Footnote 27: Service Announcement--regular posting re-commences tomorrow, 14 April

I'm back from the 'frontier' of Scandinavia: a couple of personal musings about life in the North and a few pictures from my new abode

Dear readers, last Friday, we took over the keys to our new little farm somewhere in very rural Scandinavia. ‘Regular’ posting will resume tomorrow, for tonight I just have some (personal) musings for you (which, if you’re here for ‘just’ the regular stuff, you may, of course, skip.)

Getting There

True, the next village of some ± 2,600 (human) souls—and perhaps more domestic animals—is literally a few kilometers away. Still, there’s only one secondary road leading to the place and it is closed quite many weeks at a time in winter due to, well, excessive snowfall.

The landscape is stunningly beautiful, I daresay, and to buttress my claim, here’s a couple of pictures I took from our car while admiring the area (yes, these were taken on our trip to the farm last Friday):

Pic 1: Going up to the mountain pass.

Pic 2: brief stop just behind the pass, which allows you to see the valley below with our little farm.

Pic 3: on the way down—you can see the nearby fjord already.

Brief Musings on Life in the North

For a bit over 1.5 years, we’ve been living up north now. How far up north? Well, about 60° North, i.e., about the same latitude as (southern) Alaska, or northern Canada, which implies ± the same issues, such as loads of salt in winter, rusting cars, and the like.

Other than that, there’s little difference to esp. North America. Small towns, bigger towns, a few large cities. The entire region is thoroughly over-regulated and homogenised, but few, if any, local people realise that this is virtually all a post-1945 phenomenon. I doubt that it’ll last, but at least for now you can walk into virtually any place and find virtually the same stuff to buy, e.g., even in the above-referred village, the local supermarket has an aisle with ‘ethnic’ (by which is meant: Polish) foodstuffs.

We took over the keys on Friday and began renovating. The main building is about 100 years old, it has been enlarged a few times, and the last serious renovations occurred in the mid-1970s and late 1990s. It’ll change quite a bit, but it’s going to be quite some work-in-progress. So far, we’ve taken out the kitchen (which was a partially used IKEA model from the late 1990s, but the floor needs to be replaced, same as some of the insulation. Before we do that, though, we need an electrician to set up separate electricity outlets for the various rooms. Imagine my ‘suprprise’ when I found old ceramic circuit breakers and the like, right next to a ‘smart meter’.

That latter thing will go out of the house: too much EM radiation (which I’ll try to ‘defang’ a bit by placing a mesh (which makes a Faraday’s Cage around it) ain’t good, in particular as Norway is currently rolling out 5G everywhere. Sure, that’ll take some time to arrive in our area, but better be ready for it.

We already set up a compost heap and started looking around where to plant foodstuffs etc. It’ll be quite some work, but I take this as a kind of Ciceronian endeavour: reading/writing and horticulture/farming shall go hand in hand. If it’s good for the Romans (and what have they every done for us, eh?), it’s probably not the worst idea to do either.

One last paragraph before I wrap this up: we already chatted with our new neighbours, all of whome have been farming the valley for generations. These are some of the nicest and most helpful people we’ve ever met. I’m really happ that our kids will go to school with their kids, and if I’d have to buy a couple of horses to make my girls even happier, I’ll gladly do that, too.

Leaving the City

At first, it might seem strange to do so—I grew up downtown Vienna, spent all my life in cities, including a stint in NYC. Leaving ‘the city’ feels…well, strangely alright. Driving there was awesome (see the pictures above), but returning to one of the bigger places in Scandinavia was…strange.

Imagine—at our new home, there’s 500-600m of open land between our place and our neighbours: it was very quiet, no city noises, or the like. It’s really so quiet that you can hear the owls at night.

Driving back to our current abode, well, there were columns of cars going on vacation (Easter break, the local Thanksgiving equivalent), a super-stuffed grocery store, and so much of everything: cars, dirt, noise, light, etc.

It was one of the first things both my wife and I noticed: we won’t miss ‘the city’.

Given the trajectory of ‘Western Civ’, well, it’s probably not the worst point in history to ‘get out’.

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Well, that’s it for tonight—as mentioned above, ‘regular’ postings will re-commence tomorrow (we had to await a somewhat delayed delivery of new kitchen hardware before we could leave…).