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In Which I Contemplate The Great Sweep Of History. And Smokie.
August 18, 2006 by Mike
Tromsø
Again, no reindeer. Though having said that, I've been in the middle of a city of 60,000 people all day - not the reindeers' natural habitat.
I've enjoyed stopping here for three nights. Haven't been on the bike for 48 hours - my bum says Thank You - and I'm even getting used to wearing civvies, rather than biker gear. I smell better than I have for weeks. I'm also getting used to drinking alcohol.. and that means Tromsø has been expensive.
A bus ticket? £2.
Chocolate bar? £1.
Small glass of house red? £6.
Several small glasses of house red, a beer and whisky chaser for the lead singer out of Smokie? Errrr...
Yes. Smokie. The music here smells of patchouli oil, unwashed denim and Brut 33. It eats Alphabetti Spaghetti and coq au vin, drinks Liebfraumilch and drives a Ford Capri with go-faster stripes. Ladies and gentleman, the 70s didn't disappear, they just moved north of the Arctic Circle, put on their fur-lined boots and waited for hell to freeze over.
Smokie. But also on the jukebox in the Victoria Fun Pub [sic] , you hear Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Focus, Status Quo, the Eagles. Supertramp. Yes! I mean No!
When I was a callow youth, I occasionally babysat the kids of a young Norwegian couple who had moved to Norwich. I was too sweetly innocent to raid the drinks cabinet (and besides, it was full of Liebfraumilch) and too obsessed with music to do anything guiltier than to investigate their record collection:
Smokie. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Focus, Status Quo, the Eagles. Supertramp.
In the Fun Pub [sic] some kind soul had turned the music down. Pulling the cotton wool out of my ears I realised why: Norway were playing a friendly against Brazil. That's more like it. And then the young man with the dodgy record collection loomed large on the screen. Because -- and this was my big claim to fame way back when -- that young man was Åge Hareide, then an enthusiastic but limited Norwich City defender, today the coach of the Norway team.
He was a bit too soft to make it in English football. Bless him (and it's happened to us all) he's even softer these days. He looks, well, matronly. The Hareides returned to Norway when he was offered a job as a bank manager. Unimaginable these days. Modern footballers buy banks, they don't work in them.
It was bizarre watching the Norwegians watching the game. Half cheered every time Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (Man Yoo) touched the ball or appeared on the screen. And the other half did exactly the same for John Arne Riise (Liverpool). Clearly, they're Liverpool fans first and Norway fans second. Understandably, some might say, given how those teams play.
The Norwegian national football team is sponsored by a leading brand of banana. You couldn't make it up.
The crowd thinned out after the Norway game and the TV switched to showing the second half of England's destruction of Greece. To no great surprise, I found myself at the bar with a collection of Englishmen (see diary entries passim): a travelling dental salesman from one side of the Oslo fjord in southern Norway; a travelling pianist from the other side of the Oslo fjord; and the lead singer out of Smokie, in town to headline the Tromsø Beer Festival.
I dared approach him -- with that hair, that ear-ring, that denim jacket, that medallion, he couldn't be anyone else but a member of Smokie (except the entire male population of Tromsø -- but I'd heard him speaking broad Yorkshire.) Mike Craft is a lovely man, interested in lots of things, thrilled to bits to be in a band at his age (I'll be discrete, Mike) and seeing hotel rooms from Montevideo to Tashkent and most points inbetween. Not England, though, where for some reason Smokie aren't major stars anymore.
Not that I'm suggesting that a headlining in gig in the Tromsø Beer Festival tent, in front of 2-300 Very Drunk Norwegians, makes them major stars in Norway,
But I am suggesting that he's doing very well for himself, and lives a life that lots of us.. OK, me.. would be verrrrry happy with. I can even forgive for letting me tell him that I remember seeing him on Top Of The Pops, when in fact he only joined the band ten years ago -- about 300 years after they were last on telly.
I outdrank him though. I outdrank a Rock Star-ish. And stayed up way past his bedtime. As he explained: "I have to work tomorrow."
---
Earlier in the day, I visited the Polar Museum on the seafront. It focuses on seal hunting on the ground floor, a trade that polarises (pun intended) opinion. Hunters still operate out of here. Seal-fur shoes are on sale in the shops.
Seal hunting isn't anything like as pretty as a seal pup with big eyes staring dolefully out of an anti-hunting poster. The images of bloody death are powerful. It's very easy to see those images and make yr mind up.
But you know what? Man has lived up here for ten thousand years. So have seals. They've been hunted throughout that time. (The museum displays a 4000 year old harpoon tip, used in seal hunting.) Seal fur keeps you warm. It's cold here. I can't criticise - not when I'm happy to wear leather and eat the cows, pigs and ickle lambikkins that live in warmer climes. And reindeer.
(But no, I'm not about to wear them. Oh, the tortuous posturings of the bleeding heart middle class white liberal...)
--
Elsewhere in the museum. I can't be the only visitor who does a double take seeing the grave of a 17th century whaler, transported from the icy burial site on Svalbard/ Spitzbergen. It recreates the scene so completely trhere's even a copy of the modern sign at the site in Svalbard warning:
"This area contains British and Dutch graves which date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' whaling. The burial ground is protected by law. Damage, the removal of objects, and the leaving of litter are punishable offences. SHOW RESPECT FOR THE BURIAL GROUND."
... yeah, unless you're taking the grave back to a museum in Tromsø, clearly.
--
I was more interested in the rooms dedicated to polar exploration. (Yes, all the guff I've written already and I'm just getting to the good bit.) Tromsø being the last major port on the way north, most of the great Norwegian explorers used it as a base - Amundsen, Nansen, Sverdrup.
(Most, but not all. My grandfather's uncle Eivind Astrup became, in 1892, the northernmost human being ever when he and Robert Peary reached the very north of Greenland by sledge. He was a national hero.
Once upon a time (can you work out when?) I thought it would be a great adventure to recreate that journey to mark its centenary. But in 1992 -- there, I gave it away -- I was a football journalist and commentator working for a premium-rate telephone service. Greenland? Or Carrow Road? Sad to say, it was no contest.
He died, too young, three years after that expedition. A brilliant skier, his body was found in remote Norwegian mountains a month after his death. Was it suicide? It seems more than likely. He may have known of health problems. He may have been in love with Peary's wife. It's hard to know, looking back so far, but his death robbed his family and his country of a special man.
That expedition had left from the USA so doesn't feature in the Tromsø museum, but his name appears on one of the charts on display. Eerie for me to see it.
Also on view - incredible! - the very compass used by Roald Amundsen's party to reach the South Pole in 1911:
Amundsen, who credited my great-grand-uncle Eivind as his inspiration for polar travel, was a hawk-nosed, preternaturally aged man, all wrinkles and wrathful stares. He comes from another age. A figure from history. But one of the men who reached the Pole with him, Helmer Hansen, lived here in Tromsø until his death in 1956. That's only two years before the lead singer out of Smokie was born. That's not ancient history (despite what I said about Smokie. I know. I'm such a hypocrite...)
Which made me think... when my Dad was three, his family moved to a small road in Coulsden, Surrey. Three doors down a gentleman called John Logie Baird was busy inventing television in the room at the back of his house. My father was there when TV was invented! How incredible is that? So that's not ancient history either.
Even though, before you write and remind me, I'm no spring chicken myself. Mike the pianist had a good line in the bar last night:
"By the time you reach 40, if you wake up in the morning and nothing aches or hurts... you're probably dead."
Riding a bike all day ensures that you ache every day when you wake up.
--
Tromso: the main square is named after Mr Richard With. Great name, great moustache!
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By mark | August 21, 2006 11:41 AM
you need to name drop a bit more, not nearly enough of it :-)
and if you ever go to Maderia make sure you vist the whale museum as it sounds very similiar to the seal one you visited, apart from the grave.