Be Lonely Anywhere
Cities full of strangers
It is holiday season here in Norway. Kindergartens are closed, schools are closed, and it is a great time to be at work if you like to take it easy.
There is lots of drama about flying the summer. Airlines have made it really unpleasant to work for them, so people strike, and rich CXOs are absolutely shocked and disappointed that their attempts to squeeze further water from already exhausted stones has failed (so far).
We have stayed in Norway this year. Kjersti is pregnant and Eva wants to see family. So off to the west coast of Norway! London complains of a heat wave, we have 13 degrees and rain. It was nice to move before I people could call me a climate refuge.
I had a call today with a man living in London; he said the thermometer in his house was over 40 degrees when he woke up this morning. A funny place, London. Too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer. Windows with good intentions and bad results. I have lived in cold places, but it was the only place I have been where the middle-class stuff newspapers into the cracks around their windows to keep out the wind and rain and don’t thing twice about it.
You could say we are in the countryside, but its not entirely fair. Its certainly the country, but its quite industrial- here in Øvre Årdal, the heart of the economy is aluminum production. Before that, there were some farms that survived on potatoes. They were really poor!
For being in the countryside, western Norway is remarkably industrialized. It’s also quite densely built. In the east, you need to drive everywhere. Farms are spread out, the design of any larger area has just taken the “easy” way and made it more convenient to drive anywhere than any other mode of transport. To walk is dangerous, to ride a bike is accepted, until it is not by that one person who is willing to take your life to make a point about the importance of convenience when driving.
Here though, in a place with only three roads going in and out, one of which is closed for the next month due to an avalanche, you can walk everywhere. And I mean, everywhere. Everyone has a car, of course, but it is quiet. I can go all night and the morning without hearing a car or seeing one move-I can see out the window right now 4 houses, but I dont know if I have seen any people in them the last 48 hours. There are people in the shops, though. There are old men sitting around on the benches talking without looking at each other. Gangs of gangly kids roam the streets on their bike and clog the sidewalk when they stop to chat to and old lady and pet her dog.
The town only has 3000 people, but get this: It has a 50m olympic size swimming pool. The pool is outdoors, warmed to 30 degrees and sits next to the indoor pool, which doesn’t seem open in the summer. These pools are next to maybe 3 astroturf football pitches, which are next to the small stadium with is track and grass football pitch. Its absolutely luxurious.
I live in Oslo, one of the richest cities in the world, and there are two astroturf pitches that i can think of in cycling distance. There is one pool in the district, but it’s not open to the public. The outdoor pool in frognerparken is open, but the main public pool in Tøyen is closed for years because they decided to dig it out of the ground like a wart and build in something new. I guess someone had to be able to say they had rebuilt Tøyen Bad. If we left things alone, when would we get to do great things?
It’s quiet here, and if you don’t fit in you dont find your niche, you get squeezed out like water from a brick after a frost. You fall out elsewhere and remember when the town stopped feeling like home.
At the same time, it is relaxed. the city is relaxed, at least. I can’t speak for the people, we can all find a way to be unhappy, but I haven’t been worried for Eva in the street, I haven’t seen someone angry yet, and no drunken gossip girl has argued with their boyfriend at two in the morning outside our building.
Could I live here? Probably. I would be very fit. Would I be lonely? Yeah, but that isn’t entirely location-dependent. Could Eva live here? For awhile, sure, but she is going to break some eggs while making her own omelette, and she wont find the rest of the ingredients here, either.
She would leave as fast as her parents did when they were teenagers. I hope she would want to come back more often, but that is her path to choose. Eva doesn’t get the joke yet, but Kjersti and I tell her that we are going to enrol in whichever university she ends up at-I always planned on being a mature learner. I am going to keep telling her that joke until she gets it and then I will tell it twice as often and to her friends as well.
Originally published at https://charlield.substack.com on July 14, 2022.
