Sausage mix with sugar

Have I already harped on about how appalling Norwegian supermarkets are? Well, they are. They're about the size of a newsagent, in dire need of refurbishment and ready meals have not yet been invented. They just don't exist. Imagine! The worst aspect of all is the fresh produce. Firstly, if something is off season, you just can't get it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in Sainsbury's if one needs something off season it's still there but general not as good quality or rather over-priced. Oh, not so here! I won't see rhubarb again for nine months! Not that I have pressing need for rhubarb, but still. This is not the worst of it. The fruit and vegetables that are here, well. I've seen mouldering oranges, green potatoes and black onions and strawberries, on display, in a supermarket (one of the ones which claims to be upmarket) writhing in aphids. Even the fruit and vegetables we get delivered at work are mouldering half of the time. The most irritating aspect is that everyone just seems to accept that this is alright and puts it down the fact that Norway is a long way from anywhere else. Rubbish! Cleethorpes is a long way from the Cayman Islands, they've still got decent bananas! Well, I've never been to Cleethorpes, but I imagine they have decent bananas. Actually, I used to have a boss from Cleethorpes and she did say it was rather backward. Her old friends didn't appreciate her fancy London ways when she went home. She pointed out that she'd been locked in a fascinating conversation with one of them about continental breakfasts and she realised halfway through it that her friend didn't know what a croissant was.

Well, to further compound the frustration of shopping, not only do the supermarkets not really contain anything you might want to eat, but once you get to the checkout there are so many pointless and unfathomable vending machines that half of the time one ends up leaving without paying anyway. In Spar for example, if one wants to buy cigarettes (which I don't, incidentally) one picks up a card with a picture of the cigarettes one wants before one gets to the checkout. One hands the card to the cashier, pays, and gets another card. Then, one queues up at a large blue machine and sticks one's new card in it and is presented, hopefully, with one's purchase. Why? Why? Why?

Not only this, but in Spar they have some sort of automated system, if, heaven forfend, you want to pay with cash. One is told the amount one has to pay by the unhelpful cashier, and the coin element of one's payment is slotted into a small blue box in front of one, which makes a number of buzzing and whirring noises and then showers one's change out all over the floor in front of one. If one has any notes one hands them to the cashier. She slots them into the top of something behind her which looks not unlike a pinball machine which proceeds to make a number of buzzing and whirring noises and then fires different notes by way of change back out at her. Why? Why? Why? Isn't cash the basic element of how we trade in western society? How is any of that easier than a till drawer? How?

Well, alongside these various inconveniences there are a number of vending machines in and around checkouts in larger supermarkets which after six months I still have no clue as to what their purpose is. They're generally about the size of a skip and have pictures of smiling, healthy blond children or smiling, healthy, young blond Scandinavian couples standing by mountains on the front and a very large opening at the front, but no indication of their purpose. The only one I thought I understood was the drinks vending machine in RIMI (a sort of ASDA equivalent, although about one twentieth of the size of an ASDA). Well now, I can generally understand Norwegian menus, and as I was waiting four people in front of me to be served at the checkout (all of them purchasing frozen pizza and that three-flavour neapolitan ice cream that everyone in the UK stopped eating in 1986 but which is still all the rage here, I'm afraid there's no hope of Ben and Jerry's) I perused the choices which could be vended from said machine. There was, unlike in RIMI in general, an astonishing array of choice. There were all the usual suspects - tea, coffee, hot chocolate with various degrees of powedered milk and artificial sweetener. But about two thirds of the way down my eye stumbled across an offering neither I, nor anyone I have asked since, has been able to explain. Wiener mélange. Wiener mélange. What, in the name of all that is good and holy is wiener mélange? My initial thought, not unreasonably, I'm sure you'll agree, was that it was some sort of sausage mix. In a cup? Perhaps a slightly lighter equivalent of a cup of hot Bovril? But, to the right of wiener mélange was the choice of wiener mélange med sukker. Those language experts among you will have deduced that means with sugar rather putting paid to my Bovril theory. The only solution, of course, is going to be to get one. I'll report back.