This post is overdue. Apologies to my legions of fans, but I've been hella busy of late. I went to Oslo the weekend before last, though, and this blog will be about that.
Fascinating place. I haven't travelled as much as I'd like over the last few years, as I've had to start paying for myself (well, sometimes). This trip really reminded me how great it is to see new places, though. It's a shame, in a way, because Oslo/Norway is worthy of far more consideration than I could really give it at the time, as I was either drunk or hungover the whole weekend (I was visiting uni pals - it was never going to be a civilised affair).
The little cognitive processing I did manage, though, left me thoroughly impressed. I tell you, the UK doesn't look so hot in comparison. More on that later. The first thing to mention, almost to get it out of the way, is that the women were spectacularly beautiful and very, very generous with their eye contact (this probably goes along way to explaining why the UK looks so rubbish now). More interesting, though, was the society. I genuinely didn't lay eyes on a single "chav" all weekend. This wasn't an accident, either - they really are a single class society (well, as close as I've seen, anyway). Norway sits on a tremendous amount of oil and gas, true, but they sell 99.9% of it on the international market, I'm told. They get almost all their power from hydro-electric dams in the fiordlands. All that oil money, then, allied with high taxes and eye-wateringly high prices (a tenner for a Big Mac! It's not so bad for them, though - they earn correspondingly high salaries), makes for the kind of public spending Polly Toynbee can only dream of.
Added to that, their salary distribution is much more equal than ours. Where, in the UK, the CEO of McDonald's probably earns 20 times what a burger-flipper does, in Norway it's probably only 2-3 times. They still have richer people, then, but not nearly like we do.
It's a fascinating social experiment. A lot of lefties over here would like us to try to recreate the "Nordic Miracle" and it's easy to see why. A gentler, more tolerant, more civilised society would be a wonderful thing. The biggest differences between Norway and the UK, though, it seems to my untutored eye, are that a) we don't have fiords to dam, and b) we have more than 60 million people, where Norway has *hastily checks Wikipedia* just under 5. To replicate the experiment on such a grand scale would be a huge undertaking, which we Brits aren't exactly famous for.
I really don't know if we could do it here. A large part of me wishes we could, though. A single, civilised class - it'd be like Islington writ large - heaven or hell, depending on your tastes.
Riddle me this, though: why do we (so often) blindly accept living where we were born? Maybe the UK ain't some big, screaming deal - why live there? We'll be much more discerning about where we live in the future, I would have thought, and that's a great, great thing.
