I stayed in Scotland last weekend and Triar and I had a couple of good days. He and I went for a walk in a forest on Saturday. He was off lead and though I was a little nervous as he rushed off, splashing through ditches and disappearing into the undergrowth, he kept coming back and was eventually so tired that he returned to walk at my side, at which point I put him back on the lead. There were laws in Norway and going off lead was banned at certain times of year, so this is mostly new to both of us, but hopefully will become normal. He came home with manky paws and a coat full of twigs. I’ve spent the past week picking tiny bits of wood from the carpets, but it was worth it to see his cheery face.
On Sunday, I hired a dog field at Kirkgunzeon and that was also great fun. I invited Donna and her two dogs and thought they didn’t interact too much, they didn’t fight and all of them were tired out after running around for forty five minutes. I also got to practice Triar’s whistle recall, which is still excellent, thank goodness.
Treacle and RubensTabletop Triar
My brain has been a bit frazzled at work this week. One of the most disconcerting things in my new job is having to jump from case to case, sometimes at the drop of a hat. Part of the reason it’s tough at the moment is that so many things are new to me. I can be just starting to be feeling things are under control, when suddenly something unexpected wangs into my e-mail that needs an urgent response and (this is the problem) I don’t know how to handle it.
I know from experience that this will get better. It’s a long time ago now, but I can remember as a brand new vet that every night on call felt this way. Anything could fly at me and I was more or less on my own to deal with it. Yes, I could usually call on someone, but you you can’t do that for every case. After a while, it became normal and I could deal with anything without that panicky feeling that I might mess something up.
Outside of that, my new life continues to be interesting and rewarding. On Monday, C took me out on a visit to the Red Kite Centre at Ballymack Farm. We weren’t there to see the kites, rather the way their food was prepared and stored, but we stopped to watch the kites anyway. It was probably amongst the best lunchtime breaks I’ve ever had!
The delightful owner is in her eighties, but still goes out every day to feed the birds. There were a few birds circling in the sky overhead but we watched her go out and scatter their food and then suddenly the entire sky was filled with soaring wings. Their cries sounded melancholy on the wind as they waited, then in a flurry, they swooped in, diving to grab the raw meat, rising again into the air and then circling again. It was a stunning display and though I tried to take some photos, my phone camera couldn’t really do it justice. I envied the man who had a huge zoom lens on his camera. His family were waiting impatiently for him, but I fully understood as he stood outside in the blustery wind taking picture after picture, hoping for that perfect shot.
I’ve done a couple of other visits this week and raw pet food has been a feature of all of them. It comes under the classification Animal By Products or ABP and the agency I work for does quite a lot of work trying to ensure it is produced and stored safely. Other features included work on my first potential TB case and a complaint about two dead cows. One thing I can say is that every day is different! Thank goodness I have wonderful colleagues who seem very willing to support me through it all.
I’m in Yorkshire this weekend, dropping Triar off as next week I will be in Stranraer again, learning more about TB case handling out on a farm. Have a good week all!
Lunch at the kite feeding station – they do a mean carrot cake!
The rain is hurling itself against the window as I write this, having returned home after half a week in Stranraer. The wind there was relentless and felt like it was filled with icicles. Not quite the balmy, maritime climate I might have hoped for. Despite the chilly wind and the sleet that fell, the fields were still green and many animals are still outside. So different from the months of snow and ice in the far north. I finally found the time to take a few photos when I was out and about, which I’ll share in between the streams of reminiscence!
It was strange being back. A lot has changed in the last thirty years, although one thing that hasn’t changed much is the little lodge house I lived in back then. It now has oil central heating, where once the only warmth came from a coal fire, and the wheelie bins are out front, rather than tucked away at the back door, but other than that, it still looks much as it did when I lived there. I swore, after those eighteen months that I would never again accept a house without central heating.
The practice I worked in is long gone. The younger of my bosses sold it to the neighbouring practice (now Academy Vets) years ago. I went into Academy Vets as I had to chat to them about a case. I thought I didn’t know any of the staff, but I discovered that one of the senior vets had seen practice with me when he was a student, which illustrates how long ago it all was. My older boss is still around, apparently. Hopefully I can visit him, next time I’m over.
Simpson’s the bakers is still there on the main shopping street. I remember Anne, the kindest receptionist ever, asking if I wanted anything from Simpson’s at lunch time on an almost daily basis. I bought a sandwich: coronation chicken on white bread and they must still be using the same recipe as they used, all those years ago. It was as delicious as I remembered, though it now comes in plastic, where once it was in a white paper bag. The cakes haven’t changed either: very traditionally Scottish, all intensely sweet, no fresh cream and some very garish icing.
I was quite surprised (and rather saddened) by how unfamiliar a lot of it seemed, though I did keep tripping over memories over the course of a few days. I thought the Morrisons supermarket was new, but when I went in, it dawned on me that it was the precious supermarket that was built when I was there. It was Safeway when it arrived in town and was a wonderful addition. Before that, there was only a dim and narrow W.M. Low’s that I would walk around, looking for something for dinner, finding no inspiration. Morrison’s was closer to the centre than I remember and I don’t recall using a roundabout to get into it, but maybe I’ve just forgotten. A colleague who grew up in Stranraer reminded me that the old cattle market was knocked down to build it, and I do recall that as well, but only in the vaguest of ways.
Mostly I drove around, thinking how unfamiliar it all seemed, though when I drove away from Academy Vets (where we used to take dogs for x-rays as my practice didn’t have one) I knew exactly how to get to Lewis Street, where McTaggart and Williamson used to be, and for a few moments, I felt as if time had shifted.
Though my time in Stranraer wasn’t particularly happy, it is where I met Charlie. He took a job in my practice, having spent time as a student doing extramural studies around the corner in Academy Street. We were married twenty three years and have three wonderful children together, so it was a significant time in my life.
Anyway, enough reminiscing and back to the present. This week I have been learning about tuberculosis. It’s important that I do as I will be taking over several TB outbreak cases in just over a month’s time, when my Stranraer colleague goes on maternity leave. Although I’m learning a lot at high speed, I am now reaching the stage when I can see just how much I don’t know.
There’s an online course I need to take, as well as having time for the cases to be handed over. I am finding out where to look up case handling and I’ve an offer of help with the tracing and epidemiology, but I am still going to need a lot of guidance. Each case is different, depending on whether there were signs of TB found when an animal went to slaughter, or whether it was picked up during a skin test, and beyond that how exactly the case progresses, once a positive skin test occurs. There are a multitude of pathways, depending on those factors. I did the skin testing thirty years back, but there were no positive skin tests back then, so the rest is new to me.
Now in addition to skin tests, they can take blood tests and are beginning to understand some of the genetics. Tracing where it came from (and where it might have spread to) is now becoming more clear. You can sometimes tell where a strain might have come from, because it is genetically similar to a separate case. When I was testing, thirty years ago, there was no TB in the area. The aim is to return to that situation, but I think that will take a very long time, if it’s possible at all. Only time will tell.
Yesterday, R and I visited a farm where the investigation is just beginning. One of their cows had a small reaction to the injection during a routine skin test. When tested again, sixty days later, she reacted more. Now she will sadly be taken to slaughter, where they will check her for visible signs of TB and also do a PCR check, where they look for TB DNA. After that, whatever the result, the whole herd will have to be checked again. Until they get the all-clear, with no reactors, they cannot sell any of their animals, or move them off the farm, other than for slaughter. It’s a huge blow to any farmer to find out some of his cows will have to be culled and that there is disease in the herd that can spread to humans. I hope, for their sake, that the tests all come back clear.
I had left my car in a car park in the middle of nowhere while R took me to the farm, and on my return, I was quite surprised to see a van parked beside it. R headed off and to my surprise, the driver of the van came over to chat to me. He was wizened as if he had spent a lot of years battling the weather, but he seemed cheery as he told me he was a mole exterminator! He is seventy five, he said, and still tending to over seventy farms, though in his heyday, he cleared a hundred and twenty. I confess that it had never crossed my mind that the job of mole exterminator existed, but he seemed very upbeat about it and was obviously very efficient. It did cross my mind that perhaps I should consider a new career, but he said he thinks he has someone lined up to take over his patch when he finally gets too old.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with some food pictures. I ate every night in the North West Castle Hotel and would highly recommend it!
Sea bass with creamed potatoes, prawn and chive butter and seasonal vegetables Breast of chicken with mash, haggis and peppercorn sauce
Another emotional week, this week. If you’ve been following for a while, you will understand why I was nervous of handing over the house, more specifically the cleaning. Shirley, knowing all that history, volunteered to come and help me and was absolutely wonderful.
As a retired nurse, I thought that if there were any problems, she’d be a great witness. She is also an absolute whirlwind with a mop. I think she cleaned three rooms in the time it took me to get the bathroom sorted out. She also brought along a kettle and delicious biscuits and we sat and drank coffee, gazing out of the kitchen window at the snowy bulk of Fagerfjell (Mountain) that rises up behind the house. It was lovely to have some pleasant last memories after the furniture removal debacle!
My last two days at work were lovely. I was on the early shift, checking the live animals both days. I had quite forgotten that Tuesday was Halloween, so I was especially delighted to come back from the lairage to find that Trude had made our office really cosy with Halloween themed decorations, sweets, and a cake.
A few last memories of the lairage: there were wooly pigs there on my last day. Like many of the pigs, they were fast asleep when I arrived to look at them, so I took a photo. Actually, I think the black one facing me in the middle might have clocked me, but it’s a typically peaceful scene from the pig pens, albeit with extra wool!
There are a couple of bits of grafitti that have amused me over the years. Someone with a dark sense of humour has added a direction marker for any poor sheep in the «cold lairage». Fortunately, with all the sheep being Norwegian, they won’t have understood it if they saw it.
And there is a cheerier message on the back of one of the gates we stand behind when the animals come in. There’s not too much danger from a flock of sheep, even if they do run straight over you, but there are also big bulls brought in on a regular basis, and then this i very relevant.
Translated, it says, «You are safe here, Amen». A very reassuring message.
We had pizza together at lunch time and I spent the rest of the day showing Ingrid how to do a few last things. I also hugged almost everyone, which was lovely, given the restraints of Covid that were in place for so much of my first couple of years. I was also given some gifts, including a lovely pair of Målselv socks, which I can confirm are deliciously warm as well as very pleasing to look at.
The sale of the car to Kaj and later of the house, went through without a hitch. Both had originally been planned for 1st November, but as the house was ready before that, I handed over both sets of keys on the 31st and then drove to Tromsø with John. I had two nights in the lovely flat he and Yoana have rented. They’ve made it really cosy. I bought them a Nespresso machine as a housewarming present. Hopefully they’ll get a lot of use from it.
On Thursday morning, I walked through the snow to catch the bus that would take me to the airport. It was a beautiful day and I managed to capture a last photo of Tromsø as the plane took off.
It was a lot greener in Stavanger when I landed.
And of course, this lovely boy was waiting for me at the airport. It was wonderful to be reunited.
So now I am in Stavanger for a few days. Andrew came round on Thursday evening and yesterday and tonight Anna will be joining us. She will be coming with me on the next leg of my journey. We will take a boat from Stavanger to Hirtshals in Denmark on Tuesday evening.
And for regular readers, I have been asked to continue blogging by so many people that I will continue when I get to Scotland, so I hope you will all join me as I begin the next stage of my life as «The Vet Who Came In From The Cold».
We’re reaching the tail end of the twenty four hour sunlight. You might think that, as we live in the Arctic, that it would never get warm, but this week it was approaching thirty degrees Celsius. There’s no point in waiting for the cooler evening either, because there isn’t one. I have been woken at four in the morning most days this week. That seems to be the time when the sun reaches the side of the house where my bedroom window is. fortunately, we have an air conditioning unit, which gives us heat in winter and cool air now. The house has a tin roof, designed to hold some snow in winter as snow acts as insulation, to an extent, but in summer, having a house with a black tin roof obviously can have its disadvantages.
The heat can be very significant when considering the transportation of animals, so that has been an important part of my job this week. Several countries in Europe have actually banned animal transport this week, but sometimes when it’s warm, it’s possible for them to travel during the night, when temperature’s drop, but up here, that’s not really a consideration. We’ve not been at the stage where a ban was needed, but the drivers of the lorries that bring animals into the abattoir have been asked to ensure the animals have enough space in the containers and to make sure their temperature alarm systems are working and switched on. The lorries are fitted with thermometers which measure temperature and if it goes over thirty, the driver should receive an alarm on their mobile phone. I have been monitoring the logs all week. Though it’s actually the abattoir’s responsibility (the company owns the lorries) Mattilsynet can request the information at any time and it’s good to make sure, especially during the holiday period.
In Norway in summer, everyone is entitled to take four weeks of holiday in a single block. Most people choose to take at least three weeks and many take four. There’s often a rule that you have to choose whether to take the first four weeks or the second of a seven or eight week period, but what it means is that everything is running at a much reduced rate. In the abattoir, when the line is running fast, there are people at lots of different stations and each does an individual task, but in the holiday, they often have to double up. And if the person who does one specific job most of the time is away, then often the person doing that task will be less experienced. Of course, that means the vets and technicians at Mattilsynet have to do more monitoring, which would be fine if we didn’t also have the same holiday system! In short, in Norway you shouldn’t expect anything much to be achieved in summer.
There are compensations though. It is spectacularly beautiful with everything growing. There are lots of insects, including bumble bees, which I love.
There are also less attractive insects. I’m sure I have mentioned mega mosquitoes before, but this year has yielded a spectacular crop of evil, black horse flies. According to locals, this is because we had a cold and rainy May. Supposedly they are short lived, which is good because when they bite you, it’s painful. The locals also call them kleg, which might not be the correct spelling, but is a real blast from the past as in Scotland, horse flies are also known as klegs.
Anyway, despite the clouds of horse flies, John and I managed to enjoy a barbecue last Sunday, to celebrate Konstantin’s birthday. Konstantin had lit a fire by the time we got there and the smoke kept them at bay for a little while. It was a wonderful location by a lake, chosen by Konstantin.
There’s a notice on that board behind Konstantin that says you can hire canoes. There’s also a boat landing place with a ladder for swimming. We will definitely be going back sometime and hopefully, the flies will stay away!
I’ve seen the sun! I wasn’t even looking for it, but went outside at work on Monday just after ten o’clock and, to my amazement, there it was!
I don’t think the feeling of joy this gives can be understood until you’ve lived somewhere where there is a significant period when the sun doesn’t come over the horizon at all. Long cloudy spells, even in the south of Norway, were not the same. I had a visceral feeling of joy at this moment. When the sun isn’t out, the light here is still super blue. I will add some other photos later, taken on a couple of different days this week, and you will see what I mean.
This winter has been hard. The snow came early and there has been a lot of it and on top of that, the temperature changes have been crazy. One day it’s minus twenty, the next it can be above zero. We badly needed the wood that Ann brought because this year has demonstrated that our house is not really insulated well enough. At super-cold temperatures, even the lovely new, powerful heat exchanger I bought doesn’t really cut it and the electricity bill last month was heinous. On the coldest days, when we come home, it can be thirteen or fourteen degrees in the house, which isn’t super-freezing, but isn’t comfortable to sit in. The wood stove solves the problem, but it takes a couple of hours to really start warming the place up. Before next winter, I will be getting new insulation in the loft and I hope that will make a significant difference.
As regular readers will know, I am in the process of moving jobs at the moment, though still within the Norwegian Food Safety Authority: Mattilsynet. I have spent most of this week working in the abattoir, where I am rapidly learning how to do new tasks, in particular to do with administration. The two main aims are to ensure that the food produced is safe and to ensure that animal welfare is high and though the first is very important, it is the second that interests me more.
For the first time this week, I have come across a situation where I am going to have to issue a fine. In Norway, it is illegal to send cows to the abattoir within the last month before they are due to calve. As their pregnancy progresses, the ligaments around the pelvis begin to loosen, and obviously as the calf gets bigger, it’s more likely that loading and unloading and travelling in general can result in pain or injury. In an odd coincidence, having not come across a case before, this week there were two.
In one of these, in my opinion, the farmer seems not to have been careful enough, though I believe he does still care about his animals. It’s not entirely up to me and Thomas explained that I will need to involve the animal welfare advisor before I make the decision, but it seems likely he will be fined. The other case was even sadder to deal with. I called the farmer and he told me that he’d had a vet out to check the cow for pregnancy and that the vet had got it wrong. It happens, of course. Mistakes do occur, but for the farmer it was a significant blow. He won’t be charged a fine as he sent me evidence, but his cow was pregnant with twins and he sounded very upset as he told me she was a good cow. Farming has to be one of the toughest professions there is.
Andrew is in his last year at school. He has known for a while that he wanted to go to folk high school for a year (before probably going on to university), but this was the week when many of them started accepting applications for next year, and to his enormous delight, he got into his first choice of school to study film. We had previously looked at ones closer to home, but the courses local t ous didn’t seem as well suited to what he wanted, and so he is going to move back to southwest Norway for a year. It will be strange without him, but I am delighted with how excited he seems. Anna spent a year studying computer game coding near Trondheim and I think she would agree it was one of the best years of her life so far – an uncomplicatedly happy time. As well as studying computing, there was an unexpected sideline at Torshus where they sang sea shanties and the culmination of the year was to sail a tall ship from Bergen to Shetland and back. It will be very interesting to see how Andrew’s school compares.
Last but not least, my mum is eighty years old today. I hope you have something lovely planned and I’m looking forward to celebrating with you in March when we come over. Happy birthday Mum!
So much for trying to take a week off. The photograph of the ice bridge at the top of the page was only taken last Saturday, but it feels a very long time ago. John and I drove across it (just for fun) when we went to buy parts to try and fix the snow blower. It’s not quite working yet as one of the belts keeps jumping off, but John thinks he will be able to resolve that shortly. After working on it for several hours in significantly sub zero temperatures last weekend, he has made a lot of good progress.
My week off didn’t go as planned though. I was on my way to buy some gifts for John and Andrew’s stockings, on Monday morning, when I received a phone call from Thomas asking me to attend a meeting. Fortunately I have Teams on my phone, so I was able to join the meeting as I drove home. It was, of course, regarding last week’s tragedy, when one of the farmers in our district was shot by the police. I can’t share any details of the case itself, but Thomas and I spent a very long day out, in very low temperatures (round -15°C) working together to ensure that all the animals at the farm were either moved or would receive ongoing care until they can be.
I think the worst thing was the mental toll. Hard to deal with a case where it was so obvious that this was a person who had been badly failed by the system, but it was physically challenging as well. I hadn’t realised we would be there so long, but when I was preparing to go out, the only gloves I found were thickish waterproof gloves with no lining. Thomas, generous as ever, on seeing this lent me one of the two pairs he had brought. In fact, I think he lent me the warmer pair and that meant a lot. Sometimes it’s the small things that really help. It was a long and difficult day though, and we didn’t get back to Finnsnes until about midnight. I left Thomas working, with the agreement that I would go to the abattoir next morning, to oversee some ongoing work with the case.
The next morning’s trip didn’t go to plan either. I had taken one of the Mattilsynet lease cars. They are all quite new, and I wasn’t expecting any trouble, though one of the tyres was registering as having slightly low pressure, as sometimes seems to happen when it’s very cold. I was about half way there, when the car suddenly lost power and began to slow down. I was on a main road, where stopping would be dangerous, so I pushed the accelerator down further and the car speeded up a little, but was obviously not normal as it surged and slowed. I know the road very well, fortunately and knew there was a large bus stop up ahead where I could pull in. By this time, a message had popped up to say the motor was overheating. I managed to coax it into the layby before I turned the engine off.
My situation, even then, was precarious. I couldn’t run the engine to keep the car warm and the outside temperature was -25°C. I called the breakdown services and got through to a central line, who said someone local would call me back. I had a warm Mattilsynet jacket and hat in the car, which I quickly put on and fortunately, within a few minutes, I was talking to someone from Viking rescue, who was only about half an hour away. He wouldn’t be able to pick up the car, he told me. He already had one on the lorry, which he had to take to Tromsø ( a two hour drive) but he could pick me up and drop me off at the abattoir. I can honestly say, I have rarely been more grateful. I had been contemplating ringing Trude to collect me, but there was no guarantee anyone would be available for a while.
So I limped on to the abattoir, but then without a car, I couldn’t get back to collect my own from Finnsnes, so had to wait until my colleague was finished on the line. I also didn’t make it to the blood test I had booked in that afternoon.
Wednesday, I actually did manage a day off, though I was so exhausted by this time that it wasn’t really enough. I also received a phone call from work to ask if I could take Thomas’ shift at the abattoir on Thursday, starting at 05:45. Thomas had been working continually throughout and was even more exhausted than I was, so of course, I said yes. It was just one of those weeks!
On Thursday, just as I was contemplating the fact that I might manage to get home a little bit early to start my long weekend, which would be good as the weather forecast was awful, my phone rang. It was John, who often calls to tell me he’s going to be late home, or ask whether I want him to get anything at the shop, so I answered without any concern. John sounded a little bit shaky though, as he told me he was at the local doctors’. He had fallen and hurt his ankle, and as there was no longer an x-ray facility in Finnsnes, he had to go to the hospital in Tromsø. He was waiting for a taxi, he told me. Fortunately my generous colleague Konstantin said they would manage without me.
There was heavy snow forecast, but we made it to Tromsø in good time. It was a nightmare trying to find a place where I could park near an entrance to drop John off though, given that he couldn’t bear any weight on his foot. The doctor in Målselv had told us to take him to Accident and Emergency, but there didn’t seem to be any access there for ordinary cars. Eventually, we went to the main entrance, where there were wheelchairs available, but even then it wasn’t straightforward. Manoeuvring a rickety wheelchair in snow and ice isn’t easy. Then we couldn’t find anyone to tell us where we needed to be. I know the UK health service is on its knees, but I was thinking fondly of the old days in Scotland, where every hospital I ever attended had A&E department where you could drive up to the door, and walk in to find a receptionist who, one way or another, would register you and get you into the system.
We finally managed to find our way to the right place, but after the x-ray was taken, we had quite a long wait. I spent the time worrying about the fact that my phone was (uncharacteristically) low on charge, I didn’t have a charger with me, and that finding a hotel in Tromsø with parking at five or six at night would be difficult as well as heinously expensive.
To our relief, John’s ankle wasn’t broken and he didn’t need to stay in, but as we set off to drive back, it started to snow heavily. Visibility was awful and for a while, I couldn’t manage to limp along any faster than 40km/hour. The headlights clogged up with snow and the windscreen wipers were icing up and smeary and I had been up since four in the morning. Once again, we limped along until we could find a place to get off the main road. Fortunately, John had declined to take any strong painkillers and even more fortunately, it was his left ankle that was damaged and my wonderful, workhorse car is an automatic. In any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have let him drive, but driving onwards felt almost impossible. Still, we contemplated stopping at Vollan Gjestestue, which would be halfway home. By some miracle, the snow stopped at Nordkjøsbotn and John felt able to carry on and we made it home at about nine in the evening.
The storm finally hit properly yesterday and I was super-glad we had made it home on Thursday evening. It took a very long time to dig out the car yesterday. Have a good week all.
And so here I am, after my hoped-for week off ended up being anything but. We haven’t decorated for Christmas yet and I haven’t done the edits to my book that Ger, my agent, has asked me to do. I am now very much hoping that I can use some of my flexitime hours to take some shorter days next week, but of course it will depend what work comes in. When I decided, forty years ago, that I wanted to be a vet, I had no thought at all, and no understanding of how tough it can be to work in a profession where you never know what the next days, or even hours might bring. It’s mentally so much tougher than I could ever have imagined too, but one thing I can say about my life is that it is rarely ever boring.
So here’s hoping that there isn’t too much more snow and that I have a bit more time this week. This was the view from my kitchen window yesterday, during the short, twilight hours.
Yesterday was officially the last day of the season at the abattoir. It’s rather sad to think that the vast majority of the lambs that were born in the spring time are now processed and ready to be eaten, but that is the end result for almost all animals that are bred for food. My job, as ever, is to ensure that the animal welfare during that process is as high as it can possibly be, and also to check that the quality and cleanliness of the meat produced is up to scratch.
Though the season officially ended yesterday, lots of the season workers flew home (including twelve who had decided to desert early in order to get cheaper flights). A quick change of plan meant that instead of being on the sheep production line, as I had expected, I was suddenly free to make a start on all the work that’s been building up while I’ve been busy. Every year, the season overshadows all the other work we do and I guess it’s the busiest time of the year.
It felt good to be making a start on the backlog. Hilde has given me some new tasks at the abattoir as I will eventually be moving there on a permanent basis. As with any other business, there’s a lot of paperwork to do behind the scenes and with my predecessor having left a year ago, and the other permanent vet (Ann) on sick leave, I am in the sink or swim phase of a new job, where things are thrown at me and I have to work out how they are done before a (fortunately mostly reasonable) deadline. That sort of thing can be somewhat stressful, but I can remember, all those years ago as a brand new vet, being thrown into a consulting room with clients when my knowledge of how to do the job was sadly lacking, and that was way worse! Ultimately, I will swim. I always do. Life experience is a wonderful thing.
John’s Triar fence isn’t quite finished. He and I had measured before we began and had estimated we needed 100m of lamb netting, but it seems we were out by a few metres and will need to buy some more lamb netting. I was amazed by John’s expertise though. One of the beautiful things about having adult children is that they learn to do things you never expected them to. Before I married, I was always impressed with the young farmers I had to work with, who were so wonderfully practical and seemed to be able to turn their hands to anything. I can do lots of things, if taught to do them, but often fear messing up (though obviously, reading my own words higher up the page, that doesn’t apply to things that are thrown at me at work!). John reminds me of those young farmers. He has no fear of taking things apart and putting them back together, or building a fence and sorting out any problems that come up. I am immensely proud of the young man he’s turned into.
Here he is wielding a mallet to put the posts in place, banging them down with a post knocker, sawing a notch for the stay (posts that go in at an angle to stabilise the corner posts) hammering in a stay and finally, tightening up the lamb netting (wider holes at the top, smaller gaps lower down). As you can see, he did it all with snow on the ground. That snow is mostly gone again for now, but winter is definitely here.
After we had been working on the fence, John went inside to have a warm shower, while I did some washing up. The washing machine was also on. While I was standing at the sink, I got something of a shock when I found my feet were suddenly wet. We have a dishwasher, but it isn’t plumbed in yet (it needs a new pipe and, you guessed it, it’s on John’s list of things to tackle). This means that there is an uncovered hole in one of the pipes under the sink. Up until now, the water has drained away normally despite this, but now it wasn’t. John also came out of the shower to say there was water all over the bathroom floor. It’s a wet room, so that wasn’t a disaster, but it certainly wasn’t normal either.
Norwegian insurance companies are great. In the UK, most seem to spend their time trying to get out of paying out, but here in Norway, I phoned mine (Gjensidige) immediately, and within a couple of hours there was a plumbing expert, who ran a self propelling hose up the pipes from the septic tank, then put in a camera to see what was wrong. It seems a previous occupier has thrown a load of solid fat down the drains, which has attached to the pipes and not only blocked them, but has done significant damage. For now they are unblocked, but will need to be replaced.
I’m not sure yet whether this is going to involve digging up huge sections of the garden (there might be a quicker fix under the house as the pipe from the toilet is large and still intact) but either way it’s a big job. It may be that it will have to wait for next year, as when the snow comes and the ground freezes, it will become impossible to dig, or indeed to access the “creep cellar” under the house, which is accessed from outside and will shortly be under a metre of snow. Still, for now it’s all working okay and it will be sorted out eventually. I’m just glad we found it early. The person that sold me the house also bought insurance for unexpected things happening after she’d moved out, so I will, if at all possible, shift the claim from my own insurance onto hers, but either way, I feel confident that this will all be sorted out.
Anyway, I have to go. My car has a major fault which is going to take three days to fix (something called the wire harness has a fault) and there’s nobody nearer than Tromsø with the expertise to fix it. I’ll take it today and collect it next weekend. One thing I can certainly say is that life here is rarely boring!
Autumn is progressing fast, and earlier this week, I saw some early snow dusting the top of the mountains. It was only on the highest peaks, so the (now disappeared again) snow line was probably about a thousand metres above sea level, but it will return and gradually descend. I think there are many areas in the UK where there is no snow from one year to the next. It suddenly struck me as odd to live somewhere where it was inevitable that there will be many months of snow on the ground. It never really crossed my mind, growing up, that I would ever live anywhere other than the UK. I never had a burning desire to do so, yet here I am.
John bought a new car this week. He’s been driving an old banger since he passed his test, but the clutch has been slipping towards oblivion ever since he got it. He’s bought a five year old Ford Mondeo, which will hopefully be more reliable. They don’t use salt on the roads here, so there’s less of a problem with rust. The stunning autumn colours and the new car prompted me to suggest a road trip this weekend. Campsites in Norway often have cabins to rent at very reasonable prices, so I had booked one in Alta, but John called me at work yesterday to say he thought he was coming down with a cold, so we cancelled. Alta is a six hour drive, so doing it after work on a Friday night would ideally only be done with both of us fit and well. We’ll probably go somewhere next weekend instead – perhaps somewhere in Sweden – though as Triar doesn’t have a doggy passport, he’ll probably have to sit that one out.
Projects with the house are ongoing. I’m still waiting for quotations for work to be done by the builder. In the meantime, we are still putting stuff away after the move and trying to get some smaller tasks done. For example, the living room is quite large and only has one overhead light and two small wall lamps. If it was only for use in the evenings, we could probably get away with a standard lamp or a couple of table lamps, but as there are months in the winter when it’s dark almost all day, it’s necessary to provide enough light to mimic daylight, otherwise it is all too easy to go into hibernation mode. We’ve invested in some smart bulbs from Philips. Some provide different shades of white (bright and warm) while others also can be coloured. We finally got internet earlier this week, so we will be able to get Alexa up and running so she can turn the lights on for us. We’ve also found a stand to put firewood into, so hopefully we will be able to get the living room into better shape this week.
I’ve been at the abattoir most of this week. We are already short staffed, but when the call came in from the reindeer abattoir that they wanted to open for a day or two, we realised that we were going have to manage with one person less. Konstantin said he was happy to go, so though it was somewhat chaotic on Thursday and Friday, we managed to get through it. The reindeer abattoir is small and run by a Sami family. I’ve written about it before, but it’s difficult to plan around as the reindeer are often herded there on foot, rather than being transported in lorries.
Something of a hammer blow fell on Thursday afternoon. We were sent an e-mail to say that there was a suspected case of CWD in a reindeer that was slaughtered in Bjørgefjell in Helgeland. CWD (chronic wasting disease) is a prion disease, somewhat similar to Scrapie in sheep and BSE in cattle. There are two possible forms, one of which crops up occasionally in individuals. The other form is infectious and could potentially lead to huge problems and a great deal of suffering, if allowed to spread.
So for now, there are preparatory actions being set in motion. It’s likely that all the meat produce from that herd will have to be traced, but that is minor in comparison to working out all the reindeer that might potentially have been in contact with the affected one. Reindeer are not fenced in, but herded loose on pastures that are traditionally used by various Sami families. In wild reindeer, the infection can be passed on through infected saliva, and prions are very difficult to remove from the environment.
Norway is incredibly strict about disease outbreaks in animals, the consideration being that if a disease becomes endemic, the suffering over time will be worse than that caused by a cull. Back in 2016, infectious CWD was found for the first time in Europe in wild reindeer in Norway. The entire herd of over 2000 reindeer was culled in an attempt to stop it spreading. The devastation that will occur if there is an outbreak in domesticated reindeer will be cataclysmic. Relations between the Sami and the powers that be in Norway are already strained. And so, we wait for answers. Hopefully the wait will not be too long.
It was hard leaving Yorkshire. I left just after midday last Saturday and the last few hours were melancholy. I travelled to Gatwick on the train: a frustrating journey as I misbooked my tickets on the Trainline App and though I realised my error moments after I had done it, it couldn’t be undone. And so I walked through Leeds station and watched an almost empty train to Kings Cross leave ten minutes after I arrived there, then travelled to York, where two more trains to the same destination left before the one I was booked onto pulled in. Still, I stayed overnight in a Premier Inn near the North Terminal and set off at a civilised time on Sunday morning to fly home.
That day’s journey was somewhat hair-raising. I flew from Gatwick to Bergen, then from Bergen to Tromsø. The original plan was that John was to collect me from the airport, but as he was stuck in the UK due to the SAS strike, I planned on getting a bus from the airport to the fast boat and taking the last boat of the day, which left Tromsø at 8pm. All the connections were a bit tight, but despite a couple of delays and an almost interminable wait, while they unloaded the baggage for four planes onto the two, smallish luggage carousels in Tromsø, I arrived safely at around 10pm. Just as well as I was due in the abattoir at 6am on Monday morning. Had I not made it, I would have been faced with the interesting dilemma of which of my colleagues might be willing to take the two and a half hour drive to Tromsø at an unspecified time on a Sunday evening.
It’s been a fairly typical summer week at work. I was at the abattoir Monday to Wednesday, then on Thursday I set to, tackling the six new cases I’ve been sent. Fortunately, the abattoir is closed next week, so hopefully I will get at least half of the investigations under way then, and keep my fingers crossed that I don’t get another six in the meantime. The good news is that Gry is sacrificing some of the first week of her holiday to come out with me.
I haven’t been out and about too much this week, but Triar and I did take a tour down the pathway at the back of the house and round to the little harbour that lies near the bottom of the hill. I’ve commented before on the fact that most of the small paths are blocked in the winter due to the snow. When it’s a meter deep and regularly added to, they rapidly become impassable. But this is a land of extremes. While the long dark spell brings a blanket of white over the landscape, the light brings so much life that even the floors of dense pine forests are swathed in green. This was the path Triar and I took. The undergrowth is at shoulder height.
Rampant plants almost obscuring the path
And here’s Triar on the harbour wall.
Triar
Of course, all that growth means there are lots of insects. In particular, I love watching the bumble bees.
Bumble bee on a violet flower
The last two photos are from a trip to collect John from the airport yesterday evening. I set off for Tromsø before his plane left Oslo and before the hour and a half delay was announced, so I took my time (and a small detour) driving up. The tops of the mountains were swathed in clouds, but now and then I would catch sight of a rocky peak.
Rocky peaks on the far side of a fjord
And as ever, where the mountains are so steep, there are stunning waterfalls along the roadside. Though technically today is the last day of 24 hour daylight, there was a brief period around 1am where it was definitely twilight. Due to the mountains, though the sun is still technically above the horizon, the reality is a little different.
And though it was hard leaving Yorkshire, and Mum and Dad, now I am back, I am not homesick. The week after next, I will get the keys to my new house, and then a whole new chapter will be beginning. Have a lovely week all!
I’m going to start with a couple of photos this week. I need to find a way to stop myself huddling inside through the winters here. Having just lived through my second, I have come out the other side hopelessly unfit again. Still, I have made a start, and Triar and I took our first outing up the track that leads to Kistafjellet, which I discovered at the end of autumn last year: Changing Wheels, Changing Weather
Triar waits for me as I take a picture of the fjord and mountains beyoned
I won’t make it up Kistafjellet before I go on holiday in two week’s time, but hopefully I will when I get back. It’s a long walk, but not technically difficult and there’s a good track all the way up, so it’s a good mountain to start on. I walked for about half an hour, which isn’t that much, but the track is pretty steep. I got as far as this river, before turning to come back.
In other news, I have found an agent who wants to sell my book. Having written the Hope Meadows books with Vicky Holmes, I have been hoping to write something that would be all mine and published under my own name. This is part of the letter I sent the agent last Friday, along with part of the manuscript.
“The Good Friends’ Veterinary Clinic” is an exploration of the life of a recently widowed veterinary surgeon and how she deals with the consequences of a lifetime of putting her family before herself. I was aiming for a cross between James Herriot and Sally Wainwright (Last Tango in Halifax). It is set in rural Scotland and is filled with diverse women and their animal friends, from the partnership between receptionist Gail and her guide dog Beth, to butch lesbian, Mags, who loves her crazy mare, Strumpet, almost more than life itself.
I finished writing a while back and had been looking for an agent, but hadn’t been very active in pursuing it. After something of a break, I looked through The Writers’ and Authors’ Yearbook last Friday and something about this agent caught my eye, so I sent off a submission. Since then everything has happened at high speed. Anyway, I don’t want to say any more right now as we are at the contract stage and it’s not quite complete. Suffice it to say, I think I’ve found someone I can really work with, which feels brilliant!
More pictures now. Thomas, Gry and I were driving back from a case yesterday when we noticed the almost-perfect reflection of mountains in Skøvatnet, the lake we were driving beside. It was so still and so beautiful that Thomas actually turned the car round so we could all go back and take some pictures.
There was something of an unexpected coda to last week’s post about the dead eagle. Line, who oversees our animal health and welfare team, commented on my Facebook post last week to say “Good job”. I was slightly surprised then, when she called me midweek to talk about it. She sounded a little tentative as she opened up the OK Program instructions for the year and asked me which protocol it was I’d followed. She opened up the familiar sheet with the instructions and polite dissection photos and I told her that yes, that was what I had done.
It turns out that though I had very carefully read and translated the instructions, I hadn’t given the same attention to the explanation at the top, which said that this form was for the use of hunters who found birds when they were out hunting. My eagle had been found by someone out hunting, but apparently the form I should have filled in, as a Mattilsynet vet, was actually to be found on MatCIM, the emergency monitoring channel that we use to track outbreaks and emergencies. Had I found the instructions on MatCIM, I would have discovered that there was no need to take the wing at all, and the swabs alone were enough. Still, she said, probably the Veterinær Institutt down in Ås were pleasantly surprised to have received my carefully packed eagle wing…
She apologised for laughing, but I actually thought it was funny enough to relate it to the three colleagues with whom I sat and ate lunch a few minutes later. They all thought it was hilarious too. So I was laughing for what remained of the day and was still giggling to myself as I drove home. After all, there was no harm done, it had certainly been an adventure and anyway, I love things that are just too ridiculous. The lab haven’t got back to me yet, so I still don’t know whether the poor old eagle died of bird flu, but don’t worry. I’ll keep you posted.
And finally, I’ll leave you with another midnight sun picture. Have a good week!
A Vet’s Life 