Your chicken is not safe

In my last despatch I mentioned that Bjørn is really thriving and I pointed to the fact that we now have a vet and a hairdresser. You probably thought that a vet and hairdresser do not a thriving town make. And of course you'd be right. What the purpose of that point was to be, and obviously I got distracted when writing because I forgot to include it, was that we now have a post office bit at the local shop. I can't describe the joy that brings. I have moaned about this before but one thing that does cause a little frustration with living here is the post. Obviously if one chooses to live on island one has to endure a certain amount of inconvenience but... my post box is 85 steps from my front door (not that I am sad enough to have counted it you understand) but woe betide if your parcel doesn't fit. In a worse case scenario, I have a 50km round trip to collect it. But no more, now it's a 300 m walk (and there's even a short cut to that if I'm really excited). Of course sod's law meant that my second parcel delivered there was eventually returned to sender as I never got a notification about it. Hey ho.

We had relatively few church services in February for one reason or another (you're not going to catch me complaining though!). One particular Sunday we had a "Festgudtjeneste" on Løkta followed by a "Lysmesse" for the konfirmants in Herøy. Not a feature I was used to back in the day at St Mary's but the service concluded with the beating the heck out of a piñata. The priest initially forgot about the organ postlude and when he remembered asked if I wanted to play it. I was under no illusion about the importance of the organ music at this particular service as I have to confess that all the music was chosen with consideration of number of bars foremost in my mind. I was equally under no illusion that the kids (and considering the size of the island, there were a number there), when given the difficult choice between a Fugue by Rinck and hitting a piñata, they might not actually find it that difficult to chose. So I just ate a fair amount of cake instead.

For the postlude at the service in Herøy, I had chosen a Trio by Telemann. The Bach Trio Sonatas are regarded as the pinnacle of trio writing and the Telemann is no where close in terms of quality. But could I play it on the day? It is nowhere as hard as the Bach but I could just not get my head around it. The excuse I have settled on is that it wasn't originally written for organ so the writing wasn't as idiomatic as it might be but I struggled so much with it. I didn't have a chance to rehearse it before the service and my performance of it was so bad that in the end I just gave up about a 1/4 of the way through. The shame. I will sit down again at somepoint and I try again and hopefully it will eventually appear on my YouTube channel.

In February, I began my series of 6 concerts where I will perform all of Johann Ludwig Krebs' extant keyboard music on 4 of the islands that I play on. It's quite fun to dismantle the harpsichord, lob it in the back of the car, and then go off and "entertain" people with an entire concert of music of a composer that they've never heard of. I originally asked AI to come up with the running order but as most of Krebs' keyboard music was composed/ published in groups of 6 it doesn't need a genius (phew) to arrange them into a series of 6 concerts. My interest in JLK began about 40 years ago when my grandfather gave me a book of his organ music and since then I have always had a soft spot for Krebs' music. My grandfather kept a notebook in which he listed all the pieces he played at services between (at least) 1954 and 1981. When he died I inherited the notebook and a close examination of its contents revealed that in those 27 years he appears to have played Krebs exactly zero times. So at least we know why he gave the book. Still, could have been worse, beside Maurice Greene's Trumpet Voluntary, grandad wrote, in capital letters no less, "NOT AGAIN". Which roughly sums up my feelings about the aforementioned Telemann Trio.

One of the plus sides of doing the concerts in different places is that there will be different audiences so I can use a lot of the same programme notes eg there are 6 preludes from Krebs "First Piece" so I can say the same basic information but just change the key of the piece. I have written all my notes in English and then translate them in my head as I read them out - I felt that writing them in Norwegian would be cheating. Sadly I'm too scared to ask if people have actually understood me - I like living in happy obliviousness. There were some smiles at at least 2 of my attempted jokes so that was a plus.

In my first concert in Dønnes there were 17 people which is over 1% of the population of the island - definitely a win for Krebs there. And in an unusual turn of events, I had a strange sensation at the conclusion of the concert. After much research, I believe the technical term for what I felt is "happy". It probably (almost certainly!) wasn't perfect but I was quite satisfied which is not something I'm used to. Sadly, normal service was resumed after the Herøy concert. Some of my colleagues who came to the concert complemented me on my Norwegian which was nice - of course there might be a subtext: good effort on the language Graeme, but ooof, the music....?

My next concert is on Løkta and should you have nothing better to do, you can watch along here: https://youtube.com/live/SATvmzXGFyc?feature=share

As if a vet, a hairdresser and a post office were not excitement enough I also discovered that the Hurtigbåt stops here on the way up to Bodø. This is the express boat that zips up the coast. I was sooo excited to discover this earlier in the year but decided to wait until slightly closer to spring so that I could actually admire the coast line as we went. Not to criticise the boat company but cleaner windows would have helped! Most of the previous occasions that I have been in Bodø were via aeroplane. From here, that would involve a ferry ride, a bus ride to the airport, check in a good length of time before the flight etc so I'd probably have to leave a good 2 or 3 hours before hand if not the night before if it was very early. The boat was due to leave Bjørn at 6.25am and I left the house at 6.12am. Sooo much better! Potter down the road and voila. And the hotel at the other end was about a 3 minute walk from the docking point so was all very simple.

Liv-Helga is up in Bodø for a few weeks so we managed to meet up a couple of times for lunch or coffee. The topics of conversation were your typical priest - organist discussion points eg death, the correct order of watching the entire Star Wars sage and the size of

whale penises. Now, if I'm honest, I can't actually recall how we get on to that last subject, and I don't want to cast aspersions, but it wasn't me that brought it up. I shall say no more... I managed to visit a number of museums/ galleries while I was there - the North Norway Art Gallery, Bodø City museum, the Second World War museum and of course, I can never go to Bodø without a pilgrimage to the Air Museum.

On the Sunday morning I went to the DomKirke (Cathedral) as I wanted to hear how a "proper" Norwegian organist played a service. I wish I had taken a notebook to write more detailed notes on things that he did so that I could maybe try them out down here. There was a lot of improvisation including the introductions to the salmes (hymns) so we'll see how I get on trying that out.

As you will be able to see in the gallery below, there is a lot of street art in the city. One of the finest pieces I thought was a huge golden eagle. I spent ages wandering around the streets trying to find it. Alas, closer examination of one of the pages on the web pointed out that that particular building had actually been knocked down so that was time I'll not be getting back.

After our lunch Liv-Helga and I had a very pleasant time pottering around the flea markets in Bodø and we ended up in a fabulous second hand book shop. Huge piles of books, posters, CDs, LPs, cassettes all in a seemingly random fashion. I asked the chap if they had any Biggles and in this warren of a place he went straight to a shelf and brought them out. I then asked if he had any of the old editions (I'm sad that way) and he went straight to a completely different part of the shop and pulled out another one. I already had a copy of this one but my copy has its spine missing and as this bothers me when I look at it on the bookshelf (I'm sad that way) I purchased it.

In February I had a visit at the house from a local fireman. I originally thought he was just coming to admire my new heat pump but no it was slightly more complicated. My colleagues explained that it was actually a fire inspection. Against all odds I got pass marks. This was despite a/ almost every smoke detector needing batteries (they're on my shopping list for this afternoon I told him (and they are all indeed running smoothly now) b/ asking to see a chimney thingy that I had no idea existed ( we eventually found it - it wouldn't open easily (that will get fixed) and obviously hadn't been swept for years (it has now)) c/ the woodburner was full of rubbish like crisp packets etc which I use to help get the fire going when needed (this is bad apparently) d/ asking to see the fire extinguisher and me not having a clue where it was (I was highly stressed by this point and not thinking straight) e/ me finally remembering where it was and bringing it to him feeling quite pleased with myself and then him observing that it was about 10 years past its best before date. I did enquire when the next fire inspection will be so that I'm properly prepared in 2028.

When I moved in in May 2024, I was gifted a bird feeder by some friends (which I was extremely chuffed with). I am not great at making sure it always fully stocked for our local feather friends but was struck one morning by one of the other trees being completely full of birds. Not only did I feel that this was severe criticism from my avian colleagues but also looked like something out of a Hitchcock movie. I've attached a picture in the gallery.

I was going to finish this post with a whimsical little story about asking Sigrid and Steffen about how I could warm the ground floor of my house but that story has become a saga so I will save that for March's update.

Thanks to those of you who have been in touch - it is always lovely to hear from you and as always, thanks for reading.