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      Balalaikas in Syria

      Training 1

      My Russian friend Alexander made a trip to Syria some years ago. He was working in a city in the heart of Siberia as an interpreter for a dancing group, composed of boys and girls. They were a very professional dancing group, as they’d all started dancing at about the age of six and had been training intensively since then. Every time he looked at them, he couldn’t help admiring them, as they danced better than many adult dancing groups that he’d seen.

      Training 2

      They travelled to Damascus in the middle of summer. When they arrived at the airport, however, it was announced that it was just eighteen degrees, so they couldn’t believe their ears. The next day, however, the heat wave came, and it was blistering hot. The temperature reached forty-seven degrees, and so during the day it was absolutely unbearable to be in the open.

      Training 3

      During the daytime in the summer Damascus is just like a dead city, with nearly empty streets with only very few people and no other signs of life. But when the sun goes down life there really begins. All of the people come out into the streets, the restaurants open, they go to parties, visit each other, buy and sell things, go to the cinemas – everything starts at nine in the evening and carries on until about two or three in the morning.

      Training 4

      Their dancing tour was a great success. They were in several cities, and in each place that they danced the audiences went wild. They applauded and called for encores again and again. They were accompanied by a small group of musicians playing Russian instruments, balalaikas, and this was very unusual for the local people, as their music was absolutely different, so they were altogether amused, amazed and thoroughly entertained.

      Training 5

      They stayed in a beautiful five-star hotel, with luxurious facilities, swimming pools, huge four-course meals, top-class service and things like this, it was an absolutely fantastic experience. This was so unusual for my friend, especially as Russia had been so restricted because of the Iron Curtain and he’d never had the opportunity to travel abroad before.

      Lost and Found

      I’ll tell you about the time I spent living in Norway. I had a girlfriend when I was there named Helga, and we used to go away sometimes to her family house, which was two thousand metres up in the mountains, and a very good base for skiing. We used to go up the mountains with a rucksack and skis on our backs, spend the day skiing, and then come back down and sit by the fire, and then Helga’s Dad would beat me at chess: he’d just trap my king and I’d lose…

      I was in Norway because I was working as an archaeologist, specializing in mediaeval archaeology, in the town of Trondheim, which is nowadays not that large, but was the capital of Norway in the Middle Ages, when Norway had a large empire, which included the Shetland and Orkney Isles, Ireland for a while, Iceland and Greenland. So, it was a very rich town, and we dug it up, and there was a lot left from those times. We were not sure why there was a lot left, but a lot of old pots, and old leather and wooden articles survived. We found loads, especially things like forks and spoons, everyday objects.

      We found a lot of rune-sticks, which was very exciting. What we were digging up was generally bits of wood, chips and chunks, and some of these lumps of wood had runes on them. Runes are a kind of writing which was used in Viking and mediaeval Norway. They are often thought to have been magical symbols, and in fact they may have also functioned in this way, but primarily they were used for simple writing, as they didn’t have paper but had tons of wood. The symbols are made up of straight lines, because if you have a knife and a piece of wood, this is the easiest way to make letters. Obviously, you couldn’t write books, or long texts, but it was a good system of conveying messages.

      The content was often quite mundane, things like “Thorsson made me” or the alphabet, which is called the “Futhark” as the first letters were F-U-T-H-A-R-K. There was one strange one with something about Jerusalem written on it, which we couldn’t work out. Some of them were just wrong, I mean what was written on them was gibberish, just letters that didn’t really mean anything. These were all found in the rubbish, you see, and we think that there may have been people learning there, in kind of runic schools, where people had to write the alphabet twenty times and things like that.

      We had buckets of water, and when we found something, a little piece of wood or something like that, we washed it and took a close look to see if there was anything there. Any runes we found were written down, and as it wasn’t in modern Norwegian – the runes were written in mediaeval Norwegian- someone had to get a book out, first of all to find out what letters the runes represented and then to find out what the text meant.

      We found a lot of objects that we couldn’t identify. We found a very nice thing one day. Sonja, a Swedish woman who had been digging in the corner, suddenly said, “Whooah, look at this”, and carried this thing towards me. From a distance it looked just like a little piece of wood, but when it was about a yard away, I could see that it was a little king from a chess set. It was really, really exciting. To find the king was nice, not a pawn or a bishop, for example. We were really lucky that it came out in a lump, and we didn’t scrape his head off, as we were cutting sections

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