Oslo in Summer

a vintage video tribute to my hometown

[ soundtrack : Next Summer - deLillos (1993) ]

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I subscribe to a compatriot YouTuber who uploads historical Norwegian stuff; I’m interested in history and a fierce patriot. Today, he posted this vintage pearl from 1948; it shows the populace at play on a beautiful summer’s day. I enjoy this sort of footage for its anthropological content; There are so many interesting details, both differences and similarities compared to how things are today.

There’s a crisply enunciated Norwegian voice-over and a suitably rousing soundtrack. You can toggle the auto-translate function if you’re curious, but it’s mostly wholesome tourist-brochure pabulum — ten years earlier and they might as well have been talking about Kraft durch Freude. The modernistic creed - regardless of political clothes - seems to elevate and revere the functional optimum — it makes a lot of sense if you’re an engineer and view the world and its inhabitants as something akin to machines, or mechanistic systems to be tweaked and perfected.

I’m more of a Sturm und Drang kind of guy myself, but even a misanthrope needs a holiday — if only from himself.

My father’s side is from Oslo since the time of Arild. My grandfather was a musician; he played drums with various orchestras in restaurants, theatres, clubs and cinemas — he was a working musician, with all the pecuniary ups and downs that entails. He could’ve played on the soundtrack for the video above, for all I know. His school report-cards show him to be a highly intelligent pupil, but his taste for music and easy/ecstatic living got the better of him, I guess. A charming, well-dressed drunk. Not a family man.

My father was also an Oslo-boy through and through. After helping to occupy Germany after the war, he went to sea; first as a deckhand, then as a telegraphist. He sailed the world and many years later told me stories from New York, Aden and Montevideo, about storms in the Bay of Biscay and seedy bars in Bombay. He disembarked in London and lived there for seven years in the fifties before settling down as a teacher back home.

Whatever scholarly attainments I have achieved, they are built on the foundations he laid down in my childhood. I grew up in a home full of books, where reading and curiosity were encouraged and questions were answered honestly. I will always remember his patience and the Sunday afternoons I lay in the crook of his arm as he read to me, after our ski-trips to Ringdalskoia.

He was a good man. It’s a shame the feminists, in their arrogance, seem so intent on denigrating every kind of masculinity. They seem unable to foresee the consequences of their chauvinism; they are like ideologically drunk teenagers — I doubt this is a social experiment that will end well.

My father waiting for his father outside Grand Hotel - ca. 1935

My parents moved out of town just before they had me — my father very reluctantly. I’m glad they did, because their choice meant I got to grow up where the fields, farms and forests began. We were free to roam over vast tracts; kids exploring the world — unsupervised and at our leisure, negotiating the rules of reality as we went, getting on with it or running home to Mommy — as you please.

It was a childhood I wouldn’t have wanted to be without.

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