I’ve previously mentioned that there’s an Irish pub on board. The child bride and I have achieved local status – they know our names and room number and deliver G&T’s without asking. A couple of Irish guys play there a few times a night and watching them has convinced me to go back to my roots. Being 25% Irish, which incidentally is proportionally higher than most of our aboriginals are aboriginal in my estimation, it’s a legitimate pursuit, I think.

So I’ve been noting the songs that these guys have been playing, that I’d like to play. One is about a bloke who gets married just before being executed, one is about a bloke who steals to feed his family and gets transported to Australia, one is about a bloke who dreams about his Irish home while living in California (he dies when he’s 23), and another is about a bloke who is framed by a beautiful woman and is also sent to Australia. There are others with similar themes but I have trouble reading the words and music at this stage because of the tears. I love the Pogues also, but it’s hard to get a smile from most of their songs. I need to find or write some happy Irish songs.

It’s quite anomalous when you consider how outwardly happy-go-lucky the Irish are yet there is so much sadness and bitterness in their music. They can and do draw on rebellions, troubles, crime, betrayal, war and famine – disagreements and tragedy on every conceivable level.

Time to move on to something debatably less traumatic. The good news is we’ve had no rain so far on this trip. The bad news is the wind has been whipping up rough seas so our last stop in Norway – Alesund – has also been dropped from the itinerary. Fortunately, when Gravdal was jettisoned, Narvik was available to step into the breech. This time it looked like a slow 3 day wend down to Southampton until Le Havre volunteered it’s services. Is this the first time the French have volunteered for anything? Just asking. So, Le Havre here we come.

The first and last time I was in Le Havre was in 1986 and all I can remember is looking at a large pile of coal which our hosts assured us came from our mine in Queensland. How was I to know if they were having us on? If you’ve ever seen piles of coal ostensibly from different mines next to each other, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Oh, and the trip back to Paris was conducted like we had a terminator on out tail with Jake and Ellwood Blues taking it in turns to drive.

So Le Havre was an opportunity for a bus drive into Paris, a bit of a drive around, a photo opportunity at the Eiffel Tower and lunch in a restaurant that reminded me of the refectory at university. We then drove back. And that is the end of the Fjord Escort. Next comes the Sicily Walk as we head to Italy today.

We have another day at sea today so the child bride and I slept in and were late heading off for breakfast – about 9.30am. You’d think at that time there would be a liberal sprinkling of available tables. But no. We went to lunch at about 2.00pm the other day – rather late for your average pensioner who will be early for any freebie, but same result – this particular restaurant always seems to be full. I think some people sleep there. They are not relinquishing a window seat for anyone or anything. If they’re not eating at that table they’re playing cards. Rough seas and the wobbly boots should be keeping the walking sticks, walkers and mobility scooters in their rooms but that’s only a small percentage. Everyone else is there with bells on.

I have to admit, it’s nice to get off these ships regularly so the CB and I are not fans of extended times at sea. There are reasons for this. Boredom is one because we don’t want to join a choir or be embarrassed by the professional trivia competitors or enter a ping pong tournament or learn to line dance. Actually, that may be worth investigating although there are no Shania Twains on this boat so….. Exploring (and sampling) the various drinking establishments does while away some time and we’ve done that countless times so far. An additional reason to get off occasionally is because cruise ships are just about the most efficient virus incubators ever invented and are especially effective in bad weather when all of the doors and windows to the outside world are closed. So I caught a cold. I’m blaming the CB for hiding the zinc tablets thereby compromising my immune system. Maybe I should have worn one of those useless masks that some people on this boat still insist on wearing.

We were lucky during the first half of this trip with great weather but once we started to head south the weather went pear shaped so we had to skip the exposed Gravdal in the Lofoten Islands. Fortunately the skipper decided to substitute the geographically protected town of Narvik. This place had a small but significant place in the conduct of World War 2 in 1940. Jumping forward a couple of years, in November 1942, Winston Churchill said in a speech regarding the Second Battle of El Alamein that “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat”. Incidentally he also said in the same speech “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” But I digress. Back to Narvik.

The Battle of Narvik was fought from April to June 1940. In April the British and Polish navies beat the German navy off Narvik and in the next months German forces were driven back to the Swedish border. This was the first Allied victory but I guess Churchill forgot because British forces were withdrawn in June that year to fight elsewhere and Norway was subsequently lost.

Just to finish off, why was Narvik so important that a naval battle was fought over it? Amongst other things it’s the port for iron ore produced at the Kiruna mine (there’s a fascinating story unfolding there right now but  that’s a digression too far) not far away in Sweden. No iron ore, no tanks. Thus endeth the history lesson.

Alta, which is as close to the top of the world as we have ever been, has restored my faith in humourless Scandinavian pragmatism. This relates to the Alta city centre. Now, before getting into the detail, it’s necessary to understand that the area in question was relatively recently rebuilt (without character or quirk) after the Nazis destroyed everything in the area except the church at the end of WW2. The church was spared because there are German soldiers buried there. Oh the humanity! None of what would be the charming olde worlde old town exists any more.

The city centre is clean, ordered, free of congestion (both mechanical and human) and entirely comprised of what appear to be relatively new buildings. No one is shouting or brandishing weapons or loitering or fighting and there doesn’t appear to be any homeless (too bloody cold I expect) or obvious sub-saharan African or Middle Eastern “refugees”. It’s the sort of boring only Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes are capable of. If deadpan was a town, this would be it. The CB and I and our mate Jas got a shuttle bus (US$20 each – this cruise line doesn’t miss) for the 10 minute ride from the ship to the town, walked from one end to the other and back, got back in the bus and went back to the ship. That’s as exciting as it got.

Fortunately you don’t have to go far out of town to find a pulse and a personality. There’s a husky farm where dogs are trained for sled races like the 1600km Iditerod in Alaska. If they knew what they were in for, I’m sure they wouldn’t be so enthusiastically friendly and seemingly happy. My favourite touristy spot was a slate mine where they make roof tiles that the Iranians should have utilised to protect their nuclear facilities. It would take more than a bunker buster to break those suckers.

The indigenous Sami people add a splash of colour to fairly drab (colour-wise) but scenery-spectacular area. Admittedly, there are autumn colours where there are trees but trees are like swimming pools up here – rather scarce. The Sami breed reindeer. Reindeer can now be added to a list that includes the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and Stonehenge in that they are much smaller than you expect.

And of course there’s the Norther Lights or Aurora Borealis which this part of the world is famous for. We heard a story about a couple who’ve been coming here for 16 years and haven’t seen them yet. I assume they are blind because we’ve seen them in Trondheim, Tromso, Alta and from the ship. It’s a good year and a good time of the year to see them so all we needed was a clear sky which we got. We’re on our way south now and the weather has closed in and the boat’s doing a bit of rockin’ and rollin’. More on that in #6

Norway is one of the most expensive countries in the world….that is if your country has a crap currency like Australia’s Pacific peso. It stands to reason that if our currency was a lot stronger, it wouldn’t have cost me A$66 for two beers. Admittedly one of them was a litre and the other was half a litre but that price should at least come with a lap-dance. I’m not sure whether that would have been on the CB’s list though, she being the recipient of the girlie half litre beer. The litre should have come with a girlie.

And why is this the case? Because Norway built a massive sovereign wealth fund on the back of North Sea fossil fuels so has a strong economy and therefore a strong currency. Australia, which has more wealth in the ground than just about anywhere else on earth has sqandered opportunity after opportunity. We should be creaming it but aren’t. Why? Because idiots vote for idiots and we all live happily ever after until, as prescient Margaret Thatcher noted, we run out of other people’s money and unfortunately that won’t happen until the IMF or the World Bank or the Chinese tell us we can’t borrow anymore.

And now for something completely different (to steal a phrase). We were sitting in a bar overlooking the commercial area of a marina with tour boats and other working boats in Tromso when we saw people actually in the water, in October, way north of the Arctic Circle. What madness is this we asked as one? They were at the end of a 50m pier periodically emerging from a wooden shed-like building before diving, jumping or getting gingerly into the water. Turns out the building is a sauna. So these people were heating themselves to lobster mornay then jumping into the Arctic Ocean. I can’t think of anything with more heart attack inducing efficiency.

Tromso has this very modern church which they call a cathedral but it isn’t. It’s A-shaped with glass at both ends. The back is lined up with where the sun comes up and as there are times of the year when the sun barely gets above the horizon, for a big part of the year the parishoners were looking straight into the sun. So they all started wearing sun glasses. It must have looked like the Godfather’s funeral every week. To alleviate this situation the church now has a stained glass back window. A cheaper option would have been to turn the pews round, move the alter to the other end and buy sunnies for the pastor.

American songwriters were and I guess still are fond of writing songs about American females. I can think of a few – She Was an American Girl by Tom Petty, American Girls by Counting Crows, California Girls by the Beach Boys, American Woman by the Guess Who (okay, they’re Canadian). I’m sorry, I can’t help it and I could do with losing a bit of avoirdupois myself but (nastiness alert) travelling on this ship reminds me of Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many canes, walkers and mobility scooters beep beep beeping as they reverse into elevators. If we hit weather like the CB and I experienced off Japan last year, it’ll be carnage. The crew will be sweeping body parts into the ocean. I know it’s a bit unfair making this an American thing but their life expectancy has dropped in recent years and there’s a reason they had so many covid deaths. I’ll leave it there before I get into more trouble.

I mentioned in #2 that the Northern lights forecast was at 40% from 8.00pm last night. When the CB and I managed to drag ourselves away from O’Malley’s (of course there’s an Irish pub – they’re everywhere) and head up to the roof (deck 16) it was obvious that word had got around. These big cruise ships look pretty top-heavy but when most of the passengers are at the top, on one side of the boat, those stabilisers below the waterline have to be working overtime lest we tip over (see paragraph above). At first glance it was hard to tell what the fuss was about but you have to give it to phone camera manufacturers because through the camera lens, there was the Aurora Borealis . We’re hoping the weather holds out so that when we get to the roof of Norway, it will be even more spectacular.

Trondheim is a very nice city of about 200,000 people of which about 20% are students – science and technology dominates (yea!) and there’s a big medical school. I’m assuming that they have here similar discriminatory enrolment policies as Harvard and othe Ivy League schools in the US. But instead of favouring Obamas, here it’s gorgeous cool blondes. There are Miss Worlds everywhere you look. So I certainly have something to look at while throwing down a Ringnes or three.

There’s a zone around Trondheim and the next stop – Tromso – which gets the benefit of the warm Gulf Stream so it’s a balmy 4 degrees rather than minus 20 or whatever it would be without that advantage. I guess we also have to realise that we are further north than the north coast of Alaska, which puts things into a bit of perspective. Breaking out the thermals today.