The opposite

It’s almost embarrassing. Well, not almost, it’s very embarrassing. Here we are in Norway, one of the richest countries in the world, and we run out of…butter.

The reason why it’s so embarrassing is that there are very many countries in the world that have far more important things to concern themselves with than running out of butter. Running out of water is just one example. Bread is another. Freedom is another.

But here in mid-December 2011, the butter supply dried up. It’s the wrong verb here, I’m sure. Does a butter supply dry up? Or does it run out? Trickle away? Perhaps it just gets spread too thinly and becomes invisible.

Whatever. It disappeared from the supermarket shelves.

Supermarket shelves uncontaminated by butter.

Now Norwegians are a stoical bunch. They are also more willing than most to believe in the infallibility of the status quo. Whereas a Frenchman or Italian might immediately blame the government, a Norwegian will simply buy margarine instead.

However, questions started to be asked. For example: “Where’s the butter?” Christmas was approaching, which is pretty butter-heavy everywhere in Western Europe, and the shelves were empty. How could you make cakes? Puddings? How could you rub it all over yourself and then jump up and down in the snow singing the national anthem?

Norwegian butter. Smør it on all over!

So obviously the right people to ask were the people who made the butter.

Well, of course, farmers make butter. But just about all the farmers in Norway sell their butter to a sort of cooperative called Tine. Now Tine has a virtual monopoly of the dairy industry in Norway. You won’t find much other butter – if any – on the supermarket shelves and Tine turns over roughly 3 billion US dollars a year with an operating profit of about 80 million dollars in the third quarter of 2011 alone. Which is a heck of a lot of milk.

Nor does Tine enjoy an exactly squeaky-clean reputation. There have been rumours – undoubtedly ill-founded – that Tine has misused its position to squeeze competitors out of the market. But, as I said, the rumours are probably ill-founded and have no truth in them whatsoever.

A slightly more believable rumour.

So what did Tine say when people asked why there was no butter? Well, there were two answers. One appears to have blamed the craze for high-fat, low-carb diets. Yes, it was all the fault of those mad dieters who were drenching their ice creams in litres of melted butter. Or rubbing it all over themselves and then jumping up and down in the snow singing the national anthem.

Sure.

The other answer was that the summer had been wetter than usual and that there was insufficient animal feed as a result.

Now called me old-fashioned if you will, but one of the biggest butter producers in Europe is Ireland. It’s a country on which the god of weather dumps enough rain annually to fill the Mediterranean Basin three times over with still some left over to fill the world’s swimming pools for the next century. So how come we suddenly had Irish butter in the supermarket while Norwegian butter was slightly noticeable by its absence?

And what was even more strange was that there appeared to be no shortage of milk. Or cream, or cheese, or sour cream, or crème fraîche… Just butter. Which, as far as I’m aware, is actually made from milk.

Let them eat crème fraîche!

Stern measures were called for, and painful measures were taken. In its efforts to support the 16,000 Norwegian farmers that supply butter to Tine, the government had imposed massive importation tariffs on dairy products. Well, not just on dairy products, to be honest. There are also, for example, massive duties on cars to protect the thriving Norwegian automotive industry.

These tariffs had to be reduced. And they were. Until the end of March 2012, I believe.

As a result, butter turned up in the supermarkets once again. Of course, it wasn’t Norwegian butter: it came from France, Belgium and sunny Ireland. At first it was limited to 250 grams per customer but this was, understandably, soon abandoned. What was rather noticeable – to me at any rate – was that there was no butter from the traditional Nordic allies. No Swedish butter. No Danish butter. Certainly no Finnish butter. Had the same problem afflicted them, or were they just a tad reluctant to bail out a neighbour who had effectively refused to allow their products into the country before?

We will probably never know. Any more than we will ever know the real reason for the Great Norwegian Butter Drought.

Personally, I blame the Egyptians.

As I write this, in February 2012, a couple of months after butter disappeared from the shelves, the first tubs of Tine are finding their way back into the supermarkets. There are still none of the half-kilo bars that we are used to – just modest little tubs so far. But what is clear is that either the dieters have resorted to some other method of boosting their fat intake – margarine or lard perhaps – or that the depleted stocks of animal feed have somehow recovered from the wet summer and are getting back to normal.

As we all know, animal feed, like the human liver, has miraculous regenerative properties.

And so, apparently, has the Norwegian dairy industry.

Fresh from the butter mountain. Thought I was joking, didn't you.

Part Two: Bad Language

Let’s get one thing straight right now: there is no such thing as the Norwegian language. Officially, there are two of them: Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål, which literally means ‘book language’, is not necessarily the language you find in a book, as there are at least some books written in Nynorsk. Nynorsk, which means ‘new Norwegian’, is, however, exactly what it says on the label: it’s new (well, about 150 years old, which is new in linguistic terms anyway).

So why have two languages?

Good question. Bokmål, which can be loosely defined as a sort of unofficial standard Norwegian, is spoken by roughly 88% of the population, 80% of whom work for TV and radio and write for the newspapers. On the other hand, Nynorsk is spoken by a few farmers and fishermen on the west coast.

So what made these farmers and fishermen so important as to get their own official language? The short answer is that they couldn’t understand each other very well and none of them spoke Bokmål. You must remember that most of the west of Norway is mountainous, and what is not covered in mountains is divided up by fjords. This means that speaking to anyone outside your own community used to be a bit difficult, unless you thought that a nice chat was worth risking your life on a mountain or in an open boat. The result of this was dialects. Not just a couple either – loads of them. Hence Nynorsk: a brave attempt to get Norwegians to understand each other.

A typical language barrier.

Strangely enough, more or less the same can be said of Bokmål. It may well be the semi-semi-official language, and it may well be understood by everyone (even the people who speak Nynorsk) but it too is an attempt to rope together several dialects. Not consciously, as in the case of Nynorsk, but it amounts to the same thing.

In fact, left to their own devices, no one in Norway would speak either language; they would all speak a dialect.

Of course, if you were foolhardy enough to enrol for Norwegian lessons, you would be taught Bokmål. After all, you’re using a bok so it seems logical. Besides which, the people who write ‘Teach yourself Norsk’ books are all Bokmål speakers anyway, so you haven’t much choice.

But, in fact, using a book is not such a good idea anyway because very little of what you read will resemble what you hear. Take a simple word like Oslo, for example. We all know Oslo, don’t we? The capital of Norway? And how is it pronounced? Oz-loh, right? Nope. It’s actually pronounced Ooshlo. Or even Ooshloo in some parts of Ooshlo. Okay, you might say, but what about Paris, which the French pronounce Paree? Well French pronunciation follows clear rules, according to which the S is not pronounced anyway.

A group of Norwegians trying to pronounce Oslo.

So does Norwegian follow similar rules? Well, if it does, they are certainly well hidden. In a desperate attempt to get Norwegians to pronounce ‘oh’, ‘ah’ and ‘er’, someone even introduced three extra letters – å, æ and ø. As you might expect, these are the last letters in the Norwegian alphabet. And they are also the reason why Norsk-speak looks so odd.

Naturally, in order to overcome these linguistic difficulties, some Norwegians decided to take the easy way out by emigrating to the United States, where they could speak a dialect of English in peace.

But, you’ve guessed it. I’ve been fooling you all along with this story of Bokmål and Nynorsk being the two Norwegian languages. There are also Riksmål, Østnorsk, the actual Oslo dialect and, of course, Danish. In fact, a linguistic war has been waged in Norway for the past 150 years and no one really looks like winning.

Two Norwegians settling a linguistic point.

Here are a couple of examples of this verbal conflict to give you some idea. The verb ‘to eat’, which is ‘spise’ in Danish, Bokmål and Østnorsk, is ‘eta’ in Nynorsk and in Oslo. If you were to say ‘the boats’ in Danish it would be ‘bådene’, but in Bokmål and Østnorsk it would be ‘båtene’, while it would ‘båta’ in Oslo and ‘båtane’ in Nynorsk. Confused? You will be!

So perhaps there’s some excuse for people like me who, after seven years in Norway, hardly dare utter a word of Norwegian. I lived in France and spoke French and I lived in Holland and spoke Dutch. Without any problems. I could even pronounce the capital cities. But somehow Norwegian has eluded me. And that’s probably because whenever I think that I can pronounce a word correctly, I suddenly realise that I can’t.

Part One: Keeping up appearances.

I ought to say at the outset that I was prompted to set down these thoughts about Norwegians by my wife – who’s Norwegian. That’s just in case anyone might think I have some sort of prejudice against Norway and Norwegians. In fact, that could not be further from the truth: I love Norway. But having lived here now for 7 years, I’m no longer blind to its peculiarities. And there are plenty of those.

So let’s start with what Norwegians look like. Well, today they come in all sorts of colours, shapes and sizes, but this was not always the case. Back in the good old Viking times, everyone looked more or less the same: tall and blond (or, in some cases, ginger). Things weren’t helped by a fondness for wearing beards (usually the men) and identical helmets and carrying shields.

It’s no wonder that battles in the Viking days were chaotic affairs. As most people tended to look fairly much alike, you couldn’t be quite sure whether you were fighting the enemy or each other. This may explain the Viking tactic of standing in line abreast facing the enemy, so you could be more or less certain whose side you were on, and their fondness for attacking monks – it being difficult to confuse a fellow Viking with someone wearing a cowl and sandals.

A group of Vikings on a day-trip to Lindesfarne. Spot the odd one out.

The Vikings went some way towards addressing this problem by giving each other descriptive names: Svein Forkbeard, Erik the Red, Jimmy Five Bellies, etc. This worked as long as they never met anyone with a red, forked beard and five bellies.

As I said, things are different today. However, there are still a very large number of Norwegians who conform to the racial stereotype: tall, blond(e), blue-eyed, etc. In fact, these Norwegians are almost impossible to tell apart and there are even theories that they are not born naturally but come off a production line in Taiwan and are sold in cans. To complicate the issue even further, middle-class teenage Norwegians tend to favour a style of dressing that further emphasises their uniformity and their general Barbie and Ken appearance: white and pastel colours (both sexes, even in winter), bandanas (!) and snow white socks and trainers.

A group of Norwegian ladies desperately trying to look different.

So there’s little wonder that levels of divorce and illegitimacy are so high in Norway, as there’s a fair chance that you might well end up in bed with someone else’s wife or husband simply because you mistook them for yours.

When it comes to dressing, Norwegians are much less uniform. Particularly in winter. After all, when it’s minus 20 outside you don’t much care what you look like as long as you’re warm. Which explains why so many Norwegians still favour woolly hats. They may look ridiculous, especially those with the bobble, but they keep your head a lot warmer than a stylish pork-pie hat or a trilby. And warmth is what it’s all about. In fact it might be accurate to say that between November and March a lot of Norwegians can go out without recognising each other at all, so winter means that a good opportunity for mutual identification is more or less wasted.

Summer is a different matter, however. As soon as the sun ventures above the horizon for more than 4 hours a day, out come the shorts and T-shirts! Particularly noteworthy are the captains of industry who swap the boardroom suit for regulation summer-wear at weekends. You can spot them a mile off. The shorts are, of course, neatly pressed and the T-shirt is at least Lacoste but the dead giveaway is the feet neatly tucked into socks and expensive running shoes in which they do anything but run. It might still be sub-zero and their knees are blue but, my God, summer is almost, well nearly almost, here and it’s time for T-shirts and shorts, come what may! Of course this is closely associated with the barbecue season – which extends from the last frost to the first frost – but more of that in a later post.

The ultimate in pastel high-tech cold weather gear. Just right for August!

It is quite easy to spot a Norwegian on holiday. They are generally big, with extended families, as you might expect given all the confusion, and they tend to amble along the street occupying all of the space as they do so. It is impossible to overtake a Norwegian family on holiday so the best move is simply to exercise patience. Stop at a local bar and sip a Pernod, read the paper and have an interesting conversation with the person at the next table. This will have allowed the Norwegian family to advance about 20 metres as they gaze open-mouthed at shops selling things that they have seen a hundred times before and interesting buildings that are no different from any other buildings.

A Norwegian extended family on holiday.

If you suspect that you may have encountered a Norwegian on holiday, but are still in some doubt about the matter, here are a few tips. (Here we’re talking about the ÜberNorwegian, of course.) In men, look for very large size (XXXL), shambling gait and possibly the odd tattoo. Don’t worry, this is no Hell’s Angel, just a normal holidaymaking Norwegian with whom you can probably have a quite interesting conversation about Schopenhauer over a cappuccino. In women, look for very large size (XXXL), shambling gait, possibly the odd tattoo, and slightly shorter hair. Don’t worry, this is no Bull Dyke, just a normal holidaymaking Norwegian with whom you can probably have a quite interesting conversation about flower arranging and stock-car racing.

So that just about wraps it up for appearances. Next time, housing. As in homes. As in IKEA.

So the rebels are getting gradually pushed back to Benghazi in the face of overwhelming firepower. And meanwhile Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, that decadent physical and mental wreck, is sitting back and playing his usual psycho games – hoodwinking his followers with a mixture of money, charisma and fear.

And what do the other countries do?

Nothing.

Why do they do nothing?

The Arab nations do nothing because they don’t want the same thing happening in their backyard. They’ll make sympathetic noises but they won’t intervene in any meaningful way.

The UN does nothing because it would mean a vote in the Security Council, which China would veto. Why? Because China doesn’t want the same thing happening in its backyard either.

The EU? Well, the EU is the Coalition of the Ineffective. Intervening in Libya would mean creating a pan-European military force. Which the EU doesn’t have.

The ‘Coalition of the Willing’? They got their fingers burnt in Iraq.

NATO? Up to their heads in problems in Afghanistan and they won’t do anything until the UN says so (see above).

Who does that leave?

South America?

Central and Southern Africa?

The Far East?

Antarctica?

Sorry Libya. It looks like you’re on your own.