Sunrise/sunset: Up all day.

I scrolled back to last year to find out how I had formatted the immortal words “Sunrise/sunset: Up all day.” and I see that this time last year, I was excited, having just found an agent for my book. It seems unlikely at this point, that Ger will find a publisher and I haven’t made much progress in writing anything new. There has been altogether too much going on and I haven’t been in a good frame of mind for writing. It’s always hard to write without deadlines anyway, but there has been way too much time spent clearing snow and on other distractions. So for now, there’s not much likelihood of publication any time soon, though several of the publishers said they’d like to see new things from me. There was, in fact, quite a lot of good feedback, but it seems that, without romance, women’s fiction of the type I’ve written is difficult to sell. At some point, I will get started again, but I will need to work out a new strategy.

Returning to the north was difficult after a week of sun and warmth in Yorkshire. I arrived back in Bardufoss at 11:30 at night. It wasn’t dark, of course, but it was very chilly and raining. At one point, as I drove back, my car pinged me to give the ice warning it gives when the temperature is 3.5°C. I had taken Monday off, so I drove Andrew into school. He is doing his final exams at the moment. All the written exams are over, so now he is waiting to do a final, oral exam. Both John and Anna did International Baccalaureate, so this is our first experience of the Norwegian exam system, which seems to be somewhat bizarre. I knew from before, that the written exams are oddly long. You can come in any time between eight and ten, then sit in them all day, if you like, though you can walk out after ten, all of which sounds enormously distracting.

But the oral exam tradition is even weirder. Over the course of three weeks, all the students will have one oral exam in one of their subjects, but they are not told the date or the subject in advance. At Andrew’s school, all the students who haven’t yet had their exam, have to go in on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week. When they go in on Monday, some of them will find out that they have an exam on Wednesday, and in which subject. Those who have an exam stay and get some general extra tuition from the teacher on the Monday. On Tuesday, they are told the topic within their subject that they should prepare for and on Wednesday, they sit their exam. The rest of the students who weren’t selected for an exam, are free to go home, but of course for Andrew, this means waiting for a bus as there are only a few each day. Why they can’t just alert the students by text the night before, or early enough in the morning that they can go in if they need to is beyond me.

We’re currently at the end of the first week and happily, Andrew found out yesterday that he has been selected to have his oral exam in history, which is the subject he wanted. It also means that, once his exam is over, he will be finished and won’t have to go back in. There will be a graduation ceremony, but for me, as well as for him, it really will be the end of an era.

On Wednesday, John and I went to Ann’s to shear her sheep, at least John sheared them and I started and stopped the shearing machine. Despite it being quite chilly in the barn, John was quickly sweating. Shearing sheep is a very physical job. Goodness knows how it feels to be a sheep with winter-thick wool that is taken off all at once, but I should imagine it is both something of a shock and a relief at the same time.

Anna and her girlfriend Lauren are coming here on Monday, which I am very much looking forward to. I considered taking time off as flexitime, but having had to work the last time I booked that, I decided to take a holiday, just to be sure! It was odd being back at work for four days and hard to get my teeth into anything, though it’s great to see that my new colleague, Ingrid, is settling in well and picking things up very quickly. It looks like it is going to be a bit warmer this week, at least, which is good as it would be a sad introduction to the North of Norway for Lauren if it was still snowing in June, as it was on and off, right up to the end of May. And so, I am going to sign off as there is lots to do. I hope you all have a good week.