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things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
    I get great pleasure from watching foreign TV and trying to imagine what on earth is going on. On my first evening in Oslo, I watched a science programme in which two men in a studio stood at a lab table discussing a variety of sleek, rodent-like animals that were crawling over the surface and occasionally up the host’s jacket. ‘And you have sex with all these creatures, do you?’ the host was saying.
    ‘Certainly,’ replied the guest. ‘You have to be careful with the porcupines, of course, and the lemmings can get very neurotic and hurl themselves off cliffs if they feel you don’t love them as you once did, but basically these animals make very affectionate companions, and the sex is simply out of this world.’
    ‘Well, I think that’s wonderful. Next week we’ll be looking at how you can make hallucinogenic drugs with simple household chemicals from your own medicine cabinet, but now it’s time for the screen to go blank for a minute and then for the lights to come up suddenly on the host of the day looking as if he was just about to pick his nose. See you next week.’
    After Hammerfest, Oslo was simply wonderful. It was still cold and dusted with greyish snow, but it seemed positively tropical after Hammerfest, and I abandoned all thought of buying a furry hat. I went to the museums and for a day-long walk out around the Bygdøy peninsula, where the city’s finest houses stand on the wooded hillsides, with fetching views across the icy water of the harbour to the downtown. But mostly I hung around the city centre, wandering back and forth between the railway station and the royal palace, peering in the store windows along Karl Johans Gate, the long and handsome main pedestrian street, cheered by the bright lights, mingling with the happy, healthy, relentlessly youthful Norwegians, very pleased to be alive and out of Hammerfest and in a world of daylight. When I grew cold, I sat in cafés and bars and eavesdropped on conversations that I could not understand or brought out my Thomas Cook European Timetable and studied it with a kind of humble reverence, planning the rest of my trip.
    The Thomas Cook European Timetable is possibly the finest book ever produced. It is impossible to leaf through its 500 pages of densely printed timetables without wanting to dump a double armload of clothes into an old Gladstone and just take off. Every page whispers romance: ‘Montreux – Zweisimmen – Spiez – Interlaken’, ‘Beograd – Trieste – Venezia – Verona – Milano’, ‘Göteborg – Laxå – (Hallsberg) – Stockholm’, ‘Ventimiglia – Marseille – Lyon – Paris’. Who could recite these names without experiencing a tug of excitement, without seeing in his mind’s eye a steamy platform full of expectant travellers and piles of luggage standing beside a sleek, quarter-mile-long train with a list of exotic locations slotted into every carriage? Who could read the names ‘Moskva – Warszawa – Berlin – Basel – Genève’ and not feel a melancholy envy for all those lucky people who get to make a grand journey across a storied continent? Who could glance at such an itinerary and not want to climb aboard? Well, Sunny von Bülow for a start. But as for me, I could spend hours just poring over the tables, each one a magical thicket of times, numbers, distances, mysterious little pictograms showing crossed knives and forks, wine glasses, daggers, miners’ pickaxes (whatever could they be for?), ferry boats and buses, and bewilderingly abstruse footnotes:

873–4
To/from Storlien – see Table 473.
977
Lapplandspillen – see Table 472. Stops to set down only. On (7) cars run in train 421.
k
Reservation advisable.
t
Passengers may not join or alight at these stations.
x
Via Västerås on (4), (5), (6), (7).

    What does it all mean? I have no idea.