It’s through their works and not their bones that you see the people who have gone before. The old Nidaros cathedral in Trondheim has had all the chequered history you’d…

I had tired of carrying my snowshoes strapped to the side of my pack, making me stick in doorways and tearing at passers-by with their zig-zag metal claws. Gone are…

‘The first time I came to England was in 1950. I had very little money, and they were supposed only to let me stay three days, so I would have…

I loved the Polar Museum in Tromso. Mainly because I have a childish fascination with old-school heroes, and also in a small way because it is the sort of museum…

I was talking to a Dixieland jazz player, in his sixties, in a bar in Gamla Stan. I told him how much I was enjoying hearing band jazz played live,…

I think Stockholm is one of my new favourite cities. It has a peculiar layout, scattered across a number of islands, and a subtly European feel to it too. I…

I spent last night on a sleeper train from Narvik to Stockholm. Seemed a pity to be in Scandinavia and not at least have a look in at Sweden. Narvik…

I have not often declared out loud my love for an inanimate object. I have been lost on mountains plenty of times, but never alone, and never north of the…

As they sometimes do, chance events conspired against me in Hammerfest. If I believed in karma, which I don’t, preferring to work on the principles of consequence and blind chance,…