Ana Vidovic, Pierre Bensusan and a Norwegian mood

Even her wretched weather
was poetry- Derek Walcott, Exile



Norwegian summers are the best types of summers when they are comprised of a good balance between warm and chilly, wet and dry, and so I have been anticipating with great excitement the coming weeks which I will spend among the mountains back in the fjords. However, so far it has been a rather cold and wet summer, and in the days ahead we are likely to encounter more of the same. It is not what I had hoped for, and I'm already starting to feel tired of it. But at times I forget the duration of this weather and I catch myself becoming immersed in this particular pensive, dreaming mood that emerges late at night in the fjords and which feel out of time. Last night I experienced this mood as I sat with a cup of warm tea in the living room of my grandparents' house and saw the enveloping darkness without. And so I stepped out on the verandah and enjoyed this familiar darkness, while I listened to Ana Vidovic's performance of Pierre Bensusan's guitar piece Altiplanos, a song that for me evokes the highland plateaus of Morocco, which might - to a descendant of Jewish refugees fleeing Spain in 1492 - have appeared as a memento of those Spanish plateaus left behind generations ago. This instrumental, pregnant with a mood of longing and exile, felt to me very suitable for how I felt as I stood at home, having returned to my village after years living abroad in a voluntary - and immensely beneficial and pleasurable - academic exile in Denmark.

Ana Vidovic plays Pierre Bensusan's Altiplanos