Today it is election day in Norway. We have elections every second year, alternating between parliamentary and municipality/county elections. This  time it is municipalities and counties that are up for grabs.

As I mentioned in August, I have already voted electronically.

I haven’t really changed my mind. The only thing that has vaguely tipped me away from the party I voted for back then was the planned expansion of the toll-road around my part of town, but the only party that is against that is also so douche-baggy that I really don’t want them to have my vote for anything.

As we don’t have a two party system, we do have a lot of parties. I overheard someone say that voting for smaller parties is a vote wasted. But, if we all thought like that, we would end up with a two party system, and I think we would be poorer for it.

There will be an election wake going on television tonight, but, unlike the parliamentary elections, I can’t muster that much interest in the results to watch. I’ll be settling down on the couch with a pair of knitting needles watching my box set of Bones. I’m not much of a political junkie.

I picked A Throne in Brussels by Paul Belien up in London this summer. I have been fascinated with Belgium and the internal struggle there for a while, and finding this seemed a great way to get a bit more thorough into the subject.

The book deals with the history of the Belgian monarchy – and the consequences for the European Union if it should model itself on being as constructed as Belgium.

The first thing to note about this book, and to bring with into the reading of it, is that the author is quite pro-Flemish, is quite seemingly against unified Belgium, and thus also rather against the monarchy.

It starts with Leopold and his first wife, and what happened when she died – and Leopold was put into the monarch’s role in Belgium (with a large subsidy from the British government), and continues through the generations to today’s royal family.

If Belien is to be believed, the monarchs and politicians of Belgium have been a corrupt bunch through the ages. About the only passable one seems to have been Baudoin.

With all its foibles and possible flaws in objectivity, I still found it an interesting read from one of the sides, as it is well-written and compelling.

If anyone has any good books on Belgian history to recommend, I’m up for reading more.

Even though the Norwegian election campaigning has been postponed by the Utøya shootings, I have still managed to vote as the election itself is going normally. Election day is September 12, but they open up for distance voting a fair bit before that.

And this year, they’re also experimenting. 10 municipalities in Norway are offering electronic voting. I happen to live in one of them.

I would have gone to vote on September 12, at my local school – but this is shiny and new… and I just had to try.

Essentially, what they have done is give each Norwegian their own secure (or so they claim) virtual identity with accompanying pin codes. You can apply for study loans, you can check your taxes, you can apply for kindergarten places for your children, and so on, with these virtual identities. And now the citizens in ten municipalities can also vote.

It was remarkably easy. I’m not sure how secure it was, but if I am worried about that, I can still head down to the paper voting on September 12 – testing the electronic system does not negating voting by paper. I can also change my vote as many times as I’d like by September 12.

It is the last cast vote that counts.

Albeit slowly.

It was a shock the first time I turned on the television after the attacks at Utøya and in Oslo 22. July – and noticed that the programme did not cover those attacks. I think it was the Wednesday after.

Life goes on, even for the television channels, who emptied all their programming selections that weekend in order to cover the tragedy.

For those of us who weren’t hit directly, life goes on quicker than those who were there, who lost someone or who know someone who lost someone close to them. Regardless of that, it is still incomprehensible that this would happen in little Norway.

The funerals started just before the weekend, and will likely keep going for a bit. I think the coverage from those make it seem more real than the pictures from a bombed out Oslo.

A national day of mourning has been declared for later in August, and the start of the campaigning for the election has been postponed.

But at some point, the municipal elections this autumn will come – and though the political parties have mentioned that they’re getting more members after this – time will tell if the plea for more democracy will be effective come September, as people are getting back to normal.

We can say what kind of Norway we want to have after the disaster, but allegedly it takes 21 days to form or break a habit, and we’ve not passed that mark yet. Time will tell.

My grandmother has dementia. It runs in the family. Her mother had it. Her mother’s father, allegedly, had it. (I’m choosing to take the positive here that my grandmother didn’t start getting bad at remembering things until she was 86.)

When I moved home after finishing my degree, I moved into a self-contained flat on the second floor of her house with my sister. (The sister recently moved out.) It was a win-win situation. Finding affordable living space in this area is near to impossible. Having someone she could trust in the house (although as her memory has slipped more and more, I’m sometimes the abstractly mean lady who lives on the second floor) was paramount, as the angst is a side effect of the dementia progressing.

Living with someone who has dementia, can be difficult. She’ll ask the same question several times in a conversation, and more times if she’s really concerned about something. We took her shopping around Easter, just when I’d got my new car. For some reason, she was really obsessed with getting baking powder (she loves making cakes), so baking powder was the refrain for the whole grocery trip. Never mind that we discovered several unopened packs of baking powder in her kitchen when we got back.

She’ll repeat several tasks over and over. The vacuum cleaner in particular is always getting a work-out. And she’s constantly cleaning up in her drawers – which will lead to inevitable confusion the next time she’s looking to find something.

Technology (save for the vacuum cleaner) has stopped working for her. The first thing was the microwave she got 20 years ago. A long time, it was mostly a storage unit. Then came the washer and television set (she had to have both of them replaced a while back, thus leading to total confusion now.) and for a long while there was constant complaining that her oven wasn’t working properly, as the cakes would be constantly burnt. (We’ve discovered it is less about the oven, and more about the setting she bakes at.).

I have discovered that how much or how little she remembers depends on chiefly two factors: Is she tired? Has she eaten enough in the day? If she isn’t tired, and have eaten regularly, the odds are higher that she’ll remember more.

We’ve had to label her kitchen cabinets, so she’ll know that she is allowed to eat the food therein. (She’s terrified of stealing other people’s food). And we’ve had to label her bathroom, as she kept coming up and asking if it was okay that she used the bathroom. (I have a separate one, for what it is worth.)

But, in between all the frustration, and the memory loss, there are good things too. When she isn’t feeling depressed for not remembering (and being 89) she has got quite a good mood. Her sense of humour is emerging and showing more than when she was in her 60s and 70s, when things were mostly about being proper.

She’s remembering and telling more and more about her childhood and formative years, including what it was like to live in Norway during the Second World War.

Her memory is very hit and miss, though. She’ll remember the oddest thing – that she can’t understand the Chinese guy who is renting in her basement, that I’ve got a new car, that her second cousin’s grandson ended up being a crook, that she’s going to “day care” some times during the week, that the home care workers who stop by are nice, that my mother once as a child commented on someone’s glasses…

The problem for us is that, with her form of dementia, she’ll often imagine things happening, and expand upon them. A trip to the day care centre becomes a huge outing to the winter resort where my grandfather came from, when in reality it is just across the populated valley below us. It makes it very difficult to trust what she’s telling us, which she fortunately knows most of the time.

She starts her introductions to strangers not with her name but with: “I can’t remember things, so don’t trust me.”

Despite all of the good and bad times, though – the really bad times for people with dementia are times like this.

Times when there is a big disaster going on, either natural or man-made, on the news or in the newspapers.

They can’t remember what has happened from time to time, each time they hear the news it is like they are hearing it for the first time.

Thus, Grandmother has already gone through several mourning phases for the children shot at Utøya and the deceased after the bomb in Oslo.

And when she gets the newspaper on Monday, the cycle will begin all over again.

Cripes.

A press conference states that 7 are dead in Oslo – but that the buildings haven’t been searched extensively, so those numbers may rise.

Currently 84 are dead at the Youth Camp at Utøya, but they’re searching the lake around the island with divers, etc. so those numbers may rise.

In a country with around  five milion people, that’s a whole lot of people.

They’ve caught a 32 year old, right wing, Christian fundamentalist, Norwegian, whose only twitter message from a couple of days ago state «One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests.» He was the shooter, and they have charged him in connection with the bombings as well.

Horror doesn’t always come from outside.

Just to let everyone know, I am fine – and am not in the Oslo area at all. No one in my circle of friends/family appear to be in the area and be injured. (The brother of someone I know, who is rather high up in the Labour Youth Party and who would normally be at the camp at Utøya where people were shot at, was actually in London on summer holidays instead.)

I find the news of the bombing and subsequent shooting in Oslo scary and sad, and while I don’t often agree with the PM and the reigning parties, I do find his words in this case, worthy, poignant, and just right.

“This evening, and tonight, we will take care of each other. Give each other comfort and talk together. Tomorrow, we shall show the world that the Norwegian democracy will become stronger. We will find the guilty. But the most important tonight is to save lives and show care.”

They have caught a guy – a 32 year old, ethnical Norwegian, and speculations are currently going as to whether he’s a crazy army vet, recruit of a fundamentalist organization, etc. And whether or not he is working alone.

Currently, there are 7 dead from the bombing in Oslo, and 10 severely injured. The numbers from the shooting at the Youth Camp was 10 dead, but there has been an acknowledgement that these numbers will rise as they comb through the area more finely.

There was a Twitter/Facebook campaign going on to get people to donate blood. Two hours afterwards, the news had to go out and ask people to stop coming in to donate as the hospitals couldn’t handle all the donations. Things like that give me hope for society, when it seems like things are going very wrong, like today.

Election in Norway tomorrow. Unlike the presidential elections in the US, when I stayed up all night to watch the results on the BBC, I will be sleeping in my bed. The reasons for that are many, but the most obvious one at the moment is that I’m no longer a student, who has the next day off… There is actually work on Tuesday.

The other reasons are that I am currently not owning a television set. I gave my old one away when I moved from Denmark, and I haven’t got to the point where I have bought a new one.

I suppose it will be streamed on the net, if I do decide to watch, so not owning a television set is no hindrance in that regard.

But the race looks to be so close anyway, that it probably won’t be decided night to Tuesday anyway.

I will be voting tomorrow. And it won’t be for the same party that I have voted for until now. Which makes the end result a bit more interesting. But I still won’t be watching the tallying of the votes. Unless Norwegian politics somehow becomes more interesting in the next 24 hours…