3 July 2011
I’ve been in Stavanger since Thursday afternoon. The city seems strangely deserted for the summer season and Tou Scene, where I am staying, closed the day I arrived. I’ve taken the solitude as an opportunity to work on my map of Doggerland, with which I have made significant progress.
I did make it out of my residency this afternoon, in order to visit the city’s petroleum museum. Stavanger is Norway’s oil capital and the operation of extracting North Sea oil is controlled largely from here.
I began thinking about the offshore platforms above the many oil and gas fields. The museum held quite a number of scale models of these. It also had quite an emphasis on helicopter flight. Helicopters journey everyday between the city’s Soma airport and these temporary structures on the sea.
While I am here, I will consider Stavanger the gateway to the North Sea’s oil platforms.
Posted in Perambulations | Tagged oil platforms, Rogaland |
10 June 2011
By Sandra Dogger Klassen
His tombstone stands among the rest;
Not neglected nor alone.
The name and date are chiseled out
On polished, marbled stone.
It reaches out to all who care
It is too late to mourn.
He did not know that you’d exist
He died and You were born.
Yet each of us are cells of Dad
In flesh, in blood, in bone.
Our blood contracts and beats a pulse
Entirely not our own.
Dear Dad, the place you filled
Not very long ago
Spreads out among the ones you left
Who would have loved you so.
Future Ancestor:
I wonder if you lived and loved,
I wonder if you had
Idea someday you would find this spot,
And come to visit our Dad.
Originally posted as anonymous on Genealogy page,some words changed making it personal.. Sandra
Posted in Contribution | Tagged Sandra Dogger Klassen |
30 May 2011
We had the kippers for breakfast, largely because I remember Elizabeth Taylor eating them in Conspirator, which had used shots of Cley windmill. As some of the previous days had seemed a little hurried, we chose to spend much of our time in Cley.
In the marshes and then on the beach, we took quite a number of photos and field recordings. It was a sunny morning but was very windy so this affected the recordings. I certainly felt not nearly as well equipped as the many birdwatchers out on the marshes. Luckily Alessandra had brought her camera and kit, which is a lot better than mine.
While on the beach, I read a large signpost explaining how the coastline here was no longer being defended. Cley had been cut off from the sea since the 18th century and was being defended by a shingle ridge. This has been heightened artificially since the 1940s, but with rising sea levels, this has been deemed no longer sustainable. So it is no longer being done. This means that fairly soon, the grazing marshes will revert to salt marshes and eventually return to the sea.
Leaving Cley, our last stop was Happisburgh. This seemed an appropriate place to end. On the beach, the effect of erosion looked almost violent. The wreck of wooden groynes was quite a dramatic sight. Boulders and rusty metal seemed to have been piled up to hold back the tide temporarily. But it was quite obvious that the defence of the coastline had been well and truly abandoned.
Houses stood right on the cliff edge and you could see as concrete was gradually slipping down on to the beach. The peace with which we could contemplate this was soon interrupted by hordes of schoolchildren arriving on a geography field trip.
On the edge by the car park stood a shack, or at least a sort of holiday chalet, in which people were living – apparently holding on until the ground literally disappeared beneath their feet. They were flying a cross of St George. This could have been for a number of reasons – football, patriotism, nationalism – but it occurred to me that the claiming of this land as England seemed so pointless. Presumably it would not be long before this would cease to be England, or in fact anywhere.
Alessandra drove me to Stansted from where I flew back to Berlin. I believe I still owe her petrol money.
Posted in Perambulations | Tagged erosion, Norfolk |
