Dugnads and the Big Society

It was the Norwegian word of the year in 2004, and a concept which the people here hold extremely dear.

But even despite Britain's pukka heritage of foreign word-appropriation “dugnad” is not a term which will quickly earn a place in the Oxford English dictionary.

Such is the shame. If it were nestled there somewhere in between “duffer” and “dugout”, perhaps we wouldn’t have to exhaust quite so much newsprint or airtime trying to work out what The Big Society is all about. As the Tory Party Conference in Manchester rolls around, we could look forward to politicians taking to the stage saying, “this Big Society thing - it’s just a great big dugnad isn’t it,” then sitting back down again.

Instead we’ll have to listen to bogus anecdotes about a “good friend” who gives up her Saturdays to help parcel up the detritus of doomed Post Offices. Or a constituent who drives leopard-print shoes to needy conference speakers through his social entrepreneurial venture, Heels on Wheels.

There is a telling phrase on the Big Society Network website which reads: “We think that the best way to get people excited and involved in the Big Society is to help the countless amazing people and communities around the UK tell their own stories, rather than publicise it through a big marketing campaign.”

Why don’t you just come out and say it: “we can’t do a big marketing campaign because we don’t really understand what The Big Society is, and even if we did, our message would be about as straightforward as a Latin translation of a Brief History of Time.”

Norwegians, because of their love of dugnads on the other hand, would very quickly grasp the idea. Unfortunately “dugnad” is a concept equally hostile to elegant interpretation. As simply as possible, it is an event run by a self-organising group of citizens who give up their time to perform some kind of civic duty like cleaning up a nursery or pruning the hedges in a public park. Attendees drink litres of black coffee, eat dozens of crazy little pancakes and everyone gets to go home feeling good about themselves. Best of all, nobody need dip into that lovely big Norwegian budget surplus.

Attempting to introduce a great big dugnad like The Big Society, while also implementing swathes of savage public cuts, as the Tories appear to be doing, is head-kickingly cynical. Britons are rightly sceptical. But you do have to wonder whether the absence of a word like dugnad in our own rich lexicon, suggests we don’t have the type of society which requires one.

This is no criticism. Yes, dugnads are exceptionally common, well attended and motivated by an enviable collective sense of civic responsibility. But, in a deeply conformist country like Norway, they are also motivated by the social shame of not attending. And the slavishness to responsibility manifests itself in a connected lack of everyday courtesy.

People here are so attuned to what they should do, that they almost invariably miss what they could do to make life a tiny bit more bearable. Don’t, for example, ever expect to be thanked for stopping your car at the side of a narrow road for an oncoming car to pass.  “It was your responsibility,” the driver might say, “why the hell should I say thank you?”

For sure, it would be nice to have a country where communities believed in themselves, and concepts like the Big Society were instinctively understood.  But, it’s equally nice to live in a place where you can walk behind someone into a shopping centre and not expect to have the door swing back in your face.

So yes, while it’s true that “dugnad” does not exist in English, it is equally true that there is no one-word Norwegian translation of the word, “please”.

And, as far as I can see, there is no grand political idea to try to introduce one either.

A driving persona non grata

I got a fine for 6,500 Kroner. That's £650. For driving at 73kph in a 50kph zone. £650! That's a bigger fine than I would have got for strangling a corgi in Britain.

So ignore that nonsense I wrote last time about social cohesion. Fuck the carrot - who on earth wants a carrot anyway - just watch out for the almighty stick ready to bludgeon your head into the tarmac. And don't even worry about the goo because the slow moving cars will be able to easily drive around.

But also forget everything you think you know about Norwegian efficiency. It's nonsense too. Just because the immigration/police/tax office isn't a grimy shithole doesn't mean information or justice is dispensed with any of the efficiency or equality you might expect from this socialist Nirvana.

Worse, it's dispensed just as lobsidedly as it would be anywhere else in the world - only the absence of shitholiness makes you think it will be fine. Then you're there in that luridly-lit pen for non-Norwegian scum-basins, for the third time in three weeks, waiting those same three hours to be told by the same cross-eyed petty bureaucrat that everything you thought you knew from your conversations last time was nonsense.

"Get in that other queue foreign scum-basin. You won't get what you want in this bread line - not with those papers. This is the line for cooking oil."

"But I need cooking oil as well."

"You'll not get your cooking oil until you can prove you have some bread. Now stand in that queue for bread, and make sure you have enough cooking oil to prove that you can fry it."

So my ID number is still pending. I am officially unofficial, and even less employable than I would be if I had my Number 6.

There are, however, upsides to this country-hopping unbelongingness amongst polities with inefficient bureaucracies. "I'd like to pay my fine," I told the police officer.

"What is your ID number?"

"I don't have one. I'm English."

"Okay. Well we can't pursue this fine then."

"Bye."

Next time: what happens when you rob a bank without an ID number.

Driving

Not here you don't

People drive at 20 kph. That’s kph, not mph. And they just do it. They don’t whine like sows or skull-fuck statistics so they show speed cameras are deliberately murdering children. They just do it.

I’ve got a healthy dose of cynicism for the kind of group-think that leads to the observance of petty laws. That way lives all kinds of woebegone sadness.

But driving fast because you think you’re a rallyer, even though you’re a fat pig In an expensive car with reaction times like a stoner, that’s worse. In built-up areas kids play on the streets in Stavanger. You play on the streets in London, you’re going to get run down or worse.

So, yeah, I miss London. But it’s a selfish city. The community glue which binds Norwegian hearts doesn’t exist in Britain’s capital. Cameron’s Big Society bullshit, isn’t bullshit here.

It’s the other side of the penny to group think. Everyone here thinks driving fast in ostentatious cars is for fat fucking pigs. There isn’t too much wrong with that.

Rudeness

Riddle me this: What do you join at the back, and no matter how many people join after you, you stay at the back until the end?

Answer: A Norwegian queue.

Now imagine that the queue is at the passport control counter at Gatwick.  You’ve added in a dose of British inefficiency. What you have now is a queue which never moves, and you stay at the back for eternity. Or to put it more poetically: A boot stamping on a human face forever.

I have no wish to lionise Britain’s history of exporting culture and ideas. For football, cricket and rugby we deserve credit. But you have to admit that all those years of turning up in a boat with big guns and stealing mountains of tea and sugar from confused and unarmed locals before forcing them to read bibles, undoes a lot of good work.

Yet there are things we can unashamedly teach the rest of the world. Of course, pictures of our leaders cosying up to Middle Eastern and North African despots are unedifying. But I bet they stood in line behind the rest of the West’s shamefully complicit leaders patiently waiting to grip their blood stained hands.

It is, after all, about fairness and decency and everything that’s good and true and honest.

A British queue is a beautiful thing. It is the fairest and most efficient way of making your way through a list of human beings. It makes me proud. Queue jumping makes me angry. Norwegians are the worst offenders. If embracing queues is the British national expression of fairness and decency, then jumping queues is the Norwegian national expression of selfish fuckyouism.

Go to the cinema and there are dozens of them telling you to go fuck yourself with noisy sweet wrappers the whole way through the movie. They sell big old boxes of crisps (Crisps!) in the foyer, just for such selfish cacophony. “Winner of Best Picture Oscar” is what the marketing men will go for, when The King’s Speech is looking for a cover line for the DVD. “An ending so gripping it made a cinema full of Norwegians stop fucking about with sweet wrappers for two minutes,” would be an infinitely more telling strap line for anyone in the know.

I’m struggling to get to grips with it. If Samuel and Lukas inherit the British inability to get anything done and Norwegian selfishness, they will be two of the rudest most useless boys on the planet.

The deal

Yesterday I cried a bit. Not the tears you shed at the end of The Secret Millionaire; it was tears of real fear and frustration; tears for London and me. What have I done? Can I ever leave? I don’t think Hilde understands. I want her to understand the deal. 18 months then we go – no problems. If I’m unhappy then we leave. And she doesn’t make it hard for me.

She’s already making it hard. She pretends not to understand. But it’s really simple. I want her to be unequivocal. “We go. No problems. I make it easy.” She doesn’t want to say it, because she doesn’t want to think about going back, she tells me. “Because the thought is just awful.” How’s that for making it easy?

It’s a bit shameful to say this but it’s true: I wouldn’t care if we didn’t have the kids. All the power in our relationship has shifted. Had we moved here before the kids I could have just gone back to London, or Berlin, or Copenhagen, or Prague, or anywhere other than Stavanger, and she could have come if she wanted. She would have done too. Now she can trap me here. And I don’t trust that she won’t.

I wish I didn’t even need to make the deal. If I were unhappy I would want Hilde to want to go back. I know she won’t. She’s very selfish. She wants to know that I’m going to try to be happy. I’m supposed to not talk about it. I need to try. I know I do. I will. But without the safety net I can’t imagine being happy at all.

Later I’m going to make her record the deal into my iPhone. I don’t trust her otherwise. “There’s your voice saying it. There it is!” What have I done?