Just Because I'm paranoid....

"just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you"

Instinct ? Rather a mind like a chess player or perhaps just a plodding detective ? Do some things become a self fullfilling prophecy if you give voice to them infront of the would be perpretrators?

For me it is the mind not really putting two and two together, still wondering if it addition or subtraction, the gut has come up not with four, but five! Maybe that colours my future deduction ?

The Paranoia. I harbour is like a millstone round my neck with a flickering crystal ball in the centre. When i even let it slide a little, the reality of being an immigrant and a bit of an uptight but seemingly weak character bludgeons in to take over my life. Put simply, my gut feeling is a golden albatross.

In Norway I have repeatedly been discriminated against in favour of the female quota. Three times. I maybe could understand if i had been mediocre in the job or under qualified. And also my own weaknesses of course have been amplified in a couple of other jobs.

The uncanny thing is then that nearly every time there is smoke, i do find there is fire to follow just as i suspected. In norway with jobs you really do have to go with your gut instinct and be prepared to be walked over or do something proactive about it.

This starts before you apply! Is there a lot between the lines? Is the job temp ? Have you translated the content and interpreted it correctly?

The next step is the interview and here is your chance to a) be proactive b) show you know the score about norwegian wages and workers rights, but also where to compromise...whether to say you work longer hours, the whole of july, and so on. Proactive means assertive : answering with short information and following up with a question about the job. And so on, until you have a picture of the job and they have a rather to the point picture of you and how you will do well in the job.

A job offer is lovely, but remember to take a look in the mouth. Is this as expected? Is the money as good? It is likely here that personnel have come up with the salary here, one of their wee. bits of power. If it is very low then you need to go to the prospective line manager and thank you yes, but say you will need a higher offer. If the job description is vague then get more info and get it more concrete.

Then you have the six month permanency law, which is on your side if you have had the shitty end of the stick, now you can negotiate better pay and sometimes if you are discontent then you can get some better tasks and rid some spinal monkeys  yourself

At the whisp of changes or at your annual development review they have here, then be proactive. There is a good rule of thumb to nip potential changes in the bud: lower responsibility , more of those spinal monkeys, relocation, arrested development, unpaid overtime....so on. Nasty shit which usually comes with a repositioning or maybe just a feeling you get : a patronising gaze, being left out of meetings, being sent on strange courses, having your key projects taken away from you....all the smoke which wafts over before the fire reaches.

The fire reaches with the inevitable call to the boss's office out of the blue, or to an intimate meeting which is an intradepartmental ambush on you. Even then the sitting duck you, can turn and rescue a situation by asking to see the boss after and letting it hit the fan.

Before you threaten to go nuclear, speak to a lawyer and take your contract in with you. Companies here have a nominal "styrerett" meaning they can ask you to perform other tasks or even take a different position on the same money. However in exercising it they can come up against one main thing on our ex pat case and that is discrimination. If you are the only one being moved or being messed about to the favour of a native, then you have a good case.

This quite often happens actually to Norwegian women coming off maternity, usually with their second or third bairn. The company does a bit of straight talking and the woman maybe gets a lawyer and either the company capitulates, or more often a compromise is reached. Omg, who is likely to have a new part time female boss or lose their job to aforementioned? You got it, the stupid foriegner.

The Summer Trap for New Employees and Job Seekers....

Now the summer is fast approaching the prospective new employee who is naive to the way it all works here, can be caught out !

There is a convention that companies pay out your holiday pay in June, or rather manage it for you as it is your own tax percentage from the previous year. Here comes the rub for new graduates and more importantly, immigrant workers who start in the financial calender year here: you may end up with nothing "null comma nicks" in pay in June. There is a correspondingly rather nasty tendency to rush recruitment through in May such that people are in place before summer and the position does not evaporate from head count.

Here is the worst case scenario two of my Swedish colleagues encountered starting two years ago just before 17 may. They missed pay in May, fair enough, but then in june they missed pay due to the convention, but of course had to work the whole of the month, and had just taken out leases on flats and so on. Insult to injury they had their canteen money taken into account, which you had to make a case to opt out of, and they had taxation on their company laptop and their company phone they had just been presented with (which stayed in the office, a thing they later got wise to) So they came out owing the company money from their next pay, and as poor consolation were offered a loan with interest to tide them over to July.

Some employers use the pro-rata system, but most avoid it for the plain reason that the wages clerk, is a well established person in the company and takes at least half of July off and wants to do that month's administration in June as far as possible. It also makes a nice round hole in their costs for quarter two, which helps performance but not Y-on-Y anyway.  You can ask for pro rata if you really want the job but expect to be declined.

Now there is also another downer about joining any department after say mid April: the holiday calendar excel spreadsheet is done and dusted by May 1, and you will find yourself covering the whole department for most if not all of july. You are entitled to three weeks holiday at least in the June- September Period, it is not pro-rata if you start that year,  but this does not apply for a seasonal job and of course a lot of foreigners don't know about this law. On the other hand the company will be keen to make you take it so it doesn't become extra payments for them in Q1 the following year, and you may end up with three weeks here and there and the Christmas holiday.

Believe me the July office time for any normal company not into summer tourist business is a dead boring time, and worse, you can get involved in fire-fighting for which you have no authority to get anything done. Suppliers fail to deliver things, anything from June gets shelved, and worst of all some people blatantly dump admin work on summer temps and the unsuspecting newbie.

Ways round not getting money and not getting holidays in the sunny summer are of course to negotiate and you need to be careful, but take them to the wire a little. If you can start immediately and do not need to move, then try and agree some holiday or say you have a couple of weeks booked in "syden" , make it sound like you will loose out.

The alternative is to push them out on start date, and your only excuse here is to find accommodation if you need to move and are unemployed. However if you are employed in Sweden or anywhere else and you are given an offer in the knowledge that you are employed, then no matter what the job you can use Norwegian conventions against itself and say you have a usual period of notice, and an after summer holiday start is best.

Think about this seriously!! If you start say may 19th this year then in most all companies and public bodies you will get no pay until mid to end July and that is two months! Very few young people can afford to finance two months stay in Norway, and if you are not a prized engineer with experience or middle manager, then you are unlikely to get accommodation paid for more than a couple of weeks if at all.  You may find out that you are minus 3000 Euros if you get a rented flat with a deposit, and then there are your initial flytting and living costs on top.

Tread carefully here in avoiding a start, you are on thin ice if you start talking about all this with an irate FRP type boss or indeed personnel ("personal", a crappy Norweglish malapprop' !) - these type of questions are likely to be met with " do you really want to take this job??" One way round is to find another person in personnel, or network to an employee and get the low down on holiday pay and how newbies are treated over the summer. If your boss seems very nice though, then call them up and say in principle you like the offer and have just a few practical questions about pay and relate to  relocation , while also to summer holidays- propose that you have time with your family if you have kids and expect to take some time in July and see how this all goes down. Don't be surprised for either a very positive or surprisingly quite "barsk" negative answer, because they may be taking you on because you are the most available candidate, not the best qualified.  A boss is a boss and has their own priorities after all, but also their own expectations molded by the usual employee favoured  business culture and law here.

One thing to say at first interview is that you have other opportunities and are looking at seasonal work with the summer coming. Then the company knows that in the time, often long time, they take to make their decisions you may have something which requires period of notice. In fact if you get an offer and you kmow that you are going to miss May pay, June and then miss out on most of your holiday with your kids, then taking a summer job or temp' starting in May locally can be your trump card because it will allow you to earn cash through to July, and then take some holiday with your kids and still have than presumably great job to go to in Norway.

If you have that trump card of being in a job, then firstly delay them on the answer a week to think about it if employment starts after May 1, interview say 10th April, offer 17th April. After this you can then say given my period of notice and requirement to find accommodation in the area that a start around August first is most practical. Your notice in the UK especially is likely to be far less than that, but you want to avoid this huge negative cash flow situation and being landed with the department's woes and left over shit in July when you will twiddle your thumbs mostly or do stuff which is frustrating due to lack of key colleagues, suppliers or customers in the internal market.

Even in Norway, if you have just a month's  notice on a temp job, don't answer the question straight if the dreaded june hole-in-the-bank-account is looming! Say you will need to look the period of notice up, and when you call back ask them straight out if they are looking at a start date with the usual three months notice. This is all a little coy and risky, but an offer when you have a job already usually means they are really keen on you, and are willing to take the usual notice period of three months into account.

If  however you are sitting about unemployed or in an obviously meaningless job,  then really have no choice but to take the job and say you have a month before it should start, then offer instead to start immediately or offer to come and meet the team and then use that trip to network for accommodation and get an idea of holidays you can take. It could be you can take them actually, madly enough, in June such that you cover July down time. Here you can then maybe find a temporary room to stay in, take advantage of any short term relocation in your start package  and thus avoid a hefty deposit and maybe six weeks up front rent on a flat. Or you could use a week in June to live locally and get a best possible deal on a flat, or even do some temp work where you get paid.

In probably two, maybe three of my jobs I have been offered work her in Norway because I was the one guy who could start asap: three months is a business quarter ! So that length of notice is dangerous when a manager is trying to keep head count up if the job is vacated or just created. However, by in large Norwegian positions follow the pattern and there is often overlap of a few weeks with the outgoing employee even with three months notice because they are either asked to stay longer, or fall into a three calender month notice period which can mean of course almost four if they resign at the start of the month! The fast one to pull is just to propose to the boss, not personnel, that you love the offer and presume the start date can be the usual three months from now, Aug 1. In this case you want to avoid personnel and also, worst of worst, the recruitment consultant, who I try and stay clear of and work round anyway.

This all applies to permanent jobs or those which are " with possibility for extension" . With seasonal work you can usually expect to be taken on with the concept of zero holidays, which is not strictly legal, but soon will be anyway if the right wingers get their way.   If you are moving to Norway to work through a temp agency for a time less than it takes to qualify for benefits, that being if you intend to stay and look for future work, then think again about the offer if there is no offer of help with accommodation: it can be a deadly expensive misadventure with private rents being pretty high in cities ( 4000 - 8000 kr pcm for a room in the main ones, plus a deposit of one to even three months on top!! )  which can land you with  debts in NOK when you return home, or you can find yourself in the land of dodgey jobs.

However, the positive sides in a career with a medium large Norwegian company can long outweigh the negatives of an inconvenient start date, but you do have to look that gift horse in the mouth a bit if it is maybe a temporary job, not clearly leading to permanency and if it is maybe not all that well paid ( 360 000 / 180kr / h or less is difficult to live off as a new comer to Oslo or the other three main cities). If the training is not all that well explained and so on, ie you will be an admin or sales slave with two weeks max training, then you do have to consider balancing the books of the financial hit you may take versus the actual benefit to your career.

The plus side is that getting into a high growth or large company here can lead to a whole career in better directions, but that depends in large on your original qualifications or those you are willing to take after, because "fag" ( qualification)  is very important to the big firms in getting promoted or even changing to different, more interesting job.

The Next Mrs Rightsen for you the Newly ExSen

Of course most marriages fail these days in Lutheran western countries which is no surprise given that these lands have evolved the most freedom and economic mobility for women in the world, and that they allow divorce and it is normalised and not usually stigmatised. The rate is apparently worst for cohabitants, but then that includes a large proportion of rather casual moving-ins or outright parasitic "Bidey in "ness. ( "a live in ", in Scots Dialect, translated to Samboer)

What of you , ex-pat, who suddenly finds that you are just an Ex' ? Well I started to read up on immigrant-norsk marriage and divorce rates and it is no doubt higher, it takes too much time and effort for such an opinionated, biased and casually informed rant as this to be based on statistics ...or damned statistics.... Point in hand being that it can come right out of the blue of the usual domestic haze of anger and child centred logistics here. Or maybe you just can't take any more of what ever that bad "any" quality is.

I have seen it several times in the last three years at close hand, English speaking, western husbands. So now you are flung on the great rocks of singledom, aged 30 to forty something, maybe older and really adrift as I have also seen. There but for a tiny shove from God go I too soon maybe.

For the still fairly young, just a bit middle aged and yet very well aged man of new found freedom and great emotiono-sexual voidness, what is out there?

Well if you can hook a bird again, which is no huge issue given the supply side is rather good in both quantity and quality, what are you likely to fish up and what should you cast back? I would say throw a wide net and chuck most of them back in the sea before you get beyond internet chat, and focus on L-J-Be-F as a starter. What types are out there then to avoid or cherish or softly-softly-catch-a-norgee ?

1) The Lovely Waif With Multiple Kids

Yes you are over 34 and no you are not going to land a sweet fresh 25 year old. You are by in large in single mum land or divorced mums, as a pal said to me when I reached the meagre innings of twenty nine as a spouseless Scot about town.

Why would you want a young one any way ? Chat about Justin Beaver and how cool their sociology dissertation on multi culturalism is?  How drunk on alco-pops they got at the Hove Festival ? If ecstasy is better than synthetic THC ? What their sporting and globe trotting ambitions are ? ( ie how little in the picture you and your 2.4 50%ers are going to be on a parallel track)

No.

So,  if you want a good time and to be able to give yourself enough excuses and good level headed reasoning to keep it just as a fling to start with, then the Waif wi' bairns is a great bet.

The Waif wi Waines (Scots for small children) is a bit peculiar to Scandinavia maybe : often very, very attractive and thin with those nice subtle curves and calf kneed legs, and most often natural blondes or sandy blondes who dye their hair well. Or charming big toothed brunettes with ringlets of curls and an oh so sweet derierre...

The trouble is that they most often have two to three brats, with ...you got it..... two to three different fathers and at least one still on the scene, and being a bit of a nuisance (potentially life threatening or just a minor laughable irritation, do your homework before you plunge in).

Truth is ever since potential hubby no 1 did a runner or was an unkown sperm donor at a RUS party, the Waif has been tied up with on the one hand kids, and on the other a desperate need for a new man. Throw in alcohol and they drop their small top drawer's finest at the blink of a charming ex-pats eye.

And thus the cycle begins again with No.2. The third guy is a real marriage potential, but she blows it by trapping him with a bun in the oven too soon, or he faces the economic reality of being tied to trash and bails at a given alimony level before his next pay rise.

Back Paddle Ex-Pat Exssen, BACK PADDLE!!! In truth most of them are economic catastrophe areas. Some have mild substance of choice issues, others have an entourage of either protective public sector pals or trashy mates.  They are all feminine and sexy to lure you in to either trap your monthly salary in a downwardly available spiral, or they may want to exact some revenge for womankind, or just get the upper hand for once.

If you still fall in love with Norgee girlies at the flutter of an eyelid and the twirk of a buttock, then these waifs are resolutely in the barge poll zone of tenacity. If however, you are adept at disappearing behind the smoke of a false identity, or have a knack at being a bit conspicuously disinterested at the smoking on pillow moments then give them a go for a week or two.

2) The Chubbly Dubbely.

Well the chubby mid thirty spinster or the early forties divorcee who is a bit overly upholstered is no rarity as far as my radar detects. Cheery types, cuddly buns,  cosey ladies in waiting.

Back Up!!! Gentlemen, this is not Hartlepool, Kirkcaldy, Swansea or Ipswich. If you wanted a wee chubber to keep you warm at night then you would not have left Blighty. You followed your first spouse/samboer over the N. Sea because she was a hell and a camp stove hotter than anything you got near to in Bligthy!!!

Heed this warning when you feel the need for a wee warmer in your lonely cold new place of now: Chubbly Dubbelies evolve into something much more gruesome. They end up with over sunned skin, vague chin lines,  short cropped practical hair cuts, piggy eyed little oval glasses and a major super feminist, we can run the world attitude. In other words pretty much like middle aged lesbians from  Hartlepool, Kirkcaldy, Swansea or Ipswich.

You need not lift the long wooden implement from the unpowered vessel, steer a wider coarse than that.

....on the other hand, the lets just be friends hand, they could be a mother-hen? A nicey nice mummy to introduce you like a chaperone to lots of Norsk lovelies? No! Birds of a feather really do flock together here. Pick a pretty colleague to introduce you to her single mates. The chubby on the shelf type go round in veritable clone-tribes. Waves of slothful, over-eating, would-be Amazons swarming through the towns, villages, clubs & societies and hospital staff canteens  of Terra Norvegicas.

3) The Failed To Spawn An Aire to the Throne

This is outright not a subject for any humour. Often these barren women or those who just had a bit too much immunity against their ten year bidey in's sperm are a very difficult place to go for a bachelor, but a wonderful diamond to find while digging the seam of coal for an ex with alimony-access-agreed. You provide new romance and an instant granulated cup of family and they provide you with what you need, and are often cracking to look at too.

The ones to avoid are the child abstainers who held off on family to have that last adventure, or to get a decent promotion. Also of course,  avoid those who are as above, economic catastrophe areas.

4) The Forgot to Say I am Not Quite Divorced Yet....erm...

Yes the one who is dipping her toe in the water while actually still under the influence of old lovey dovey hubby-ness. Often with a much older husband, or with a man who is a career lunatic, everything materially is shiny and gilded but love is a damp squib.

A bit like attractive lawyers and investment analysts I used to perchance once in a while be a bit of rough to chat up to, I find that a lot of quite beautiful women here in this range flirt like hell at work and only tell you at the last minute that they are married. Some even take their rings off before work! Well no harm done in window shopping.

Alternatively in this type- those you think you have landed only to find whose spouse, struck by a bout of jealousy, suddenly declares never ending love , offers a new blue ocean of romance and begs forgiveness for following Manchester U for all those years.  

Well you will have your fun but be a bit suspicious of the ones who never ask you back to their place.

5) The Wealthy But Look Twice Gal

Quite a few well to do women in their thirties get single as their rich boy friends get younger and sexier models. Or they are self made and never had much time for the men in their life, who wandered off or never really materialised as serious prospects.

This type has enough cash to splash on great hair, personal trainers, frequent mountain ski trips and most of all good make up. So they make the best of themselves but for some the vaneer is lipstick on the porcine or for others it reveals a shallowness of west-oslo materialisme, keeping up with the Jones-sens, being seen in the right places with the right people in the right model of BMW or that god's chariot of WestKunt, the Porsche Cayenne.

Either way you are quite likely going to feel disappointed and lose interest or vice versa for her. I guess you could however, go a very long time in the flow of champagne before waking up to realise she isn't for you for the above reasons.

6) The Fussy Single Mum, One Kid Nearly Flown the Nest...

Now my friends.....now we have come to the real area you should be operating in. Getting this type through your turnstyles as you speed coffee-date your way round Gruneløkka' , Bryggen or Kvadra'tn.

Not only not too much baggage, be that one totally un-careful previous teenage owner, a child who is now a young adult and maybe a bit fun too, but also that you have someone who has come full circle and is ready for a new lover.

This is the real seam of gold. They have been on the shelf for a couple of reasons: firstly, they got preggers age 15-23 and the guy really couldn't cope. So they became single mums but managed to keep the wet patch in their pink frilly panties and get on with education and a career, as opposed to type 1, who exit stage left at this point.

What had to give for the early single mum, was all the dating and front-bottom reciprocal entertainment which their pals and colleagues were having back in the eighties and early nineties. They had instead,  a new love in their life, a wee gurgeling bairn to their bosom. A little bit of themselves to be kept to themselves and cherish.

Economically they are usually sound, but not affluent or money centric enough to start posing awkward questions about Ex Patsens own fluidity. Usually they are a bit of a safe bet because they are used to a bit of austerity and set a big weight on simple pleasures and just being  with people, not in a west-kant conspicous consumerist way. They come from all social classes really, some become quite career minded yet have a bigger place for people and emotions because of their life to date has been filled with so much of those quantities.

For a good few I dare say, they actually were not very attractive in their twenties. As their offspring became older, the still frightfull youthful breeder could get back in shape, and her adult chin bones start to show through from the softness of a callow youth.

Pretty, sexy, sophisticated or as homely as you like, they are the definiative, superlative target market for the newly-un-wed. Gentlemen, Place Your Bets!!!

XC ski Season 2014. My Big Bad Take OPut for You All !

My main two learning points then for this season have been to practice in good conditions and drive further to get them. The next being more fundamental actually- get used to freeing up one leg and placing 100% weight on one leg.

The latter has really transformed my skiing this year, with more combined progress in eight weeks of skiing than in the last 8 years.

My final pointer is in terms of fitness and programming your brain to new things is that ideally you want to do sessions of two to three hours, beggining with light intensity tours with short breaks every half hour. Focusing on technique and a sustainable rythmn. This kind of goes hand in hand of course, however you need to gas off a bit and get into a kind of meditative feel, which is AKA zoning.

For classic technique bench-marking was difficult this year because there was a
a confusing variability in conditions and generally soft poling sides leading to the odd face plant when poling hard but luckily no splinters of carbon this year! However, obver time I could feel my technique getting better in terms of>

1) Glide - got better showing a more efficient thrust and weight transfer and correct waxing / clister or using waxless on poorer days.
2) Rythmn / this was a bit of an after thought because the conditions varied from day to day and underway on the same trail!  However I did see that I had too fast a rythmn often and was not using the glide enough, or rushing the kick off or not using the vertical bobbing or not throwing the hip in enough . Watching a few old foxes on skis I realised I was not skiing efficiently because I was rushing the rythmn and being broken on my own wheel.
3) Thrust. I prefer to say thrust or stride than kick now that I have learned more about it and the feel of it. I still have not mastered this, it is one part of the whole rythmnic thing, like a more complex version of cycling with double linked cranks, or trying to swim butterfly.
4) most of all getting weight over onto one leg and freeing the other one up while still having a high degree of control over it. This applies to down hill more than touring, in fact you can tour all your life with some weight on your trailing ski if you always go with a pack of more than 6kg.

This last point is the very reason that kids and adults alike should be taught both styles - classic and skating - from the start and possibly use short waxless skis to achieve this in the first good number of hours. I see the opportunity for new combi skis using skintec or other things like titanium tensioning such that new beginners can learn in this way without needing two sets of skis, while the compromise in equipment is outwieghed by the advantage in learning curve.

Finally End of The The End Of the Cross Country Ski Season for Me

Finally there is no contiguous snow within a couple of hours drive from the house, and with a resounding negative reply about going up to the high mountains, like Blefjell or Raulandsgrend.

It is a bit irritating that the general use of the Norsk word 'Fjell' does not allow for a distinction between a great thrusting , snow capped, cliff sided two thousand meterer and a little moss covered stoney bump out in the back of the garden. Indeed even the ground under the house in a relatively flat area, if at an angle and composed largely of rock is refered to by the same word. Vis So you dug down and found mountain side ?
'Hoyfjell' doesnt fill the gap very well, usually referred though in XC ski circles in the winter/easter as being anything over about 700, or especially a thousand. It covers though a multitude of terrain- peaks, bealachs, arrets, raised valleys, escarpments, various angles and forms of mountain side and of the greatest misnomer where it is a plateau in fact, although they do have names for that especially Vidde. We would say of course, in the Highlands or up in the mountains not on the high mountain. I find 'fjell' both a beloved pet name and also this annoying cover all term, used for those green bumps in the Derby/Yorskshire as Fells. Anyway, until summer the high fells will not be a-visited by yours truly and enterage.

A strange ski season which was actually not all that strange. The core of it was as
nearly always from the first week in january to the second week in march. Usually snow before this time is a bit fickle and prone to melt/freeze cycles as the last of the mild atlantic fronts get through in December. The one strange thing about this season was the lack of frozen ground ('tele' taelae if I spell it right) which usually aids retention of snow. This year it just chucked it down for several weeks on end and the ground was insulated of course by all this white froth like a blanket.  However it persisted about at least 300m on shady forrest roads by virtue of its sheer amount and the freexing cycles at night. No ground frost meant that the snow also was refreshing itself, as it just had a crust on top and did not become the usual hard iice layer which I see now is caused by compression of traffic and any thaw backs, whgic is most usual for low to mid level south Norway.

Ice is a learning thing again for me. Basically I have learned that icey conditions are not worth the snow they are printed on as far as my ski skills go. I am taken from being a competent skier, down to being a laughable immigrant new beginner, like a dog on a frozen lake. Truth told I am heavy and clumsy, and I just dont get along with hard and icey conditions any more than I do with snobs, racists and people who put 'university of life' on their FB profiles.

My poor diplomatic relations with water in its contiguous solid phase condition, were shown by sharp contrast on my last ski tour a week and a half ago. There I found my new favourite down hill, icey in the shadowy parts previous trip,  but now soft easter snow all the way but with a firm base making for rapid enough progress and lots of feel. I skied in a series of tucks, turboed with some poling,  and polishged off with neat step turns round all the bends and some skating on the small uphill bits. Ice no thank you!

My main two learning points then for this season have been to practice in good conditions and drive further to get them. The next being more fundamental actually- get used to freeing up one leg and placing 100% weight on one leg.

The latter has really transformed my skiing this year, with more combined progress in eight weeks of skiing than in the last 8 years.

My final pointer is in terms of fitness and programming your brain to new things is that ideally you want to do sessions of two to three hours, beggining with light intensity tours with short breaks every half hour. Focusing on technique and a sustainable rythmn. This kind of goes hand in hand of course, however you need to gas off a bit and get into a kind of meditative feel, which is AKA zoning.

For classic technique bench-marking was difficult this year because there was a
a confusing variability in conditions and generally soft poling sides leading to the odd face plant when poling hard but luckily no splinters of carbon this year! However, obver time I could feel my technique getting better in terms of>

1) Glide - got better showing a more efficient thrust and weight transfer and correct waxing / clister or using waxless on poorer days.
2) Rythmn / this was a bit of an after thought because the conditions varied from day to day and underway on the same trail!  However I did see that I had too fast a rythmn often and was not using the glide enough, or rushing the kick off or not using the vertical bobbing or not throwing the hip in enough . Watching a few old foxes on skis I realised I was not skiing efficiently because I was rushing the rythmn and being broken on my own wheel.
3) Thrust. I prefer to say thrust or stride than kick now that I have learned more about it and the feel of it. I still have not mastered this, it is one part of the whole rythmnic thing, like a more complex version of cycling with double linked cranks, or trying to swim butterfly.
4) most of all getting weight over onto one leg and freeing the other one up while still having a high degree of control over it. This applies to down hill more than touring, in fact you can tour all your life with some weight on your trailing ski if you always go with a pack of more than 6kg.

This last point is the very reason that kids and adults alike should be taught both styles - classic and skating - from the start and possibly use short waxless skis to achieve this in the first good number of hours. I see the opportunity for new combi skis using skintec or other things like titanium tensioning such that new beginners can learn in this way without needing two sets of skis, while the compromise in equipment is outwieghed by the advantage in learning curve.

Making The Best out of Klister

We have a week of snow left in the shadowier forrest roads above 300m so there is no talk of new skintec skis or flourinated klister.

Instead I decided to strip my skis down and do a good clister job. A few tips then on a good job which uses only a few minutes while you fdo other stuff in between.

First tape off the kick wax zone at each end and clean off to the sole with the solvent. Allow to dry in a warm room to release solvent residues and open the plastic surface up.

Use either base binder clister spray or like me a base green V90 spray, swix, which is spread with the spatula tool as soon as it is on, one side at a time. Once an even layer is on, scrape off the excess in the groove.

Leave inside for a few minutes to let the solvent evapourate leaving wax. Check for any dry patches and touch up if need be. Now leave outside to set.

Cork in the layer with some real effort and then spray on a thinner layer repeating as above with a lighter corking though.

If you like me dont have a wax iron or dont want to let clister near yours, then hear is a good cheat.

Get your oven on to 50-60'C and put a tube of clister on an old plate making sure the cap is screwed on very well. Heat for five minutes and then take out with a good few layers of kitchen folded into a makeshift oven glove. Open carefully over paper and then go right to the skis.

Take one side of the groove at a time. Lay diagonal stripes of klister  from one inch in from each end along the kick zone on one side and smooth out immediately. You are aiming for a coating like a layer of oil based paint on wood for the first layer, not just a "film" but it should be thinner at the ends of the zone, hence you spread to there from stripes out to the ends. Put the tube back in the oven.

Do for all four flat sides and then leave the skis outside in the shade to harden. Repeat with a whole length thinner layer, a film allowing to cool again. Then take a third slightly thicker layer just in the middle of the foot sole under the binding.

I take my skis in the car to save on noise and petrol but ideally clistered skis should be on the roof to keep them cooler or at least out of the way. I tried baking paper secured with masking tape to mask clister off while in the skibag and it worked so well that the same paper could be wrapped round for the way home.

You can do this iron free way with hot water from a thermos or on the top of the car engine when you pull up at the car park and discover it will be klister conditions .

Result? Much better longevity than having clister ontop of old kicking wax because the harder green base holds the laminate better. Good kick on all but the iciest sections which really were concrete and no fun whatever you do. A bit grabby when coming off a fish bone ascent due to them holding snow crystals. At the end of the Drivheia Rundt i did a 5k warm down and the ends of the klistering had worn off enough for much better glide, confirming my usual practice.

I prefer usually to clister up only about 3/4 of the kick zone, leaving an inch and a half free on the heel and a good few inches on the front. This is becuase i am very heavy, and therefore i take a little thick extra layer in the "pocket". Yesterday i went to trad wisdom, full legnth as above, and the skis did jitter at the top of ascents or on hard stretches. I need a little more glide really, but had generally good kick which lasted all 17km mixed terrain and mixed hard-soft easter conditions.

Lighter skiers may avoid that grabbing by using thin full legnth application of clister in two layers of film,  and indeed some racer skiers use a longer clister zone than kick wax zone, laying very thin clister layers, with expenive stuff of course.

If you have back country "fjellski" with a lock groove for a short skin then for an up- down tour like this mini mountain then i would recommend using them and maybe whipping them off for the downhill , poling and skating up the humps.

Next year it is definetly skintecs for me, probably just with the glued in skin.

The Norwegian Right are often Not Right , Right Now

The new slightly right of centre coaltion here are also slightly wrong-side-of-centre now.

Currently they are persuing a multi message approach on the progress-party side where the political party come out with some populist rant while the parliamentary party hold quiet lipped or to the current centre line. In order to win the election they had to come to the centre from their earlier unelectable right ranting stool. Now they are towing the middle line but nibbling away at some left wing holy cows.

The first is abortion where they have opted for a kind of sly way of letting GP doctors opt out of further recommending patients. The majority of abortions here over 12 weeks are due to medical grounds of the mother or foetus. Does the doctor then not refer someone who may have a condition which clearly will lead to a termination? I have pretty conservative views that 'economic ' and ' convenience' abortion over 12 weeks is ethically unacceptable. The most common form of termination is actually now the morning after pill anyway. So they have a kind of subtle playground which probably attracts some political funding from catholic conservative foundations abroad for the political parties. The public in general are a bit wooed maybe by this, but the women's movement are not.

A further issue which is alienating right wing feminists here is the abolition of the 'fedre
kvoter' the mandatory paternity leave which if I remember right was set at 3 months or 6, I took 6 once and 3 another time which fitted in with moving here. The Hoyre party, just @Right here have been against quotas which positively discriminate for women and equalisation of mens role in the family. So now they are abolishing this which was seen as a progress towards easing society into the fact that womens careers are just as important as mens, for better or for worse house prices.

Men can now choose to not really take any and effectively the choice will be who has the bigger, better Oslo 'power job' for those high achievers there versus, it will be the missus then out in the sticks where she is much more likely work in the public health and education sector. Step in then of course bigger bills for those sectors. It means to the right, less interference in business, or rather some principle of small government which will let women struggle on rather than giving them a punt up and knocking their mans careers down a notch or two.

So the new right are newly wrong in two areas already and are about to embark on a third area too in education.

Like the right all over the west, public service teachers are seen as a wasteful and the source of all badness in international performance tables. Firstly I take issue with these performance tables and if you compare the prospects for those who take a technical apprenticeship here or university then they will not only earn far more but they will be more productive by virtue of a comprehensive education and a balanced lifestyle. Norway is actually hellish productiver per capita if you EXCLUDE the oil production industry. This is because it has to be and was leaner and meaner before oil. People were clever in how they learned and what they did with that learning, and were cunning in how they made a profit given meagre pre oil prices and long transport costs.

I would like to have a look at these league tables in terms of the later life prospects for jobs,
responsibility level at work, international responsibility, innovation, productivity,  good personnel policy implementation, general health and longevity compared to korea and china. The chinese heirarchical work culture and flippant attitude to quality standards and control mean that it is actually expensive to do quality there and freight it to the west for many capital items and with suppressed costs and profit expectations in the EU, quite a few companies I know of have moved work back for major offshore projects.

Korea can do quality, but will they be the new Scotland with shipyards eventually becoming
ueconomic in the face of the communist capitalists over the south china sea?

When I hear worries about not enough engineers and not enough programmers the issue
is actually that companies are loathed to have to pay new graduates more than established employees of course, but in general would like to have a declining cost base which is at odds not least with demographics. In Norway too many spoilt children of the oil generations best earners go out and take social sciences or art subjects or of course th
that doyen of the middle classes, Media Studies only to find that there just arent many jobs in that anyway. We are looking at the non technical generation here in Norway too, as in theUK, as earning relatively less than their parents and having a lower standard of living.

Anyway the right wing coalition here turn on that bastion of socialism in the times table, the
school teacher. They have actually their most radical policy on anything aimed at teachers and are ready for a fight. So ready in fact that their raft of proposed reforms are just the old chesnut of talking a big fight, backing down and then actually achieving the small move
-ment they originally wanted. They want both their cake in front of them and to eat it at the same time by wanting better results, harder working teachers but labouring more beaurcratic tasks on teachers outside quality teaching hours. They want to rip up the old agreements on longer working hours marking and doing non curricular out of hourrs activities for longer holidays, and get some form of wonder planning and efffectiveness from teachers working into July, when as anyone knows you can get sod all done in private industry in Norway. I think this is just a stalking horse for a simpler and popular goal which is to remove planning days into general school holidays and out of hours time, which is a good idea and if they acheive zero planning days they will save industry and public service masses of lost hours as people continue to stream to the metropolii out of reach fo the grandparents, who are getting too old now to look after 7 year olds anyway. I mean do SFO need planning days in school term? No.

The next big fight will no doubt be on health, but here it is more softly softly be pragmatic at the moment before talk of a market system outside additional capacity. Really this bunch are so arrogant to believe that they have the right to two terms in parliament to 'fix the red green mess' and then move the country forward. The next fight after these will be temporary contract work, where in fact Labour here did a cunning thing opting into the EU directive which basically puts agency workers on the same level as ordinary workers rights in that nation and has removed much of the competitive, low cost and cheating advantages they had. Temporary contracts will be good for the economy and get the long term out of work back into employment they say. Everyone here knows that you need a permanent job to get house and bling loans so this will make temp work with small companies even less popular with the brighter graduates, meaning like in the UK, you pay peanuts on short contracts and you get monkeys who are counter productive and not motivated. The finance
sector largely abuse the law ironically enough, where mid ranking analysts as in the rest of the west are on one year fixed contracts, take it or leave it, in breach of the law.

The new right keep on quoting the 'lost youth' who fall out of education as the need for much of this reform. These are the wasters, the dope smokers, the bullies, the dont care and of course those with undiagnosed dyslexia, ADHD and aspbergers. In most other western countries these wasters end up doing the shitty jobs and maybe get some adult literacty and a new start if they carre. Here they learn to go on sick-benefits or take aforementioned temp job, be shit at it, not get taken on further but earn up points for
unemployment benefit. They no doubt drag down the average on those league tables
and if you want to compare private school tables, forget it, they arre discouraged from sitting the examinations in the key metric areas of maths in particular. Double gymn for them. The simple answer is a right wing answer even Labour in the UK adopted its long reign over a bouyant ecconomy / if you dont get out and gett work then  you are going to be very poor. Here they are pandered to and get extra education and work placements I would quite fancy for myself in times between job contracts. Another thing, immigrants are seen as temp job workers, expendable so this law will just make a big rise in immigrant or guest worker unemployment as indeed the slump in house building did> they laid off all the poles and Lithuanians after five years of lots of work, and hey presto did the guests go home to abject poverty? No they signed on the dole here and kept on paying their mortgages and sending their kids to preschool and were better off than here in their newly made home than going home as they were expected to do. Temp work is bad news for me in future> I have been used and abused by contracts and even in permanent jobs but I have also used and abused contracts to suit my own ends of getting the right experience and having time with the family.Now I have to get back on the ladder soon in either a stable job or a fast moving job so temp work is bad news as we need a new car and a new mortgage.

The new soft right are then wanting to rattle sabres but come out with a series of wins
which they can parade out in time for the next general election. The trouble is that they are tickeling with the way of life and models people are used to here  and in that they stand on shallow ground, already reliant on the dieing liberal party 'venstre' who are not sitting in government but prefer wheeler dealing in back rooms. Labour here had ironically their best showing ever and have a ground of a solid force in a possible 2018 coalition leftist government where the centre-party and the left socialists will have less say but there will need to be concessions made to them in order to form a coalition. Currently the right wing are going to be putting a bung in everyone's wallet only to take it away from the below average family income in various ways over time, money floating upwards in a one way street is not popular here.

Basically Norwegians would never be fooled by bullshit like
Reaganist 'Trickle Down' - instead they have since oil came always wanted their own piece of the pie against the old right capitalists here who ran shipping lines and relied on poverty
for their supply of labour. A days work was going to be a living wage and then some, with time off in there too. Now the skilled working masses earn a lot more and are taxed too much - but the question is who voted right who did not in the last eight years? The answer is not labour and not socialist left. The answer is somewhere in the floating voter land, and not voted much before land where in my personal experience, people have been fed iup with road tolls and high taxes and the perception of waiting times in hospital. Poor roads too, but since most of Norwegian labour live within 30 minutes of their job and the roads outside rush hour resemble a Sunday 2 am in other western countries this has not been a very big swing. Enough though it has been, just as those teachers who were not political before, and those workers who do not want temp contracts and deunionisation will scome out in the next election.

Labour here has been seen as far too immigrant and assylum seeker freindly, and thgey will now inherit a more careful structure with fewer taken, maybe some selection on cultural comaptibility, locked assylum camps and extradition of paperless seekers and anyone caught doing anything else criminal while here or from abroad. This is a must happen for the right governement, another area swing voters came out in force for. A future labour government may whipe its brow and say phew because the human rights lobby are too strong in the movement and in socialist left they had to endure in the last governm,ent.

I see this as a one term government and a new centre right Labour government following them. The trouble is that all the parties are completely reliant on the 80 dollar barrell oil right now. In future gas will be more important and then the North Sea electricity net will help keep the exchequer in kroner, but no one is really addressing a possible low dollar price and of course when oil and gas becomes uneconomic here in maybe 2030 or as long as 2050.  What will Statoil and Aker Solutions do then? Will norway be lumbered with uncompetitive labour costs or will low power costs make electro industries once again the white heat thing they were in 1905 when Norway became a state again?

Innovation outside oil has been difficult here but in areas where technical creativity and qaulity production are to the fore, norway has been a world player. The set back usu6lly comes when they go big too early in a market, and this is what happened in solar cells which became both commoditised and fiddled enough with in China that a major new industry fell on its face on the starting blocks. Norway has to think nimble and support technical entrepreneurs more rather than tyring to build a new aker-kværner or Statoil.


I dont beleive there is the risk investment , the number of tech literate real entrepreneura or the government will to diversify the economy. However i do think that the current generation of young engineers do have thr attitudes to break free of the big corporate
Blankets especially if they find more and more of their time being in Korea, Brasil and China.