I’ve been feeling alternately smug and despondent lately.

The smugness mainly came from watching my neighbours throw away perfectly usable items in the two big skips (two? we made do with one last year) that are always brought in this time of year. Had we had a little more storage space I would probably have scrounged some of it, but we don’t. Besides, most of it was “deconstructed” in order to make stacking more efficient, we watched, somewhat gobsmacked, as two grown men smashed a set of six pine dining room chairs which looked, though a little out of fashion, perfectly serviceable. I disposed of exactly two items myself. One (short) length of decking which became surplus when my father built a new set of steps for our veranda – as you’re not supposed to burn these due to unsafe emissions it had to be thrown out. The other was our old barbeque, whcih we paid all of 99 NOK for in 2005 and which has languished outside in the snow over the past three winters. The ventilation valve thing was actually not quite right to start with, that’s what you get for being a cheapskate, and it had now rusted into position which meant that when hubby tried to barbeque some sausages a few weekends ago it wouldn’t heat up sufficiently. I declared it dead and threw it out. I am now insisting we buy an “expensive one”, one that costs, oh, at least 300 NOK, and get/make a cover for it in order to protect it from the weather, at least over the winter. Where was I? Oh, yes, the smugness, then, originated in wathcing my neighbours throw away Good Stuff whereas we instead put an ad up at finn.no in the “free” section and were pleased to have people arrive and carry away our “junk” with big smiles on their faces. Very eco-friendly and bringing joy to mankind (well, a couple of people, anyway) into the bargain.

The desponancy came from realising this is a drop in the ocean and that we really need to do so much more, as well as persuading our neighbours to follow suit. I was checking the Times website for mayoral and other news the other day and found their list of “top 50 green blogs“, and things followed on from there and I read lots of sites on carbon neutrality and people installing solar panels and growing their own food. Which made me feel I was a long way off. Then I started reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and that really got me down. Seriously? This head-in-the-sand strategy is looking quite good at the moment.

Well, every little helps. I have to go to Oslo for a course in mid-June, which was convenient, because I was planning to go to Oslo for the weekend following the course anyway (Alanis Morisette at Norwegian Wood, that’s why, also time to see Oslo and, more especially, T and L again)  and now my employer is paying for the tickets which can’t be a Bad Thing. So I decided to take the train instead of going by airplane. I might have considered doing so in any case, but now I get the night train down Monday night with a sleeper compartment which means I can be bright and awake for the start of the course on Turesday. And I get the night train back on Sunday evening after the festival has ended and arrive bright and early in Trondheim just in time to go to work on Monday morning. The tickets, including sleeper, are twice what you’d normally manage to get plane tickets for this far in advance. And they’re all paid for by someone else. Nice.

Not so nice: Spending a week away from the lass – and the husband. A week is a long time. This week, for example, she learned to say “katt” (cat) and I finally realised her “kaddæ?” is probably Trøndersk (the local dialect, not mine, the husband’s though, as well as all her playmates’)  and means “Ka e det?” (what is that?) – at least most of the time. If I go away for a week I’ll probably come back and find she’s learnt to recite Shakespeare. Or Kaptein Sabeltann. Oh, the horror.

Or so they say. All I know is willful ignorance in others makes me annoyed and peevish. As when we travelled by plane over easter and the baby (I really should stop calling her the baby, she isn’t anymore, she’s grown into a little lady with a mind of her own, but as I don’t want to use her name on the internet much, I need a new nickname, I know:) the little lass got a “kid’s package” from the hostesses at SAS.

This consisted of a box vaguely decorated to resemble a plane, oval windows down the sides and a plane front window at one end where you could see the pilots and so on, populated by lions. On the box lid the text reads: “Løvemat. Nesten det samme som løvene spiser.” (Lion food. Almost the same as what lions eat.)

The contents: One tiny carton of orange juice, one bag of fruit jellies shaped like small airplanes, one set of colouring pencils and one colouring book – the latter also populated by lions.

The question: Which of these items supposedly resembles something a lion would eat?

Why couldn’t they have called the concept “Monkey food” instead and populated the plane with monkeys? That would at least have been half-way plausible.

I know, I know. Hardly a big thing in the great scheme of things. It’s just that it’s so unnecessary. And it kind of falls into the same category as a lot of the spelling mistakes that make me cringe. People, when this sort of mistake is pointed out, say “But it’s not important. Everyone understands what we are trying to say.” I beg to differ. Some people might actually not understand. And it IS important. I’m probably going to be one of those mothers who write to the television companies and point out the basic mistakes they make in children’s programmes. I nearly did the other day, in fact. There was a song about an explorer where they had illustrated one of the poles with pictures of both polar bears and penguins – which probably explains why I can’t remember which pole they were singing about. In the case of the SAS lions, I doubt whether any of the design team actually believe that lions eat fruit jellies shaped like little airplanes. When it comes to the polar fauna, I’m not so sure the misinformation is willful. After all, a recent survey shows that 13 percent of adult Norwegians believe there are polar bears in the region known as “Nord-Norge” – Northern Norway. In case you’re wondering, no, there are no polar bears in Nord-Norge. At Svalbard, yes, but that is another matter entirely. Mind you, since we’ve all grown up with the “for illustration only” weather map of Norway – with Svalbard floating off the west coast of northern Norway – perhaps most people believe it’s just a skip and a jump across the North Sea from the mainland to our northerly neighbour. It ain’t.

Anyway, why do I think all this is important? Well, apart from being pedantic and just instinctively disliking willful ignorance to the point of agressiveness (seriously, around me it pays to at least pretend to be interested in factual accuracy), I honestly believe this is a symptom of what got the human race into trouble in the first place. If it’s not particularly important to know what a lion eats, it follows that you’re not really interested in how the lion fits into the ecosystem and if you don’t know that, then you won’t be able to see any reason why we need lions in the first place, hence it doesn’t really matter if they become extinct. And if lions don’t really matter to you – they live in Africa, after all (oh, and a very small population in India, remnant of the subspecies Panthera leo persica which once covered most of Asia – did you know that?), and Africa is a far way off (though not quite so far if you run an airline, I should have thought, but never mind), then I suppose you don’t really mind if the whole continent of Africa becomes deforrestated, either? I mean, it won’t affect you, will it?

And so on. Not incidentally, I’ve been overdosing on Gerald Durrell lately, but I read Durrell because I believe in much of the same principles he believed in, not the other way around.

To add insult to injury, the lions were butt ugly, imho.

Oh, and the colouring pencils? Worst ever. Pressing down hard I could barely make a mark in the colouring book, the lass, having grasped the main idea of writing implements but not having had much time to practice and lacking in precision and force stood no chance at all.

…when the best selection of new books (novels and non-fiction) can be found at a newsagent rather than any of the so-called bookshops?

I finished my current read (The Tale of Desperaux) on the bus this morning, and since I’m visiting the bloodbank later – something which usually entails a bit of waiting time – I thought I’d just pop in somewhere to see if I could find something worthwhile to buy. Since the bookshops are not yet open when I make my way to work, I thought I might as well try the largest newsagent – Narvesen at Nordre – which is just down the block. As usual (well, I have been there before, you know) I am astounded at the selection of new non-fiction and fiction they carry. Now, don’t get me wrong, the section for books is tucked away at the back and the selection consists of a few hundred titles at most, but at least it’s stuff that was actually published THIS century. AND they have NON-fiction, a type of book whose existence seems to have been all but forgotten by the major bookshops. I ended up with Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which is hardly what you’d call new, being first published in 2006, but which I have not come across at a convenient time earlier. However, had I been in the mood for fiction, there were four or five titles that I will be buying at some point, just not today, and there were several more non-fiction titles I might as well have purchased, had I not found Bryson.

By contrast, the bookshop with the largest number of books in English has a fair selection of paperback fiction – though never the really new stuff, or at least never the new books I actually want. Whenever I find a book I’d actually like in the “new arrivals” section I have normally already purchased it – somewhere else and quite a while back. And they have no non-fiction whatsoever. Perhaps most illustrative of the lack of exitement generated by their selection: Even when they run a 25%, or even 50%, off all English paperbacks I have a hard time finding anything I actually want to fork over money for.

The bookshop that used to have a fairly large non-fiction section of the English paperback kind (well, when I say fairly large I mean somewhere between one and two shelf metres dedicated to the category) recently moved from a spacious corner house to a fancy high street venue and lost at least half its area. Consequently its selection of books of any kind has dropped drastically. This morning I noted that they are advertising dvds, something they have not been selling earlier. Great, that will mean more space for actual books, then?

Perhaps they are just adopting to the market. Perhaps there really isn’t a demand for Bill Bryson and Al Franken and Christina Lamb in this town. Or perhaps everyone else actually manages to browse for new titles online and therefore shop at amazon or play or bokkilden. And it is possible that I’m the only one left who’d rather buy the hardback of Douglas Coupland’s new novel in an actual bookshop.

Or it’s back to the old chicken and egg question: Do you have a smaller selection of books because they don’t sell or don’t they sell because you have a smaller selection?