Don't throw pillows at strangers
The island of Skibbåtsvær lies off the northwest coast of Herøy. The earliest documentation of life on the island dates from 1701 and at one time it was a thriving community with shops even selling things like watches. Fishing was obviously an important industry as well as farming - apparently there was always cheap planking to build things because of wreckage from sunken ships washing up on the beach.
Now however it is an uninhabited island apart from people who have cabins on the island and can holiday there. There are also "Archipelago days" where events are run and people can visit the "Fisherman's House" (an important cultural landmark), walk round the island etc.
At this August's Archipelago Day, there was to be a service on the Sunday in the Fisherman's House led by Liv-Helga, I was to tinkle the ivories and Øyvind (who I did a concert with a few weeks previously) would sing a solo (and I believe give a concert in the evening). At a number of the churches I play at, I need to choose music for manuals only and sometimes on top of that there are further restrictions e.g. in Dønnes Kirke, there is only a 4-octave range but on Skibbåtsvær I would have the Johannus One with me so that wasn't a consideration. For the postlude I chose a voluntary by John Stanley which was rather jolly. As I would be sitting at the front (and I hate sitting at the front), I did tell Liv-Helga that there was at least one place where I could stop the piece early. I said I'd glance up and if she thought people were getting restive, I could bring the piece to a premature close.
It was about a 45-minute boat trip, so arrangements were made to leave at 10am. My car battery wasn't in danger of running out but I thought a cheeky wee top up in the morning while I went for a stroll would be just the ticket. At 8am I plugged the car in and discovered that my charging port was “having a moment”. Not panicking, I thought that's ok, I'll just plug it into the mains and then pottered off round Bjørn. When I came back about 25 minutes later, I discovered the fuse had popped. I reset it, it popped, I reset it again, it popped. The 3rd time it stayed ok, and the battery started to charge. By this point I was a starting to get a little bit stressed, but I figured if it came to the worst and I was indeed running out of battery, I'd be able to stop somewhere and plug myself (well, the car) in. So off I set for Seløy, aiming to arrive at about 9.50 for the boat departure at 10am. At 9.48 ie 2 minutes (at most!) from the boat, after all the stress over charging the car, I realised I'd forgotten to pack the keyboard....
So I phoned Liv-Helga (the previous phone call her of course was the "yes, I saw you and yes I know I was going to the wrong church but I'm heading in the right direction now") and explained that I would be a "wee bitty" late. Obviously to charge my car in a wall socket was going to take way too long, so I phoned Sigrid and explained what was happening and if it would be possible to borrow her charger for a wee while to give my car a boost. Very obligingly she said yes so I zoomed (while keeping an eye on my battery level) back to Bjørn. When I arrived and properly explained the situation, she very generously just lent me her vehicle, so I in fact had a very quick turnaround. But when I got to Seløy, could I find the shop where we were meant to meet? Google maps was initially no help whatsoever - telling me I was 40 minutes way. This started a whole new panic thinking that I got the wrong town, if not then wrong island and I started to go back through my messages to double check. Eventually I worked out that the sat nav was giving me directions from my house and that I was in the right area. Found the shop, parked the car, found the boat and loaded on the keyboard, the stand, my backpack and me. Inevitably I was in a reasonably grumpy mood about all this - entirely self-inflicted obviously - no sympathy was expected (or indeed received).
We arrived on Skibbåtsvær and started to unload. Back in Seløy I was too grumpy to allow any assistance with all my gear but this time I accepted some help and passed my stand to someone to set down on the quayside as I stepped ashore with the keyboard itself. Unfortunately, this helpful person was also the person holding the boat by the quay. I had one foot on land, a very large keyboard bag hanging off my shoulder and the other foot on the boat. The boat started to slip away from land, and I started to do the splits. A quick (high pitched!) call rectified the situation, and the boat was hauled back in time before things got really serious for me. And then with all the grace and style for which I am justly famed, I disembarked and immediately face planted myself on the quayside. Very kindly, Liv-Helga rushed to my assistance and helped me up. Oh wait, no. She stood there very sympathetically crying with laughter. Though to be fair I would probably have done the same if positions had been reversed.
My social skills aren't my greatest asset so by this time I was very much giving off the "don't even think about trying to talk to me". The service went well and if memory serves there were over 20 people there which on an uninhabited island wasn't too shabby. When it came to the last voluntary, I thought, sod it, after the day I've just had (self-inflicted or not) you will listen to every single bar that I have practised.
And speaking of making ladies cry, there were another couple of occasions in August when I drove women to tears.
In preparation for my aunt visiting, I ended up driving to Mosjøen to pick up some furniture; specifically, a bookcase and a chest of drawers. Jysk in Sandnessjøen didn't have the specific bookcase I wanted or the drawers so off I went. I had double checked the website before I left to make sure it was still in stock. I wandered round the shop, found the drawers, took a picture of the catalogue number but couldn't find the bookcase. Not to worry, I logged onto the website again, found it and to the lady at the checkout. There was no problem with the drawers, but I could tell from her face that there was a problem with the bookcase (a very similar to the look I see when my names comes up on their screens after they have asked if I am a club member of their particular shop). She eventually confessed that she couldn't seem to find the name anywhere. I double checked my phone, and at that point it did cross my mind that "Hostages" was quite an unusual name for a bookcase. I had bought quite a number already and was pretty sure that I would have remembered a name like that. Eventually it dawned on me that Google translate had kicked in automatically.... she found this absolutely hilarious and was still laughing while serving another customer as I pottered off to pick up the furniture.
The other occasion was during a service in Nordvik Kirke. Katya had sung a solo which required transposing down 4 semitones. As it is an electric organ, I was just very lazy and pressed the "down" button the appropriate number of times. Unfortunately, I forgot to untranspose afterwards for the next hymn which led it to it being spectacularly low for the congregation. It was so painfully low that to compensate for this I pressed the "up" button after every verse so by the time we got to the last verse we were finally in the right key. Spectacularly unmusical experience which certainly brought tears to Katya's eyes.
Obviously the highlight of the month was my aunt Angela visiting. And it has to be said it was like preparing for the visitation of royalty. New furniture was bought, I was finally able to decide on a new colour for the walls, places previously unvisited by daylight were cleaned etc. The choosing a colour ended up being relatively painless - I had spent ages looking at various catalogues with all their fancy (and expensive) colours and being unable to choose. Transpires that you can go into Monter and they've got their "own" colours which they just make up for you there and then with their fancy machine. V exciting. So instead of panicking about 100+ different variants of blue it came down to pretty much pale, not very pale and dark. This is much more my level of sophistication. So after about .5 second of deliberation I took the "not very pale" colour over to the man who was then quite complimentary about my Norwegian. It's always good for morale when a stranger compliments me about my attempts at the language - friends and colleagues probably feel obliged to be kind to me about my massacring of their language. The other person who was kind about my language skills was a lovely young lady who appeared at my door over the summer. But she was selling something so there may have been ulterior motives there. Suffice to say I'm now a support of the Norwegian Air Ambulance Service. However, I did figure that as I'm living on an island it's not unlikely that someday I might need the Service's help so being able to flash my membership card might reap me some extra kudos when I need them most.
Anyway, back to the preparations for the visit of Angela. I took it all so seriously that I am now the owner of makeup brushes. I used to say that my shoehorn was my best cheap investment, but it has now been replaced by these brushes. I was concerned about the levels of dust on all my Lego things so googled it and the simplest suggestion was makeup brushes. This did lead to a dilemma - I imagined myself at the checkout handing these over and the girl looking at me questioningly and I couldn't decide in my head if saying they were for cleaning my Lego models was better or worse than saying that I thought my eyes were looking a bit tired. In the end Katya was in Normal and managed to pick them up for me so I didn't have to cross that bridge.
It has been possibly the worst summer weather I have ever experienced - unquestionably the worst since I came to Norway and I don't recall a summer back in Scotland with so much rain. I did warn Angela that a life jacket would probably be more appropriate than suntan lotion. But miracle of miracles, the weather was mostly dry while she was here. We visited the Peter Dass museum and did the walk out to Kongshaugen, an landmark that was very important for navigation in the old days. We visited a number of wool shops, I showed her the churches I played at and as had happened when my dad was here, it happened to be a service on Vandve while she was here so she got to enjoy a wee boat ride and she had a great time with Gudny watching all the various bird life. Indeed, one of the highlights of her trip was when 2 white-tailed Eagles flew very low in front of us on the way back from Herøy.
While staying with me, Angela was introduced what I have begun to refer to as the “Finrod whump”. This is when you’re sitting very relaxed say reading a book when all of a sudden, there’s a loud “whump” as Finrod flings himself against the door to request entry. It’s not unlikely that one of these “whumps” will lead to me requiring the use of the aforementioned Air Ambulance.
Ever since I had first visited Solveig and Einar, I had loved their display of family photos on their staircase and as part of the decorating I was doing in preparation for Angela's visit, I wanted to my own "Gallery of Rogues" on my staircase. Apart from anything else, I didn't have a scooby of who some of them were and wanted to go through them with Angela because once her generation go doolally the names will be lost forever. The only 2 we were unable to identify were the gentleman and lady at the top of the stairs in pride of place. And at this point I noticed that the pictures had "Kansas" in very large letters which did ring a certain number of alarm bells. Having done the Stevenson family tree, I was very aware of the number of times Kansas had appeared ie zero. I do have a theory about who these interlopers are but they have now been replaced and relegated down to the mancave alongside Darth Vader's autograph.
Back in 2023, I was disappointed to not be able to do "Barbieheimer" but to "make up" for it I did what shall henceforth be known as ( probably by no one else) "Oakvite" (The Invite and The End of Oak Street). As happens reasonably often, I had no idea about The Invite apart from who the actors were. And as events turned out, I suspect I wasn't the only one who turned up in blissful ignorance. A short while into the movie, the conversation takes a very "adult" turn which I, being of sensitive nature, found slightly awkward. However, my feelings of awkwardness I suspect were nothing compared to what I assume was a grandmother and her 3 young granddaughters were going through in the row in front of me. The longer it dragged on, I could sense the youngest (9 or 10 years old maybe) getting quite fidgety. Come the end of the movie as we filed out the grandmother and I exchanged sympathetic smiles. I can imagine she had some explaining to do when dropping the kids off at their parents.
Just last weekend I came across an article about "The Sunday Letter Project" which I found very charming and in a burst of enthusiasm, I have "taken the pledge" to spend some time writing olde fashioned letters every Sunday. If you would like me to drop you a note, please let me know and I'll happily scribble a note to you and send it from my tiny island just south of Arctic Circle!
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