Forty years ago this summer, I went abroad for the first time. We went to Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In Denmark, we stayed on a farm for a week. There was a dog there that ate stones. Or it appeared to eat stones. Or my brother claimed that it ate stones. I was only 6.
I don’t remember much about Sweden either. There were lots of trees, of course, and a lake, with a wooden jetty, and, underfoot, everywhere, pine needles. Despite the endless forest in Sweden and the stone-eating dog in Denmark, both of those countries felt essentially domesticated. Tamed. Like England.
Norway, though, felt wilder. We stayed in a log cabin next to another lake, took a rowing boat out to an island. That was pretty exciting. There was also a fire in the cabin. Not an intentional fire, an accidental potentially-burn-the-place-down sort of fire. My parents managed successfully to bring this fire – quite possibly chip-pan related – under control. Quite a hoo-hah.
I also remember the Norwegian flag, because on the ferry back to Newcastle (from, I think, Bergen, or possibly Stavanger) my brother celebrated his eighth birthday. The captain gave him a badge with the Norwegian flag on it and I was insanely jealous.
In the years since that first trip, I estimate I’ve been abroad 130 times, not counting Scotland, or Wales, although Haverfordwest on a Friday night can get pretty exotic. I’ve been back to Sweden and Denmark twice each. I’ve never been back to Norway.
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And yet despite, or probably because of that omission, if I think where would I like to be right now, as opposed to sitting at a desk in East London, I’d say sitting at a desk in a cabin on a fjord in Norway. Even writing the word fjord is a thrill.
One hundred and thirty sounds a lot, but compared to some people, it’s nothing much. Many of my friends are photographers, and it’s in the nature of their work that they go abroad all the time. My pal Nick has been to more than three quarters of the planet’s 190-odd countries. If you ask Nick whether he’s been to Burkina Faso, he’ll say he’s been to southern Burkina Faso, but not, sadly, northern Burkina Faso, which he hears is the really interesting part.
Nick’s truthfulness makes him an exception. Most of us lie about the extent of our foreign travel. As and when the subject crops up, I’ll say I’ve been to Germany three times, as if that makes me nigh-on expert in the land of the litre stein and the well-tuned engine. The reality is I’ve been to Berlin and one specific area of the Ruhr (twice). The three visits information is accurate, but also close to meaningless.
Lying about travel is a modern – perhaps the modern – form of snobbery. People used to pretend they were higher up the social scale than they were, and then get anxious that Earl Arseberry would find them out when they picked up the wrong knife for the fish. Now, as important as social status (and of course intimately linked to it) is what you might call experiential status: what you’ve done; what you’ve seen; where you’ve been.
When students meet at college as first years, they don’t boast about any upmarket social connections they might have or what their parents do for a living. Quite the opposite. They boast about where they went on their gap year. The poorer the place, the higher the status. Just as nowadays, the less cutlery the restaurant puts on the table, the more fashionable it is.
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The other point about my 130 trips is that were it not for a succession of women encouraging, cajoling, nagging and plain ordering me to go, I’d have barely left these shores. Probably half of those trips have been for work, and for almost all of my working life my bosses have been women. Best way, I find.
It’s the same story with leisure. Of the perhaps 50 foreign trips we’ve made together, my wife has instigated them all. My previous girlfriend loved to travel too. We didn’t have much money, but we still got to Amsterdam and Paris, the South of France and the Greek islands. All her doing. I think I suggested a day trip to Sheffield once. Or was it Leeds?
I accept that I probably have an idealised vision of Norway, a composite vision underpinned by that first foreign trip, subsequently topped up by heroic war films, Kirk Douglas in The Vikings, Ray Mears, clips of base-jumping I’ve seen on YouTube and the fact that Ludwig Wittgenstein went there to think great thoughts of crystalline clarity and complexity when Bertrand Russell was doing his head in at Cambridge.
The perceived sexual liberalism of the Nordic world has also no doubt played its part. Perhaps it’s better if I never return.
It is important, I believe, to get these facts and imaginings, minuscule as they are, out into the public realm. Future historians may find them useful.