OK, it isn't. It's wonderful in so many ways that I don't think I can express them sufficiently. I just don't think that we're worthy. Perhaps other Scandinavians might make the grade, but the rest of us would just mess it up with our fat guts and junk food and linguistic failings and reactionary tendencies etc. etc. etc.
Coming back to the UK was like being expelled from Paradise. Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden with a lighter heart than James, Neal and I did on Saturday. I can't even be coherent about it - just everything was better. Many of them even support Stoke City, because it was a top club when British football matches started to be shown in Norway during the 70s.
I suspect that most of my posts today are going to be 'another great thing I've just remembered about Norway', and I'll post a few pictures.
One of the big things we all noticed is that Norwegians believe in using government to do big things - transport, opera houses, stunning cities that are actually brilliant to live in and get around. They undertake big projects at government expense and get them right. It's such a huge contrast to this place. Here, we wonder about doing something, then decide that if it's got to be done, better some consortium of lying thieving bankers should make money off it, and then wonder why it's shit. I refer you, of course, to 'NHS' hospitals and schools built on the PFI principle. If you don't know what that is, it involves faking the maths to make it look better to get a private company to own and run a hospital or school, renting it to the government for 30/40 years at a massive profit. It doesn't work. The hospitals are rubbish, smaller, dirtier - read this if you don't believe me.
Norway seems to be a confident, bright, caring country. The population seem to actually like and care about each other, which makes them happy to get together for the public good. We live in a selfish, atomised society in which we actually don't want to take responsibility for each other. Sure, we'd like clean hospitals and decent schools, and trains which run on time and cities you'd actually want to live in/walk around/be proud of - but we certainly don't want to pay for it. We'd rather get our kids into private schools, and get private medicine (over-rated, by the way), buy more plasma screens and generally turn away from public space, towards private, short-term pleasure.
It's embarrassing. If you haven't been to Germany, Denmark or Norway, you probably think Britain's a first-world nation. You'd be wrong.
I'm sorry. I'm in a bad mood because I've returned to litter and pollution and filth and poor architecture and an office in which some of my artwork has been smashed. Glass everywhere.
5 comments:
Goodness Vole, sorry to hear about your artwork. You remind me of how I felt when I came back from parts of the US last year, back to shitty old England which suddenly appeared x10 as shit as it did. I've always fancied Sweden rather than Norway, but that's for shallow reasons.
If you want cheering up, you might want to wander over to my blog and see what you've missed since you've been away. After all, you are a self-satisfying, nu-lab member of my clique, y'know...
Do not forget that the majority of the women are stunning, many of whom came to my college in York and damn, they looked good but typically they drank alot. I had to carry one leggy blonde home after her heel snapped under the weight of foolishness. Such hard workers too, my father managed the Scandinavians in his steel construction capacity before I was born and was largely impressed.
I can only hope your festering bitterness eases away and if you find out who smashed your artwork, my new acquainted associate will happily beat them into the ground. You may know of him, he is the one who bottled a lecturer in Hogshead last year.
Now that mere incident sums up our culture.
I agree with you on privatisation and personal greed etc but do you think that, perchance, your feelings about community spirit in Britain may be slightly skewed by your current location?
One of the lovely things about the West Midlands, which seperates it from East Berlin, Communist Hungary, Stalinist Russia and other places of an historically similar standard of living is that it is relatively easy to leave. You have spent most of your adult life in Wolverhampton. I cannot help feeling that you could have gone on holiday to Somalia and come back with feelings of anguish and regret.
Get. Out. Of. Wolverhampton. Vole. Sooner rather than later.
Otherwise I forsee a day in the distant future where a few old friends return to the West Midlands one last time to see you buried in the plot you share with Vernon. Is that what you truly want for your epitaph?
Boltzman believed in his formula strongly enough to have it engraved on his headstone. He could see a better future but no one believed him. He carved his big chance that he couldn't grasp onto his tomb. Will we lay on your grave a piece of stone with a clumsily engraved likeness of the M6 motorway decorating it's surface?
You have to move.
All true, and fair points. But, my friends, I've realised the awful truth: I belong here.
Smashed artwork?
Who would do such a thing?
Could it be that even the gravity in the west midlands is malicious?
Glad to hear you're back though.
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