My life is something like this. I live in an apartment block in Oslo. Six of the other people living in the building and I are involved in Sound of Mu, our own art gallery / bar / music venue that opens onto the street. It's my job to run the business. I have other work, freelance English language editing for organizations and individuals. I do this at home on my computer. A third 'job' is as a DJ, which I do once a month on the other side of the city, at a crazy freak place called Spasibar, connected to the art academy. Apart from that I have a band, Dacianos, and for that I have a small share in a rehearsal space about ten minutes' walk from where I live.

Sounds like a nice set-up. The only trouble is, I have been trying to finish a novel I devised in 2004, and it's still not finished. I had to escape all of the above to the farm to get some work done. Let me introduce you to the environs.

The farmhouse:

The view from my bedroom window:

The front view from the farmhouse one day, then on another. Edmund Burke wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful that "the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue", but I'll leave it for you to decide which set of clouds is grander:

The view from behind the farmhouse:

This is what it's like to walk outside:

Where to go for a walk? Up the logging road...