Norway completely ruined my bladder. Normally I can drink a pint or so without needing to visit the lavatory, but up there among the elk and the permafrost it was so damn cold that an above-average dew point was enough to keep me at the urinal for up to six hours at a time.
And I don’t want to lower the tone over your breakfast table, but it wasn’t only my bladder that shrank in the chill. This makes life difficult when you’re wearing long johns, jeans and heavily padded waterproof overstrides.
This is the weird thing about Norway. On the surface it appears to be a monochrome and rather chilly version of Britain. There’s the same northern European efficiency, the same things make us laugh, and the town centres are full of vandals who like to key your car. I was there 10 days and liked it a lot.
But behind the veneer of normality it’s as mad as a box of hovercraft. First of all there’s the bothersome business of reading the signs. There are no reference points. Norwegian doesn’t seem to be a language that’s evolved, or migrated. It isn’t an amalgam of dialects, a European potpourri of sounds and expression. If you ask me I’d say it was derived from the noises made by mooses.
I learnt after a few days that the Norwegian for “parking” is “parkering”, but this doesn’t work with other verbs. The Norwegian for “talking”, for instance, is not “talkering”. And if you say you want to go drinkering, they won’t have a clue what you’re on about.
Though that’s because in the frozen north you need to drive for 500 miles to find a beer and when you get there you’ll be charged about £500. To make your evening out even less pleasant, you aren’t allowed to drink outside and you’re not allowed to smoke inside. I spent most of my time in doorways, freezing to death.
You might think everyone can talk English and of course most do — even A-ha — but there are exceptions. Last Tuesday I asked the proprietor of a remote highland cafe for the rest room and he recoiled in such horror I began to think “rest room” might be Norwegian for “Hey, troll, I’ve got a gun and if you don’t hand over all your money I’m going to shoot your husky”.
Perhaps difficulty with communication is why the hotel room in which I stayed had a fold-out whiteboard nailed above the bed: so guests can use diagrams and cave drawings to explain to their girlfriends what they have in mind next.
I can’t imagine the whiteboard is for any sort of management meeting because in the whole of human history Norway’s only contributions have been the paperclip and the cheese slicer. Only Australia has achieved less, with the rotary washing line.
So sex, speaking, drinking and smoking are all laced with complications. And you try walkering. Yes, eco people, 2006 is alarmingly warm up there, but even so you still need your collar up. In Lillehammer it was a nippy –9.
This meant the pavements were encased in a sheet of ice. So to move around you have to develop an unusual gait. Some time back the Bangles sang a song called Walk Like an Egyptian but I think it would be better if they had done Walk Like a Norwegian.
What you do is put your foot down and then wiggle your hips imperceptibly to ensure you have grip before taking your other foot off the ground. I call it the Elvis Pelvis and it works. On Thursday I didn’t fall over once.
This strange way of walkering may explain why there are no fat people in Norway. Not one. Though it doesn’t explain why there are no cars.
No, really. On one night I stood outside having a cigarette in Lillehammer’s equivalent of Piccadilly Circus and not a single vehicle of any kind drove by. Even more spookily, there wasn’t a single parkered car to be seen either. It was as though Jonathon Porritt himself had flown over the town in a giant vacuum cleaner.
Or it could be because driving in Norway requires some special skills. If we had even a tenth as much snow, Britain would be lockered in “ice chaos”. Police would advise motorists to stay at home and not make a journey unless you were delivering a kidney to the Queen herself.
Even the main roads in Norway are snow covered. The back roads are made up of what appears to be a rip-snorting wheel-twirling combination of ice, banana skins and Fairy Liquid.
You might imagine, then, that everyone in Norway would have off-roaders. They don’t. In 10 days I didn’t see one, and that’s because up there a Land Rover Discovery costs more than £100,000. So you buy a normal two-wheel-drive car . . . and cope.
And to make sure this happens you’re limited to 4mph and the roads are littered with forward-facing speed cameras that go off in a burst of blinding red light so intense it can strip all the paint off the front of your car. They don’t take your licence for speeding over there. They take your sight.
I triggered one in the middle of a blizzard and it was like I’d driven through an acid trip. I was so disoriented I had to pull over and get a colleague to drive, and that was a shame because we were in the new Mercedes M-class. And I was rather enjoying it.
The old model was terrible. Designed just before BMW upped the ante with the new Range Rover and the X5, and built in Alabama by people more used to picking cotton than making complicated machinery, it emerged into the world badly built, lumpen, impractical and already old fashioned. Small wonder that in Top Gear’s 2004 motoring satisfaction survey it came home in last place. The worst car money can buy.
Obviously Mercedes wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, so plainly the people making the new one have been told to stop singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot and get on with some work, and the designers were told it was 2005, not 1956.
As a result the new car looks great, feels well made and when you climb aboard works like any other Mercedes, not a Massey Ferguson with electric windows.
There are, however, one of two things I should make clear before you run round to the local dealer brandishing a chequebook. First of all it’s no longer available as a seven-seater — boo — and then there’s the cost. You will be asked to pay a minimum of £36,700 for the car and then, despite appearances, you will be charged an extra £1,320 for something called the “off-road pro package”.
That really is like being charged £50 a head for dinner and then being asked to pay more for a knife and fork. And to make the prospect even more galling, the package includes various differentials, which is a good thing, and air suspension, which is not. You can’t have the diffs without the air. Zis is not permitted.
If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t bother with any of it and I wouldn’t bother with the £270 off-road exterior styling package either because all you get for this is some underfloor protection, which you can’t see, and a chrome radiator grille. Which will make you look like a drug dealer.
The worst thing about this car, though, is the gearlever. It’s mounted on the steering column, a system popularised in America when teenage boys and girls needed to cuddle up at the drive-in. But ignored in Europe because we tend to get out of the car to watch films. And have sex.
It’s annoying. Mercedes fits smaller cupholders to cars sold in Europe so why can’t we have a European stick shifter as well? It’s not that the column stalk doesn’t work. But it is an example of creeping American imperialism, one step further down the road for the San Francisco taxi driver who told me last year that “pretty soon the whole world will play American football and soccer will die”.
The verdict, then, on the M-class is pretty much the same as my verdict on Norway. Efficient and good fun, but odd and too expensive.
