Midsummer’s Night Dream

The leafy suburbs of Oslo are eerily silent. Most have vacated to their summer houses on the fjords or in the mountains. We spend summers at our hytter on the Oslo Fjord, a summer house designed for sleeping and entertaining a large family and guests. If we are not at ours, we are visiting friends at theirs. It is a period of great social connection with family and friends.

The days are long and the sun sets into an indigo twilight at midnight rising gently again at 4. Farm fresh berries and produce are sold by farmers along rural roads. A bounty of lobster, prawns and crabs are harvested and served with chilled chardonnay. Sails billow silently along the fjord occasionally interrupted by the nasal horn and swell of a passing seasonal cruise liner.

Like Tom Bombadil of Withywindle, I am in the land of berries, milk and honey. Summer in Norway is magical.

On the weeked we visit good friends down the fjord. I love the two boys aged 7 and 5 and it is all boys’ fun: fishing, boating, paper airplanes and wrestling kung fu style. No Playstation here. I invite them into the cellar to search for hidden pirate treasure. I suddenly transmogrify into a monster and chase them around the house. The din of the screaming and ensuing chaos gives me the giggles.

Mid-week and we are on a 24 hour fly in with friends to the Molde Jazz Festival to see Jamie Cullum. Molde is on a peninsula facing a large fjord with misty snow covered mountain peaks as far as the eye can see. The approach takes us through Romsdalsfjella a mountain range that drops 1000 metres straight down into a valley out to the fjord. We are flying through the valley and I feel I can touch the crag through the airplane window. The views are breathtaking and look like a scene out of the Jurassic period.

Cullum is an energetically outstanding performer and a talented musician! His band are a crop of young jazz dudes and the compositions pay little heed to the discipline of genre. The audience is filled with a large collection of 20 something babes – that is musical reach! Rafael Saadiq, the warm up act, deserves an honourable mention – he and his entourage are hot. We have an outstanding time. We are blessed to have such good friends. We are all very fond of each other and are comfortably intimate.

Summer began for us on solstice with the British Shakespeare Company performing A Midsummer’s Night Dream outdoors in a garden on a private estate in a picture postcard seaside village next to us on the fjord. It is an annual event hosted by a patron keen on the arts. The players are accommodated in the estate house and speaking with them, I am informed it is their favorite venue on the summer tour, understandably.

The high point of the very surreal garden estate is the large phallic statue in the pond. It has a motion detector and erupts abundantly on close proximity. The players are most excellent as we are all transported to the forests outside of Athens to witness the subtly architected plots of comedy and love. Kant has nothing on Shakespeare who should be credited for his contribution to modern anthropology.

The multiple plots of my summer sojourn cross and intoxicate me. Fantasy becomes reality and spins back into fantasy. I dream that Oberon has instructed Puck to apply the magical juice to my eyelids. It is my midsummer’s night dream. Summer in Norway is magical.

Beaverboosh

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