As usual on the seventeenth of May, we were awakened this morning at seven by a deafening twenty-one-gun military salute from the cannons outside our neighbour’s palace.
17 May is Norway’s national day. It’s the biggest day of the year here, with flag waving, parades and barbeques similar to July 4th in the United States . Our local parade of small children goes past the neighbour’s (the crown prince’s) front door (it’s the second photo, I can’t seem to link to it directly). The children attend the primary school across the road, and when Alma was small we too had to show up at seven, wearing national dress or some other form of best clothes.
Some news people say it’s going to be even more enthusiastically celebrated this year; it’s the first 17 May since the man shot the teenagers on Utøya, last July. Norway has been preoccupied ever since with the significance of that incident. There has been a thoughtful national debate – both about multiculturalism and how to deal with the culprit, as well as about human emotions like sorrow, anger, memorial, and so on.
Vesla has never expressed any interest in the seventeenth of May; it’s not her kind of thing.
A Bad Guide 
The only thing even roughly equivalent to a National Day that we had whenIwasaboy was Remembrance Day. We turned up, preferably bekilted, in Wolf Cub uniforms, and marched along after the ex-Servicemen – in my case, on the last couple of times I did it, carrying a fine, large banner. We’d have both a brass band and a pipe band. A pipe band is the very thing for what was essentially a service of mourning: we had all had great-uncles, or grandfathers, killed in the Great War, of course, and many families had had losses in the The War too – many fewer, though, as the War Memorial attested. My father and uncles had survived The War unscathed, in Navy, RAF and Army.
My family all survived the first world war only for my great grandmother to stumble at the last fence, the 1918 flu epidemic.
Maybe Scotland will invent a national day for itself if they strike out on their own. I suppose Burns night isn’t a daylight thing.
It makes me quite ridiculously happy that “Awakened by Gunfire” is “About Goats”.
Strictly speaking I suppose it’s only “Partly About Goats”, but I certainly know what you mean.
St Andrew’s Day seems to matter only to keen terpsichoreans. We could use the day of Bannockburn, I suppose, or of the Declaration of Arbroath, or – irresistibly for the sort of vulgar, self-regarding creeps who go into politics – something by which to congratulate the current generation of pols.
Better to stick to Remembrance Day, I’d have said. In the Great War we had the proportionately highest losses of any part of the British Empire – reason enough, don’t you think?
Reason enough, except that many countries remember 11 November. I expect that all sorts of Scottish hardships and victories will be remembered when independence (or whatever it’s going to be called) comes.
Up at 6.30. A quick shower. Get the kids into scout’s uniforms. Get into town to organize the scouts at the flagpoles before the local celebration starts at eight with gunshots, hoisting of flags, fanfares, national anthem and speech by some notability at the city hall. Back home for a quick breakfast and change of cloths before the kids rushed off to march back to town with their school for the “children’s procession”. Off to watch along the route. Back to the school for games, sweets and hotdogs in the schoolyard. Home for lunch. New change to scout’s uniforms. Back to town to march with the scouts in the “civil procession”. Home to make dinner. Back to town to haul the flags at nine o’clock. Home to pack for my brother-in-law’s wedding this weekend.
Hot dogs? Say it ain’t so. Is that American influence?
They call them varme hunder.* Actually they are usually wieners, with ketchup & mustard as req’d, wrapped in a potato tortilla thingy.
*joke
Ah, well, potato and/or tortilla, that sounds better already. In my experience most USians want ketchup or mustard but not both on a hot dog, and some of us mustard people have strong anti-ketchup sentiment (it may go the other way, too) — not in general, but only in regard to hot dogs.
“Wiener” and “frankfurter” are interchangeable USian words for hot dog, but I am afraid that if I went to Vienna or Frankfurt I would not notice if I bought a sausage in a bun and got a non-local one. They all seem like, you know, hot dogs. I think I have, years ago, bought such a thing on the streets of Frankfurt, but all I really remember about it is that there was a piece of cardboard involved which held the mustard.
I meant a tortilla that is made from potato meal (lompe).
There may be a technical difference between a wiener & a frankfurter, but the ones I’ve had have all been very bland. “Hamburger”, as everyone probably knows by now, originally referred to the kind of bun that’s used. I was disappointed by the sausages when I lived in Hamburg. The most popular was the currywurst, but it’s not my cup of tea. I find hot dogs too unattractive to eat unless I’m super hungry; their only attraction for me is that I wasn’t allowed to eat them when I was a child. I too prefer mustard – hot, like Coleman’s or Dijon – to ketchup. I use ketchup on chips (fries) & fish fingers.
“I use ketchup on chips (fries)”: I’ve always used vinegar – except when we lived in Australia when we followed local custom and squeezed some lemon onto them. Oh, and on visiting the Low Countries when we use mayo.
I have never been a fan of the “brown sauce” much favoured in Edinburgh.
Also known as “sauce”.
I like (malt) vinegar best too, but you can’t often get it abroad.
There used to be all sorts of sauces: OK Sauce, Dad’s Sauce, HP Sauce, A1 Sauce, Worcester sauce – all brown. There’s an interesting Wikipedia piece on Worcester sauce. Apparently it’s an ingredient in Welsh rabbit. I keep a bottle of Worcester sauce on the kitchen counter; I don’t use it for anything, I just like having it around.
Lemon on chips sounds interesting.
“Daddy’s”, sauce, shurely? Or is there a “Dad’s” also? HP Sauce?
K discovered real mayonnaise on a school trip to France – I think he discovered real food, basically. But it’s always mayonnaise on chips now. Homemade, as even Hellman’s seems to have got funny ingredients. And now we have a neighbour with laying hens again. Hooray!
Must get dripping and make those “real chips”.
As this post began with a “national day” I shall reveal that we are usually in France at Saint-Antoine on the Belgian national day (21 July) and all the Flemings resident in the community (and Flemish guests) wear national colours and make huge platters of chips for everyone, with mayonnaise. And sing. That’s fun. (Otherwise chips are seldom undertaken for 100+ people.)
How did July 21 come to be the Belgian national day?
I can’t remember where AJP recently mentioned diapering (in the visual-art pattern sense, not the infant care sense). Nor can I remember where the topic of different words for appetizer/starter/hors d’oeuvre/canapé came up. But these two topics come together at cattanea’s most recent blog post.
There was diapering in the brickwork at Sandringham in the video of the queen’s 1957 tv broadcast that I linked to at Languagehat.
Catannea’s diapering is just brilliant. I love ephemeral works of art. Now you see it, now you don’t, but you sure remember it.
Dad’s vs Daddy’s: I remember it as “Dad’s”, but it may be a British thing. There are a few examples of it here, (the first one’s Canadian).
21 July 1831 was the day Leopold I was installed as the first Belgian king after the revolution of 1830, when the Southern provinces seceded from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Revolution
I see Leopold had a quite interesting background. He was uncle of Prince Albert, Victoria’s prince consort, and would have been British prince consort himself if his wife Caroline, daughter of George IV, hadn’t died in childbirth. Then he turned down the kingship of Greece, before becoming king of the Belgians (why isn’t it “king of Belgium”?). In those days, if you were related to royalty it was “Have sceptre & crown, will travel”, didn’t matter which country – just not Greece, apparently; maybe it was too new & insecure.
Damn, I’m not FOLLOWING all this despite the comments coming into my email. But wasn’t the Greek king chosen from among the Danes? I always have this problem with K who insists upon referring to the Duke of Edinburgh as “Phil the Greek” and I keep saying “No! He’s a Viking! He’s a Dane!” -for which I believe my reference is a long-ago reading of a biography of HM the Queen.
Keeping up online is exhausting.
Please, update me.
WiPe says
“A member of the Danish-German House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, Prince Philip was born into the Greek royal family, […]”
Would this sentence mean anything different if it said
“A member of the Greek royal family, Prince Philip was born into the Danish-German House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, […]”?
Was he perhaps Danish on his father’s side and Greek on his mother’s side?
Phil didn’t have a last name at all until he got engaged. Then he needed one in order to become British, and was persuaded by his maternal uncle to take his name, Mountbatten (formerly ‘Battenberg‘, changed during WW1). There’s nothing Greek about the Greek former-royal family. Most of these non-Roman Catholic royal people are descended from the ruling families of the small Protestant German states that existed before German unification in 1860-ish – Schleswig & Holstein were also German back in them days. I think this state of affairs is a result of the thirty years’ war. For Britain, the German blood comes from the 17C. marriage of Charles I’s (Stuart) daughter into the Han(n)over family. In 1714 when the British had rejected the Stuarts and then run out of Orange heirs, they brought a Hanover to London to become George I and his heirs then kept on marrying Germans. One Protestant country that may have escaped this German royal export to some extent was Sweden, whose Bernadotte royal family is named for one of Napoleon’s generals who took on the country (I’ve forgotten why).
“Schleswig & Holstein were also German back in them days”: Bismarck fought a war on that topic.
There are parts of Hamburg (Altona, for example) that are still thought of as historically Danish. And then there’s a big statue of Bismarck down at the far end of the Reeperbahn.
Well, this is becoming enlightening – I’m sure I read somewhere that Her Majesty’s permission had to have been sought in order for Caroline of Monaco (so often in our Yurropian mags) to marry Ernesto de Hannover they’re Spanish magazines I see: “Ernesto”). So that explains why. Maybe. I think he must be the umpteenth in line to the throne. And about the age, but without the well-mannered comportment, of Crown.
The Bernadotte dynasty: according to Wikipedia, during the Napoleonic empire there were troubles with Swedish royalty, and between the deposition of one king, the lack of heirs of the next one, and the death of yet another one, there was no obvious candidate for a next king, so they elected Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s generals who had been made “Prince of Pontecorvo” (meaning he reigned in Pontecorvo, in Italy), to be their next king and thereby ensure the country against Napoleon. Bernadotte was an effective king and eventually broke with Napoleon.
they elected Bernadotte
And his descendants. Electing a dynasty is such a peculiar idea. The Norwegians did the same in 1905, or whenever it was. However (at least in Norway), even though there are no reelections, the monarch knows that the electorate could fairly easily get rid of them. That’s not so in the British system.
Her Majesty’s permission had to have been sought in order for Caroline of Monaco (so often in our Yurropian mags) to marry Ernesto de Hannover
Really? The queen of England? How bizarre. If I were the queen, I’d have said no just to see what happened next.
“the monarch knows that the electorate could fairly easily get rid of them. That’s not so in the British system.” It’s not very hard – elect MPs who vote to change the Act of Settlement. They can replace the Windsor dynasty by the Crown dynasty if they want – it certainly sounds regal. Would your lass like to be a princess? Easy peasy.
Crown is the wrong guy for the job: he’s a confirmed anti-royalist. And I suspect that his daughter has better things to do with her life. Maybe their goats?
Or Topsy. I think people would look forward to the annual Christmas address from Topsy.
If the head of state shall be animal, it surely should be the national animal. Now, I see that Britain’s national animal is the lion. Impractical, it seems, but such is the power of heraldry. But the national bird is the robin. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Oh, national this, national that. I’m a little jaded about such things. The Massachusetts state insect is the ladybug (I’m not sure what you call it over there: ladybird? Marienkäfer?). If a dynasty can be replaced, why not an animal?
I knew that each American state had its own state flower, state bird, and other silly things, but a state insect? why not a state earthworm or millipede too? a state arachnid? a state virus while they are at it? my mind boggles.
What often happens, I think, is that a group of schoolchildren mounts a campaign. It’s a project, a lesson in government. The point is not so much that anyone cares about the particular fish or invertebrate or rock or whatever it may be.
“I see that Britain’s national animal is the lion”: if you say so, but it’s news to me. I’m with old grumpyboots: I dislike National this that and the next thing, or Official either – official start of Spring indeed! Pernicious rubbish . Usually we’re spared such nonsense in the UK, though the youngsters probably believe we’re not, since they’re all half-Americanised anyway.
I like the idea of a state virus. There’s no reason why all the symbols need to be big and furry. Even dearie might like a national germ. The queen could be replaced by salmonella. It would be omnipresent, like God and Big Brother.
A lot of the united states celebrate the brook trout. I would make the herring my symbolic fish and the wood pigeon my bird.
The cushie doo: yes, I like that suggestion – if you must “celebrate” bloody birds that eat your harvest, that is.
cushie doo
Heh! Cushie = cushat “wood pigeon” <- cow + shoat “young pig”. I wonder, though, if that isn’t rather an onomatopoetic coo and a cognate of Swedish skata “magpie”.
doo is near homophonous with Danish due (Nyn./Eng. dove, Sw. duva, Ger. Taube)
I’m quite friendly to the concept of national life forms, but that’s probably because the Norwegian species were appointed after voting organised by a popular radio show, Nitimen, and all sorts of silly popular campaigns were unleashed.
For some reason I thought the Swedish word was düva.
Trond, you are probably right about coo + skata. Cow + shoat just would not do for the name of a bird, it is just folk etymology.
Swedish skata “magpie”
Does that have any connection with skatt (treasure), since magpies are supposed to steal twinkly objects?
Was that Bergmann a one off or did they make more of them, in the style of other directors? It’s very well done, I love the crackly sound.