As nations, we all have our little idiosyncrasies, don’t we? With the English, it’s extreme over-politeness. The French are obsessed with food and the state of their livers. The Germans laugh themselves silly at even the mention of a lavatory and the Italians are devoted to sex, either theoretically or preferably practically.
As far as I can see, the dominant idiosyncrasy of Norwegians is that most of them seem unable to drive. I’ve given this matter some considerable thought before arriving at this conclusion and I don’t commit the idea to paper very lightly. After all, some of my best friends are Norwegian, not to mention my wife.
But think about it for a minute. Norwegian Formula 1 drivers? Can’t bring any to mind. Famous Norwegian rally drivers then? Well, Wikipedia lists 5 of them, and this does include the 2003 world champion Petter Solberg. By contrast, Wikipedia lists 29 drivers for Finland and 18 for Sweden, so we can conclude that this is not a purely Nordic phenomenon.
I’d never really considered Norwegians to be bad drivers until I came to live here. In fact, I’d never given Norwegian drivers much thought at all, actually. I think I started to become aware of this idiosyncrasy when I realised that approaching cars seemed to favour the middle of the road. Unnervingly, but fortunately, they would then swerve at the last minute to avoid a collision. Of course the condition of the edges of the road might have something to do with this. I’d like, at this point, to say something positive about the state of Norwegian roads so here it is: better than Bulgaria. It’s the best I could come up with so I hope Norwegians are satisfied.

A Bulgarian road (close up).

Unfortunately the combination of wealth and an ageing population has had a further effect on this love of the middle of the road. The car approaching you is quite likely to be a massive 4×4 driven by a sweet old lady who has trouble peering over the dashboard. And it’s also likely that she is totally unaware of the 175 brake-horse-power engine lurking under the bonnet and drives her behemoth as if it were a Nissan Micra. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that she will be chatting away merrily on her mobile phone. It’s been illegal to use a phone while driving for eight years now but no one seems to have noticed.

An Oslo taxi-driver chatting to his wife.

Not that Norwegians can be unaware of the regulations, mind you. It’s difficult and unsurprisingly expensive to get a driving licence here. And you have to take a written exam. However, notwithstanding this fact, many people seem perfectly ignorant of even the simplest rules. And because Norwegians are essentially polite, civilised people, their ignorance of traffic regulations can often work in your favour – as in the driver who has right of way but stops in order to let you go first. Unfortunately this can also result in an impasse because you know that he/she should go first while he/she is adamant that you should go first. This can result in no one going anywhere.
Which leads me on to the Norwegian tendency to just plain stop. Anywhere. On a bend. On the fast lane of a motorway. Just over the brow of a hill. Anywhere. This is a tendency that was first identified by the excellent Norwegian writer, poet and general polymath Odd Børretzen, who can look disturbingly like my cousin Bill, in his book “How to understand and use a Norwegian”. It was he who first pointed out the fact that when a Norwegian feels confused and unable to decide what to do next, he will simply stop. Well, that’s all very well on a footpath but not in the fast lane of the E6.

Odd Børretzen.

Stopping gets more frequent in built-up areas, of course, as the driver may not be familiar with the route and will then stop to decide which way to turn. As he/she will inevitably be in the middle of the road anyway, this might be virtually anywhere, including right or left. But normally, after a decent pause, the driver will turn on his indicators and turn. You see, Norwegians – or some Norwegians at any rate – have never mastered the art of the indicator light. As I see it, the art is in indicating, in advance, the direction that you will take. Hence the name ‘indicator’. It’s a simple device that’s there to prevent confusion. In Norway they should be called ‘confirmators’ as they appear to be there to confirm the fact that you are already turning. As if the site of an enormous 4×4 broadside on to you was not enough.
I feel that most of the above can be brought down to one single point that Odd Børretzen would certainly approve. It has to do with population density. The population density of Norway is approximately 12 people per square kilometre. So, theoretically, if everyone were spread out over the entire country, it’s a safe bet that many of them could wander around for days without meeting another Norwegian. Especially in view of the stopping. By contrast, the population density of Germany – not a small country either – is 230 people per square kilometre, and this includes the Alps and parts of the Black Forest. So here we have a population that is used to plenty of space. And anyone who has watched a Norwegian driver nervously undertaking a 36-point turn in a crowded car park can testify to a total lack of spatial awareness. Obviously you don’t have to be particularly spatially aware when your nearest neighbour lives in a different valley. Norwegians are not urban creatures and the road is an urban device.

A typical Norwegian road. Note the lack of turnings.

So when, as a tourist, you see a Norwegian motorist driving along the middle of the road while chatting on his mobile, only to then stop and ‘confirmate’ that he is turning, you can put it into perspective by considering that such skills, while not needed in cities like Oslo or Bergen, are de rigeur in the empty spaces of northern Finnmark.

I threatened to publish an article on smoking. Here it is.
And let me make one thing perfectly clear at the outset: in no way do I condone smoking. The health risks are many and far too serious to be taken lightly. I actually look forward to the day when the world is tobacco-free.

A cigarette that 'fell' from a tall building. Accident or suicide?

Here in the western world, it’s certainly starting to get that way. Smoking is increasingly banned in public places and smokers are under more and more pressure to quit. A concerted campaign on the part of the non-smoking lobbies has had a considerable effect.
But it is certainly not the first such campaign. The first really concerted national campaign against smoking was instituted in the 1930s – yes, the days when every self-respecting gentleman was expected to smoke - and it was the brainchild of a quite remarkable man whose name I shall reveal at the end of the article.

The campaign started in magazines and newspapers where people were warned of the health hazards. This was backed up by a poster campaign while anti-smoking messages were sent to people at their workplaces. A national bureau was set up to coordinate these efforts, which swiftly began to bear fruit. Smoking was banned in the postal service and the air force, soon to be followed by hospitals, schools, public offices and convalescent homes. Army personnel were also subject to restrictions. Midwives were forbidden to smoke while on duty, as were police officers and members of paramilitary organisations. Within a few years, smoking in trams was banned in sixty major cities.

As you might expect at that time, women smokers were targeted in particular – and, of course, pregnant women more than any. In fact, restrictions were even imposed on selling tobacco products to women. As the campaign continued to gain momentum, smoking in public was outlawed for anyone under the age of 18 and a total ban was imposed on smoking in public transport – at the express demand of the architect of the campaign who feared that women might suffer from passive smoking.
Inevitably, restrictions was also imposed on tobacco advertising. It was no longer possible to portray smokers as macho or to claim that smoking was harmless. In fact, the campaign even went so far as to make it illegal to criticise the anti-smoking lobby. It was no longer possible to display ads for tobacco alongside railway lines, at stadiums or at race-courses. And the tax on tobacco was raised by about 80-95% of its retail price.

And I want you to stop pointing.

Were the measures effective? Well, given the social and political problems of the time, they undoubtedly were. The number of people who smoked 30 or more cigarettes a day dropped from 4.4% to 0.3% of the population. Given the limited media possibilities of the day, and the fact that smoking was far more widespread then than it was to be 20 years later, I think you’ll agree that this was a pretty good result.

And the result was due in no small measure to the personal influence of the architect of the campaign, whose name I shall now reveal. And if you doubt my word, you can click on this link.
The name of the campaign’s architect was a Mr. Adolf Hitler. A man who was, as we all know, ever the champion of personal freedoms. A man who was dedicated to making the world a better place for all of us. He was also a non-smoker.

Have you ever considered the concept of safety? What does ‘safe’ actually mean?
I think that we can all agree that certain things are inherently unsafe. For example, it doesn’t matter how effective seat-belts are, how many airbags you have, or how much side-impact protection is built into your vehicle, cars are still potentially lethal objects. For a start, they are made of metal, weigh anything up to a ton and a half, and hurtle along (local traffic regulations permitting) at speeds of up to about 300 kph. And that’s before we’ve even mentioned the state of the road and the competence of the driver. It doesn’t matter how much effort car manufacturers put into making cars safe, driving is still inherently unsafe.
So how come we dare to drive? The short answer is that we regard the possibility of a disaster as an acceptable risk. We can live with it even though we might die from it. And, let’s face it, there are many people who never consider the risk at all.
But the world is full of unsafe situations. They range from walking down a street in the Gaza Strip wearing a yamulka and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I hate Palestinians’ to taking a holiday on the banks of the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
However, it’s a fact that just about every human activity involves its share of risks. Most accidents happen in the home. You can choke on a chicken bone . You can look the wrong way when crossing a street. You can stubbornly try to disprove the old advice about not walking under a ladder… In fact, if we were to adhere absolutely to the concept of personal safety, we would never get out of bed. And then suffocate in the sheets.

Chicken bones.

Unfortunately western society has developed an obsession with safety. Strangely enough, this preoccupation rarely involves obvious sources of danger such as skydiving, free climbing, base-jumping or hang-gliding over active volcanoes. Instead it tends to focus on things like smoking (active and passive) or the possibility that you might contract some extremely rare condition by ingesting a substance found in minute quantities in certain specific situations.
Smoking is a debate that I’ll reserve for a future article – or several – but the last example, unspecific as it may seem, is the centre of world-wide discussion and research. I’m talking about nanoparticles.
We all know what a particle is, don’t we? Literally, it’s a small part. Very small. But perhaps big enough to actually make you cough – as in the case of a particle of soot, for example. However, to imagine a nanoparticle, you have to think in terms of a normal particle and then divide this by, say, a million. In fact, to borrow a description from the website of the Institute of Occupational Medicine, they “are usually defined as particulate materials with at least one dimension of less than 100 nanometres (nm). One nanometre is 10-9 m. By comparison, a human hair is approximately 70,000 nm in diameter, a red blood cell is approximately 5,000 nm wide and simple organic molecules have sizes ranging from 0.5 to 5 nm.”
So let’s agree that they are pretty small. Tiny even.

A nanoparticle (actual size).

Yet, there is ongoing research – presumably heavily funded – into the health issues possibly associated with nanoparticles, which are present in milk, wood and your bedroom. In other words, at least three situations in which nanoparticles are said to occur are situations that we have always lived with. Quite happily, nanoparticles or no nanoparticles.
The European Commission has held international seminars on the subject. There are commercial organisations devoted to researching nanoparticles. And, of course, they are going to find something nasty, if only because, with so much money and so many reputations at stake, they have to. The same can be said of a lot of research, in fact.
So, as I understand it, nobody is seriously thinking of outlawing hang-gliding over active volcanoes but lots of money is being devoted to assessing the possible health-risks of particles that are 700 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. And the accent is on “possible” here – there are no definite indications that there are any risks at all.
But if there’s the slightest risk… What? Are we going to ban nanotechnology, for example? Of course not. There are potential billions to be made in producing a supercomputer the size of a wristwatch. But we’ll happily spend – or someone will happily spend – millions on researching the risks. Nanoparticles are just perfect for the nanny state.
Meanwhile, I can go tramping off into the Norwegian forests, break my leg, and die out there. Or drown in a boating accident. But that’s the sort of risk that we all accept and acknowledge. It’s part of the business of being human. After all, we’re animals too and legs do break in the most inconvenient places. People drown. The world is not a safe place. And I sincerely hope that it never will be.

It was all my wife’s fault. She pointed out that I might be less tied to my computer, waiting for the next job to come in, if I had a mobile phone that would allow me to answer e-mails, do the odd bit of work and surf the Internet without having to sit in a stuffy office.
Now I’d tried to get a subscription for a mobile when I first arrived in Norway. Unfortunately, I had no credit history in this country and telecom companies were a bit hesitant to hand out spanking new phones to someone who might well be there on holiday. Or for a long weekend in Oslo. So I ended up with a prepaid account. But after 4 years, I felt that I might qualify.
And it seemed as though I did qualify. I filled in Tele2’s online form, a digital credit check was performed and everything was okay. And the phone I’d chosen was a state-of-the-art HTC S730, complete with pull-out keyboard, Windows….the works. I could even keep my old number! So I sat back and waited for my new toy to appear in the post.
But it didn’t.
After 4 or 5 days, I phoned Tele2 and asked them why I hadn’t received the phone. I was answered courteously in English by a gentleman who explained that his company – Moobi – was actually subcontracted by Tele2 to run their online shop. The HTC S730 was there alright, and ready to go, but they hadn’t received instructions from Tele2 to send it. He promised to send them an e-mail to get the problem sorted out.
Two days later, I phoned Moobi back. Naturally you have to press several buttons to do this – no I did not want a hernia operation or an oil-change for my car – and, of course, I did not get the same guy. Although this was a different guy, the story was much the same except now he would send a message to Tele2 there and then because it was almost a week since I applied for the phone and this was clearly not good enough.

A real telephone. Utterly immobile.

The next day I got a letter from Tele2. Not a real letter signed by a real person, of course, but one of those that they send out to an apparently frighteningly large number of people in similar situations. It said that there was a problem in transferring my telephone number. This might be because:
1. The legal entity (me) in whose name the telephone number was registered was not the same as the legal entity (me) to whom it was to be transferred.
2. There was a mistake in my social security number or I had not given an organisation number for my self-employed status.
3. The mobile number had been cancelled.
At the time, I chose option 2, because I am self-employed and I did not remember giving an organisation number. So I phoned Tele2 to correct the problem.
Now as useless as the boobies from Moobi were, at least they spoke good English and seemed efficient. However, this time I was forwarded through 4 different people who spoke either no English or largely unintelligible English. I spent a lot of time pressing buttons, refusing invitations for another hernia operation and I waited for a very long time. Oh, and I forgot the music, which was some heart-rending rock ballad played at ear-rending volume. But I finally got the guy I needed. And he explained that my self-employed status was not the problem. It was that the legal entity (me) in whose name the telephone number was registered was not the same as the legal entity (me) to whom it was to be transferred. I had forgotten that my prepaid account was registered in my company name. I would have to contact my existing telecom company – Telenor – and ask them to change the account from business to private.

A legal entity.

‘But it really doesn’t matter so much if I keep my own number anyway,’ I protested. ‘I’d just as soon have a new number.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that. It’s very convenient to keep your number.’
So I phoned Telenor, spoke to many different people, listened to some country and western music and finally got a guy who knew something.
‘It’s easy,’ he said, which was a definition that hadn’t occurred to me until then. ‘I’ll send you a text message asking you if it’s okay to change the business account to a private account, you reply ‘yes’ and that’s all there is to it.’
‘So I can then tell Tele2?’
‘No, not immediately. You can do that in the morning.’
So, the following morning, having replied ‘yes’ to the text message, I did phone Tele2 again. And after pressing the usual buttons – hernia, oil-change, etc. – I was speaking to a real person who assured me that there was now no problem. And I revelled in this luxury for all of 6 or 7 seven hours. Until I received the same text message again asking me to reply ‘yes’. Well, I’ve met many people who can’t take ‘no’ for an answer but this was the first time that it applied to ‘yes’.
So I immediately phoned Telenor again. You remember Telenor, don’t you? Country and western music?
‘Yesterday I was told that the legal status of my phone number had been changed from business to private and today you’re asking me if I agree to it again.’
‘Hang on,’ said the guy at Telenor, ‘I’ll check.’
There was a pause.
‘Yes, your request has been registered. It will be changed tomorrow.’
‘That’s what you said yesterday.’
‘No, that was someone else.’
By the following day, we were now 9 days down the line and still no phone, or even the remotest prospect of a phone. So, as you might, I phoned Tele2 again for an update. Buttons, music, etc. and then a gentleman who checked for me. Yes, the status of the number had been changed from business to private and the transfer could go through.
‘And how long will that take?’
‘Oh, about a week. These things take time. There’s a lot to be checked’
I did some quick mental arithmetic. That could conceivably mean a period of three weeks between ordering the phone and actually getting it.
‘What if I just go for a new number?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that. It’s very convenient to keep your number.’
‘I think I’ll do it anyway. I never did like that number very much. How long will it take to get the phone with a new number?’
‘About 5 days. You’re not gaining anything in terms of time.

Transferring a phone number.

‘Okay,’ I said, breathing heavily. ‘I think I’ll opt for a new number anyway.’
But of course, I couldn’t get a new number from him – I had to talk to someone else for that.
‘How long will it take to get a mobile with a new number?’ I asked the someone else.
‘About 10 to 14 days,’ he replied.
’10 to 14 days!’
’10 to 14 days since you first ordered,’ he corrected. I failed to see the logic in this time-scale but I thought I’d let it pass.
‘I want to order a phone with a new number,’ I said.
And so I did. Although I did have some reservations about the first order. They might not cancel it, for example. And then I’d have two phones. As much as I was looking forward to the new phone, two seemed a bit superfluous.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ the someone else assured me. ‘The first order will be cancelled automatically.’
I think you will appreciate that, by this stage, I didn’t have much faith in anything going automatically. In fact, if the entire series of communications had taken place via snail-mail it couldn’t have taken much longer, and at least I would have had everything in black and white.
But today I learned from Tele2’s remarkably unsophisticated website that my phone has been sent. Sent where is another question, as is when, or if, it will eventually arrive.
It’s not as if I use my mobile much anyway.