Bristol -- London -- Paris -- Bergen -- Oslo -- Paris - Middlesbrough

I got my deposit back from my previous house, The Negative House -- no kitchen, no living room, no heating. Chatting to Helen, my friend in Norway, I rather rashly booked a flight over to see her for a couple of days. She's in a couple of flavours of trouble at the moment, and so I went to hold her hand.

I bought us a 4-bottle box of wine from duty free. Helen is convinced she paid for it, but that would mean my bank statement has been doctored. I had a couple of glasses from it before I went to bed. A few minutes later some friends of hers came round. In Helen's oft-repeated description of them they are "lovely", but I can think of other adjectives for a couple who drank every drop of the wine before leaving.

Next night we went to a bar where I was introduced to the Norwegian cost of drinking. "A glass of red and a pint of bitter? That'll be £21 please sir"; I was later informed by a local that it was an expensive bar even by Norwegian standards. There was an open mic night, a phrase which depresses me in the same way as does "large screen sports" or "rail replacement bus service", and the first act did nothing to disabuse me of that preconception.

Clad in black, failing twice to get her fingers round Fmaj7, (the chord of clunk and thud for the small fingered guitarist) she sang some unintentionally comical dirges of Nordic gloom: "I am a visitor / I stand alone / I am sucked into the fire / I am a visitor / I stand alone." Helen looked at her with understanding and sympathy, but I was wondering if there was a house or techno night going on -- anything where we wouldn't have to look inside ourselves in order to find the cliché within.

It picked up greatly thereafter. I was taken aback by the people who turned to me and said "hej" as an introduction. It's literally just "hej," and then they wait for a response. Once you get used to it, it's a very welcoming feeling, an open-ended question far better than my standard closed opener, of "hello, looby, pleased to meet you," which leads nowhere. I found out about failed marriages, dangerous and well-paid railway jobs, and spoke to someone who was setting up a publishing house who hadn't heard of Knausgård.

We were the last ones in the bar. Me and Helen, and this wide boy who came up to me at the bar and rattled off something in Norwegian. "I'm very sorry," I replied, "I don't speak Norwegian." "Well fuck off then," he said, and I knew we were bound to get on. An hour later, we were being driven at high and possibly drunken speed out to God knows where, to look at his boat. Then we went to his friend's flat where the latter said "you will never have heard guitar played like this before" and played guitar just like I have heard it played a thousand times before; but we will forgive him because he gave us a lift back to Helen's.

This morning, I missed my 6am flight. Helen got in a mood, accusing me of freeloading, forgetting about the box of wine she'd donated to her lovely friends, and flinging a letter I'd written to Wendy's dad onto the floor.

I left her flat, jumped the tram to the airport, and my eldest paid the 277 quid it takes to get to London from Bergen at three hours' notice. "Of course I'll bail you out, you hopeless twat."