No news is bad news....always the way of it in Norway.

When it concerns many different aspects, a silence longer than a pause for 17th mai, brevity or even terse e-mail response is a sign that you are going to get it on the chin.

Norwegians pride themselves on their honesty and straight talking but of course when it comes to uncomfortable incidents or needing to reject someone then they fall to human nature and go into a kind of rebound of deep avoidance behaviour.

Take jobs- if you are not on the A list then expect a long wait for a negative reply- most often that they have actually appointed someone in the casms, neigh eons which have passed since you dropped in a CV and maybe took a chat with the prospective boss. Usually you get these just before or just after a public holiday when people are spring-cleaing their in box and to do trays.

Every cloud-...if they are interested then they ask straight questions and want to see you face to face..be that jobs or racing yachts. ..also you can send in job applications and just forget about them and move on because you will either get a nice surprise or just wait.

This has hit the fan with me this week- and my own fault really for not making some courtesay calls..I presumed I would just keep a place on a hot boat after I showed up on another at a tune up I was specifically asked to go to. The othersiwe nice bloke went all terse on mebut hey it's his loss and they ain't offshore boats anyway

But the cloud has a bigger silver lining as all this BS in cruiser-racers had made me decide to go race OOD dinghies at the helm and actually develop my own skills, judgement and most of all confidence.