THE LAST THING you want to a pack for a small island in the Arctic is a mobile phone. And I don’t mean it’s the last thing you want to pack, I mean you don’t want to pack one at all. Leave the thing at home. Like packing a low slung Colt forty-five in Dead Man’s Gulch, […]
Tag Archives: Travel
HAVE YOU EVER woke up after a couple of drinks feeling a like gang of Ancient Egyptians must’ve broken into the house overnight and mummified you? So it’s not just me then? Seriously, opening my eyes to find myself wrapped tight in a sleeping bag, in a very small attic, of a very small schoolhouse, in […]
EVEN THE sunniest of mornings on the island of Værøy can see endless low clouds appearing as a magic waterfall tipping over the mountains in slow motion. Driven upwards by the prevailing northern air currents, as the wind drops they dissolve into thin air. From time to time, the cloud mist descends below the church tower […]
Originally posted on GABFRAB:
I often live my life not through action but observance and so consider myself a collector. I love the wild and humanizing moments that emanate from the city streets and thruways of America. The singular happenings that only I care to catch and remember: Homeless make out sessions and bus stop foot repairs. Some drunken…
THE ISLAND’S ONLY PUB had run out of cigarettes yet again. Just in my hour of need. Island fever had struck. It’s a bit like cabin fever only on an island. A contradiction of emotions had me feeling like Ben Gunn, Sinbad the Sailor and Lemuel Gulliver all rolled into one. It was like being cast ashore and marooned, […]
Postcard fromVærøy EVEN THOUGH THEY couldn’t quite fit the entire island on a postcard, you can tell from photo that Værøy is pretty small. Particularly the habitable bit. A couple of mountains, a bit of green here and there and not much else. It can’t boast much more than five miles (8km) from one end […]
ROUSING FROM HAVING snatched a short nap, I switched on the box to watch a bit of Norwegian TV. An experience that can only be fully appreciated if you don’t understand the language. As I speak more than a smattering it only served to nudge me back into the state of semi-consciousness I’d just struggled out of. You […]
THE MORNING AFTER the morning before, when all feelings of fear and self-loathing had virtually dissipated into the thinness of the Arctic air, I felt almost alive again. Just a few dusty cobwebs of half-remembered doubt lingered at the frayed edges of my mind. Nothing a couple of beers couldn’t fix. But that wasn’t the […]
IT WAS HALF AN HOUR into Sunday afternoon by the time my gooey eyelids managed to wrench themselves apart. The resulting sensation was a bit like having fine sandpaper coated in blear drawn across your eyeballs. An ensuing blitz of excruciating light had my frontal lobes throbbing like they were attempting to break out of […]
THERE IS A SECRET island far beyond the Arctic Circle where people don’t lock their doors at night for there is no fear and there are no thieves. An island where small children play on homemade rafts in sparkling waters on summer days that last forever… AND SO BEGINS chapter eight of Pedersen’s Last Dream. Oddly enough, though […]
Pedersen's Last Dream 