Oslo - Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe - page 14

'Why, no,' I would reply with a certain pride, 'only English,' and they would look at me as if I were crazy.
But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking
about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where
you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you
have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without
endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
I get great pleasure from watching foreign TV and trying to imagine what on earth is going on. On my
first evening in Oslo, I watched a science programme in which two men in a studio stood at a lab table
discussing a variety of sleek, rodent-like animals that were crawling over the surface and occasionally up
the host's jacket. 'And you have sex with all these creatures, do you?' the host was saying.
'Certainly,' replied the guest. 'You have to be careful with the porcupines, of course, and the lemmings
can get very neurotic and hurl themselves off cliffs if they feel you don't love them as you once did, but
basically these animals make very affectionate companions, and the sex is simply out of this world.'
'Well, I think that's wonderful. Next week we'll be looking at how you can make hallucinogenic drugs
with simple household chemicals from your own medicine cabinet, but now it's time for the screen to go
blank for a minute and then for the lights to come up suddenly on the host of the day looking as if he was just
about to pick his nose. See you next week.'
After Hammerfest, Oslo was simply wonderful. It was still cold and dusted with greyish snow, but it
seemed positively tropical after Hammerfest, and I abandoned all thought of buying a furry hat. I went to the
museums and for a day-long walk out around the Bygd￸y peninsula, where the city's finest houses stand on
the wooded hillsides, with fetching views across the icy water of the harbour to the downtown. But mostly I
hung around the city centre, wandering back and forth between the railway station and the royal palace,
peering in the store windows along Karl Johans Gate, the long and handsome main pedestrian street,
cheered by the bright lights, mingling with the happy, healthy, relentlessly youthful Norwegians, very pleased
to be alive and out of Hammerfest and in a world of daylight. When I grew cold, I sat in caf￩s and bars and
eavesdropped on conversations that I could not understand or brought out my Thomas Cook European
Timetable and studied it with a kind of humble reverence, planning the rest of my trip.
The Thomas Cook European Timetable is possibly the finest book ever produced. It is impossible to
leaf through its 500 pages of densely printed timetables without wanting to dump a double armload of
clothes into an old Gladstone and just take off. Every page whispers romance: 'Montreux - Zweisimmen -
Spiez - Interlaken', 'Beograd - Trieste - Venezia - Verona - Milano', 'G￶teborg - Lax￥ - (Hallsberg) -
Stockholm', 'Ventimiglia - Marseille - Lyon - Paris'. Who could recite these names without experiencing a
tug of excitement, without seeing in his mind's eye a steamy platform full of expectant travellers and piles of
luggage standing beside a sleek, quarter-mile-long train with a list of exotic locations slotted into every
carriage? Who could read the names 'Moskva - Warszawa - Berlin - Basel - Gen￨ve' and not feel a
melancholy envy for all those lucky people who get to make a grand journey across a storied continent?
Who could glance at such an itinerary and not want to climb aboard? Well, Sunny von Blow for a start. But
as for me, I could spend hours just poring over the tables, each one a magical thicket of times, numbers,
distances, mysterious little pictograms showing crossed knives and forks, wine glasses, daggers, miners'
pickaxes (whatever could they be for?), ferry boats and buses, and bewilderingly abstruse footnotes:
873-4 To/from Storlien - see Table 473.
977 Lapplandspillen - see Table 472. Stops to set down only. On (7) cars run in train 421.
k Reservation advisable.
t Passengers may not join or alight at these stations.
x Via V￤ster￥s on (4), (5), (6), (7).
What does it all mean? I have no idea. You could study the Thomas Cook book for years and never truly
understand its deeper complexities. And yet these are matters that could affect one's life. Every year there
must be scores of people who end up hundreds of miles from their destination because they failed to notice
the footnote that said, 'Non-stop to Arctic Circle after Karlskrona - see Table 721 a/b. Hot-water bottle
advisable. Hard tack only after Murmansk. Return journey via Anchorage and Mexicali. Boy oh boy, have