I started writing here eleven years ago. I thought I might be bored not having to get up and go to work. Strange, because I always had a range of interests beyond my job.
And eleven years ago I went to Oslo. It has changed since then with new museums, attractive architecture and an abundance of hotels. It does have an few excellent restaurants but Scandinavians are tightwads and seem to prefer cheaper Italian fare. It also has excellent galleries and museums, of which the stand-out eye-catcher is Munch. I didn’t think I much liked Munch but the exhibitions I saw in Oslo have converted me. Of course, obviously, I didn’t see, or expect to see, The Scream anymore than I have seen Mona Lisa or The Night Watch. They are excellent crowd pullers leaving plenty of room for me to roam less popular rooms; like sugary jam jars for wasps.
But I digress, I did go to one much older museum devoted to the Fram and Amundsen’s (Norway) successful race to the South Pole in which Scott (UK) lost but is famous because he perished. Almost everything about Norway is admirable. Norwegians are honest, modest and usually rather good looking. So it was no surprise that the Fram museum, opened in 1936 by King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav, paid more attention to Scott’s tragic polar trip than their own cool, organised and more focused and successful, Roald Amundsen.
How often do you go to see something and, reading more afterwards, think I wish I’d seen that? It’s always happening to me. Fram (means forward in Norwegian) was launched in 1892 and designed specifically to avoid being crushed by polar ice floes. A relation of mine went to the S Pole not so long ago in a small fibreglass sailing boat built in Ipswich that might have been specially designed to be crushed by ice. They used broom handles or some similar high tech device to ward them off. But it surely occurs to you that Fram was not the newest vessel for a voyage to Antarctica? Scott’s Terra Nova was even older, a clapped-out old whaler built in 1882, powered by a combo of steam and sail. And this is what I didn’t see when I was on board Fram.
If you don’t know much about Diesel at least remember to spell his name with a capital D. If you want to know more about him I refer you to Douglas Brunt’s excellent biography, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. And Amundsen would very likely not have got to the SP first without his ground-breaking Diesel engine.