Take That, and Robbie Williams (she'd call him Wobbie Williams though) and I gave her some poster of Robbie I got with my summer issue of Just 17. She repaid me in turn, with a poster of Brett Anderson. And we bonded. I didn't try to hide from her, and I was quite sad when she left tht summer. It was a pretty good summer for both of us really, as friends. It never got better than that summer. It only deteriorated. But I remember we cycled down to the old primary school, that had been converted into flats. There was a seventeen year old boy living there, that she liked. And I sat under the flag pole in the playground, while she walked back and forth, showing me how the catwalk models sauntered, pouting and wiggling. Every so often she'd smile at me, and her eyes would light up, and she'd hiss "is he looking?" and that was my cue to flick my eyes, so carefully, to see if he was watching. We stayed there for about an hour, while she sauntered, back and forth, walking like the supermodels do on the catwalk, and I kept a look out for this poor bloke. We cycled down to the lake one day, me and Silje, and she was wearing this tiny bikini with a tiny white bathing robe over the top. I stuck to my shorts, t shirt and ever faithful Doc Marten boots and tortoiseshell John Lennon tyle sunglasses. She thought this guy would be there, and cycled in kitten heel mules. Given that most paths there are stoney, and aren't paths at all, more tracks, this seemed a little daft to me. But that was Silje. Going for the glamour puss knock-em dead approach. She did it all. The loud laugh, as if someone had said something fantastically witty. The bright red lipstick when she was going up into the mountains. The french hair roll thing to go to the minimarket and buy butter for her mum. Just in case she saw him. I remember him still, from the once or twice I spied him. He had very blonde hair, all spikey. And he was quite thin and lean, but really tanned. And Silje, she always reminded me of younger Diana Rigg. But this guy never seemed that impressed. Not even when Silje took to doing Cartwheels. In her bikini. She was always a bit of a show off. When she was young, she said she wanted to be Danish,like her dad. When she was 19, she met a boy from Mexico or Brazil or somewhere like that, and learnt Spanish, and went to Latin nights, to shake her thang. She wanted to emmigrate with him back to South America. She was never quite happy with who she was, or being Norwegian. She was always bossy. And if she fell out with someone (usually, when we were kids, her cousin Karen) I wasn't allowed to be friends with Karen either. But I ignored Silje and saw Karen anyway. And Silje would want me to report back. And there was never anything to say to her. And when we were older, when I went to Norway to go to uni, Silje said I couldn't be friends with certain people. And when I told her I wasn't playing childish games anymore, and I'd choose my own friends on their own merits despite her history with them, she never spoke to me again. Those friends are past and gone now, and those people are left behind in my life. Not going to tell Silje that though. When she ignores me, its easier than having to hide. ;) Love idles ===== http://groups.yahoo.com/group/corduroysmoke/ starting playground gossip and passing notes __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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