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?