By the fence that runs along the east side of our property is a wood. Actually it’s more of a forest; more like the dark evergreen forest in a fairytale, a place where witches live and there’s an occasional gingerbread house with smoke curling from the chimney. We sometimes take the goats through the forest to a rocky point about a twenty-minute walk from our house. There on a clear day is a view all the way to Oslo, twenty kilometres away. If you squint, you can even make out Oslo City Hall.
The goats trot in a line, as they do when we take them to the reservoir.
I’ve never to my knowledge actually seen a witch in the forest. What I have seen is a lot of anthills. They are all connected. Apparently there’s an enormous network of anthills that stretches all the way to Chile in the west and Mongolia in the east. I doubt that they have a proper telephone-like connection.
After ten minutes we come to a clearing.
It’s bigger than a clearing; it’s where the local authority dug a 40 km-long emergency water pipeline, just in case something goes wrong with the normal one (“Be prepared”, the Norwegian motto).
Removing the trees created a scenic overlook, as well as a strange long line of dead wood.
But what is the point of this walk?
Bugger the view, the point is berries. So, after some scrambling…
down the side of the rock…
we get to…
some Mountain Ash. Somehow I lost my trousers on the way down.
This deer is wondering what happened to my trousers. We hardly ever see deer.
Misty couldn’t care less about my trousers, she loves birch leaves.
A Bad Guide 
That glade looks like the kind of place you might run into a troll. I have heard that Norway still has them. Denmark has nisse, but I’m not sure those are real trolls.
I’m pretty sure it’s just the one species of ant that’s kosmopolitan. We still have our local ones on the side.
And do the local ants envy the cosmopolitan ones? Tell bitter jokes about them? Covertly piss on their anthills?
The locals make rules outlawing certain widespread forms of communication. In consequence the cosmopolitans sneer at the locals and call them “hicks”.
And do the local ants envy the cosmopolitan ones? If this article is correct, they die:
http://bit.ly/3StHMF
genetic studies showed all Argentine ants in New Zealand were likely to have come from a single Australian nest.
I believe it. Bloody Aussies. They come over here with those enormous backpacks and next thing you know they’ve unrolled sleeping bags all over your anthill. They drink all your beer and you can’t get rid of them.
Bloody Argentines, you should have said… apparently they come from my country in the first place!
I love your blog!
So if you lean close in the still of the night, you can hear a chorus of tiny formic voices singing “Oid mortales el grito sagrado…”
jajaja ¡Exactamente!
Thank you, Julia. I’m very pleased you’re here. I may borrow some of your upside-down ¡exclamations! that aren’t available in Norway.
¡¡De nada!! (my pleasure) these ¡¡¡ are all yours !
Julia — I used to live in Argentina, and I wish I could get back for a visit. Wonderful country (with wonderful pizza).
language hat : that’s great! Where exactly did you use to live in Argentina (a big, wonderful and really, really crazy country)?
¡ Te esperamos de vuelta !
Beautiful and cheering as always. Nothing like goats to raise a girl’s spirits.
Thanks, mab.
Julia, in case you don’t know, Language Hat has a famous blog, about language and hats, that you can see if you click on his name.
Thank you A.J.P., I’ve found it yesterday, and I’m a follower now!
Excuse me for using your comments as a platform for conversation with language hat (and excuse my terrible English, too…)
The new photos you’ve added here are fantastic (as always happens, it makes me envy even more the wonderful place where you live)
Julia: I lived in Buenos Aires for several years in the late ’60s, first in Belgrano “R” and then in Olivos. To this day I root for Boca Juniors and of course the national team (¡mano de dios, baby!).
Nice goats. No bear with a furry fell around, I hope.
Your terrible English is perfect.
A.J.P.: Thank you! (just lucky, you’ll see!)
language hat :-() !! I live in Belgrano my self (a few blocks from Belgrano R which I think it’s one of the prettiest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires). Maradona’s “la mano de Dios” was cheating to me (in a very Argentine way)
I didn’t know ash had berries. Looked it up, found that mountain ash is (1) not the same as ash, (2) the same as rowan,(3) in the rose family. It’s a little embarrassing that, although rowan is such a familiar word from the world of folk songs and such — an essential bit of old Englishness — I have never bothered to get a visual image or other sensory impression to go with it.
Do people eat those berries? What do they taste like? Rose hips, maybe? (Raspberries and blackberries and all those things (genus rubus) are in the family Rosaceae, too, but the berries in your picture don’t look like clusters of drupelets.)
And what about the name Ashbery? From the berry, or from a place name?
Rowan berries cannot be eaten raw, and Wikipedia explains why: “Raw berries also contain parasorbic acid (about 0.4%-0.7% in the European rowan), which causes indigestion and can lead to kidney damage, but heat treatment (cooking, heat-drying etc.) and, to a lesser extent, freezing, neutralises it, by changing it to the benign sorbic acid. Luckily, they are also usually too astringent to be palatable when raw.”
Still according to Wiki, you can find rowan jelly or jam in Britain. I’ve never seen it, but then I only visit there from time to time.
empty: Ashberries (Norw. ‘rognebær’ “rowanberries”) are sour. The berries are usually picked in the autumn just after the first frost, when they are sweeter, and the use is largely limited to liqueur and liquor and to a sweet and sour jelly that goes well with game or fowl.
They are also the subject of a Norwegian saying, from a naturalized version of Aesop’s fable ‘The fox and the grapes”: “Høyt henger de, og sure er de, sa reven”. Literally: “High up they hang, and sour they are, said the fox.” Meaning (of people): “They have high positions, and they aren’t nice.” I wouldn’t be surprised if our host had a picture of that, too, taken from his desk.
Trond, I didn’t know that saying. You are adding very interesting information to this blog.
I can take a picture of a rowen tree from my desk. We planted one in our garden because it’s supposed to be good for the other fruit trees & berry bushes. I can’t remember how, I’ll have to ask my wife.
Bruessel, thank you for the warning about raw rowan berries. I think I’ll avoid letting the goats near them this year. I never know what they can and can’t eat and I let them decide most of the time. As well as obvious things like foxgloves I also keep them away from rhododendron which I know is poisonous.
Little did you know when you started this blog that you would be getting useful goat-keeping advice.
Some people underestimate the value of small talk, but our idle chat about plants may have spared a goat from stomach-ache or worse.
(On the other hand , maybe those berries are fine for goats. Who knows?)
What better advice than from literary types who like goats?
Who knows, empty. There are advantages to verbal communication.
As I was looking for some jam in our super-duper extremely refined local grocer’s shop today, I suddenly found rowan jelly from the Alsace. I didn’t buy it though (7,38 EUR, what if I don’t like it?)
I did that recently with Tiptree’s Gooseberry Chutney. It was really awful!
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it 7,38’s worth. I should try making it before I say that. I could sell it at our gate on the weekend for 7 EUR. Discount rowan jelly.
I did that recently with Tiptree’s Gooseberry Chutney
A little tip for assessing the quality of Indian restaurants involves chutney. If the chutneys are thick and tasty, you have a good restaurant. If watery and nondescript, then don’t go back. Chutneys are one of the little things that distinguish a restaurant with a concern for “real” Indian food from those concerned with hoovering your cash. Using the chutney rule has eliminated several of our local Indian restaurants from consideration and those that are left do not disappoint.
I suppose you could always just BYOC.
I think that the revenue-loss-radar of most proprietors would sniff that one out pretty sharpish.
Besides, what’s the point of sneaking in your own chutney to accompany bad food?
If they’d applied for a chutney license, but hadn’t received it yet, they might let you bring your own. That’s what happens at all those Indian restaurants on E.6th Street. Actually, maybe that’s liquor.
A little tip for assessing the quality of Indian restaurants involves chutney.
For Mexican restaurants, look at the salsa. It’s a throwaway item they put on your table with chips as soon as you walk in, but if they have managed a good salsa with fresh cilantro, you know they care about food.
With Norwegian restaurants it’s the waffl… No, wait, there are no Norwegian restaurants.
what?! no Norwegian restaurants?!
you should write about that…
When I went to Norway with a French tour group many years ago, we had rice with our main meal almost every evening, so the French jokingly enquired about the many rice fields the country must possess.
Although I have occasionally had some really wonderful Norwegian food, this is not like Belgium gastronomically.
There are a normal number of restaurants here, I suppose (I really meant there aren’t ‘Norwegian restaurants’ abroad, as there are Indian or Italian restaurants), it’s just that they are incredibly expensive. We took my daughter to lunch at the new Oslo Opera the other day, as a treat, and my wife figured out that we could for the same price have taken her for a (cheap summer rates) trip to Greece.
Years ago we lived in a neighborhood that had once been heavily Swedish (I don’t know where all the Swedes went, it’s all Irish now) and we had something like frutsoopa, which was a cold and sweet soup made with rhubarb. My mother said it was like the soups her Norwegian aunts used to make. (Her Norwegian mother died when she was a toddler, but she does remember her mother deep frying donuts.)
Maybe that’s what killed her.