Sea |

Sunrise/sunset: Up all day.

John and I went swimming in the sea last Sunday. It was after midday and the knowledge that we had to get up soon after 4a.m. the next morning was hanging in the air, but the sky was a wonderful clear blue and the air was warm. It seemed a shame to waste it. So rather than spending the day lounging around, we set off and drove to an isolated beach up on the north-western tip of Senja.

John had been to the area before, having walked up the hill in the photograph above with a colleague from work. We might walk up it together some day, but for now I was content to kick off my sandals and walk across the soft sand. The water was a chilly nine degrees, but we took the plunge anyway. There weren’t many people there, but there was a boat anchored in the calm waters of the bay. Its owners were also enjoying a day in the sun and it struck me, not for the first time, that having a boat would give a whole new perspective to exploring the area.

Moored sailing boat in the bay at Skaland.

At the other end of the bay there was a building, jutting out on stilts over the sea. With the backdrop of turquoise sea and yellow sand, I was reminded of the Caribbean shacks in the TV series Death in Paradise (filmed in Guadeloupe) though there was also something distinctly Norwegian about it as well.

It got very warm on Monday and Tuesday. Thirty degrees is not something I expect here, though when the sun is up twenty four hours a day, it does allow a lot of hours for the heat to build without the cooler evening and night to offset it. There was a thunder storm forecast for Wednesday night, and I found myself contemplating whether I might find a way to capture a picture – you know the type – a perfect bolt of lighting on a backdrop of darkness. I confess I thought about this more than once before I remembered the inconvenient facts that

a) By ten or eleven o’clock in the evening, I would have already been in bed (and hopefully asleep) for a couple of hours.

And more profoundly

b) That it wasn’t actually going to get dark – well not that proper kind of black darkness I had been considering – for at least two months.

I’m not sure whether the storm ever actually arrived. If it did, I slept through it. It definitely rained and was cooler afterwards, but I had to content myself with a picture that reflects the perfect stillness of the air in the early evening leading up to it. I was hoping that in the morning, it would have been stripped, but it wasn’t, so I’m guessing it didn’t even rain that hard but in my head, I’ve given it the portentous title “Before the Storm”. I’m not going to change that, just because events inconveniently didn’t unfold in the way they ought to have done!

See you next week.

Things have changed since I last posted. So much so that this is the first time I have been able to sit down and record it. On the calendar downstairs, back on the 24th March, written in pink felt-tip pen, is the name of my nearest veterinary clinic. To distract my mind from my echoing e-mail box, I had wandered in off the street and asked (in my best Norwegian) whether I could come in and “see practice”, just for a week or two. The smiling receptionist, looking bemused promised to get the boss to call me, and I left, feeling, to be honest, like a bit of a tit. After all, I could have made that contact over the phone couldn’t I? Still, later that day, I received the call, and at 9a.m. on Monday morning, I presented myself.

I confess that the first question confused me somewhat. Peering into a cupboard filled with uniforms, Kari Anna (practice nurse) asked me whether I was a small or a medium. How to reply? I was obviously neither. Promising me that the medium was VERY stretchy round the waist (yes but what about the bum?) she handed over the medium overalls and commanded me to change. Shovelling me into a pair of green clogs (more on those later) she started to show me things on the computer. Obviously it was all written in Greek… or maybe Latin. Actually I might have understood those bits, but the rest was a mystery. Being me, I set out to solve it, and armed with a trusty pen and a post-it note, I gradually began over the course of a fortnight to decipher the runes.

I also made some new friends. So much for the much-fabled Norwegian stand-offishness; we spent the next two weeks laughing. And on the Thursday of the second week, I was offered a job. Dagny, the scary boss lady said I should talk to my husband… who of course said “What are you waiting for. Get signed up immediately!” So I did, setting out to work two days a week. The past fortnight has been a whirlwind of bank accounts and tax office visits ( yup, I didn’t have the former and have never paid the latter here) and getting the paperwork together to try to get myself authorised to carry out veterinary work in Norway. Currently I’m working as an assistant, which suits me down to the ground as I am helping out without having to consult (without knowing all those crucial anatomical words) and in the meantime, I am gradually picking up more Norwegian, though there is the terrible temptation to revert to English, especially as some of the clients immediately start to chat to me when they find out where I am from.

It’s a wonderful feeling, picking up the reins of something I used to be good at. Some things come back so quickly. Others are filled with fog. I suspect that when it comes to real knowledge, I have always been very reliant on books, and for the moment, I don’t have the right ones to hand. The BSAVA Manual of Emergency and Critical Care was my constant companion for all the years working in the emergency clinics. It’s at the top of my shopping list as even though there aren’t so many emergency cases during the day, I seem to recall it had a lot of fantastic tips on how to work cases up in the first instance. I’m slowly regaining knowledge, refilling the blanks, remembering the things I was never good at (I can take a mean x-ray, but I have never been on a course to learn to use ultrasound). I am learning new things as well. Who knew that it was illegal to castrate a dog or spay a bitch in Norway without good clinical reason? Apparently they have to be allowed freedom to explore their wild-side, though how that works when using drugs to prevent ovulation I have no idea. Bang goes the idea of opening a spay clinic in my nearest city!

This week started badly. I tried to anaesthetise a dog without having the machine fully switched on. Never a good idea. Worse still, it transpired that the green clogs actually belonged to the boss lady. Well I always did like to walk in shoes that were hard to fill. I’ve bought my own now. And Dagny has not yet used the whip on me that I took in for Irene (fabulous receptionist) to use on Jan-Arne (crazy vet).

Been out walking (the picture at the top is taken from south of our village, looking up the coast) and skiing, both downhill and cross-country. I would like to say that I didn’t fall over once, but sadly I can’t. Still things are looking up on all fronts. There might even be some movement on the book, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself so I’ll leave that for next time.

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