Oslo 2025

With the loss of my job came a lot of time to think about next steps and so forth, and not long after I had the idea to go traveling. My initial thought was a little out there: months and months away, in which I'd be soliciting freelance work and stuff. In consultation with my family and my bank account, I cut that down to two months, in which I'd spend some time in my usual spots of London and Turin. But I also wanted to take advantage of the free time that I had to do something that I don't get to do that often. 

When looking at Europe, the problem is whittling down the enormous array of stuff to see. I knew I wanted to go somewhere I hadn't been before, but the glamor of a long train trip down through France was also attractive. In the end, I decided that as much as I love the Eurostar and Paris, and that a few days in Lyon would have been nice, I'd rather go to a completely new country. Eliminating anywhere too far out of my way (like Iceland), or too small (like Luxembourg or Malta), left me with the Nordics, and so I decided on Oslo.

I'm really glad I did that.

The Radhuss, from the National Museum

I found a decently priced hotel, which turned out to be right in the center of town. The hotel itself was nothing special: the room was so tiny that in the evenings I had to move my suitcase against the front door, so that I wouldn't trip over it if I got up to pee in the middle of the night. The bathroom sink was so tiny that shaving or washing my face meant getting water everywhere. And worst of all, this being a, normally, particularly cold part of Northern Europe, there was no air conditioning - which is forgivable except that the window barely let in any air from outside, even at night.

Did I mention that this was in the middle of an epochal heatwave? I based my activities in the three full days I had in Oslo around where I could find air conditioning.

Luckily, that wasn't too difficult - major sights like the National Museum and the Munch Museum were air-conditioned (and required me to put my bag in a locker, so I got to dry out even further), and the day I went up to the ski jump at Holmenkollen it was high enough in the hills that there was some breeze, especially in among the trees. Also, walking along the harbor was a delight, because any wind coming off the water did a nice job of cooling me down.

The harbor, from the National Museum

The location of the hotel, despite my objections above, was perfect: the only time I needed public transportation was to get to Holmenkollen, but everything else was within a 20-30 minute walk. I had the royal palace just five minutes away, which I didn't catch because I was busy with other sights, and the National Museum was about ten minutes away. There was also food and drink aplenty, about which I'll speak in a moment.

The National Museum was a particular highlight for me. The first floor had a lot of Nordic design and some plaster copies of classical statuary, but the best was on the second floor, where it offered a survey of painting from the 1500s through to now, with a special focus on Norwegian painters. Among those there were a lot of good landscape paintings by Johan Christian Dahl, as well as a room devoted to Edvard Munch. In fact, the National Museum is a better place to see Munch's most famous painting, the Scream, than the Munch Museum itself (both have copies, but the one in the National isn't mobbed and is visible at all times).

The Munch Museum was also pretty great, even if I wasn't initially sure I wanted to spend a morning just with Munch's paintings. The building itself is beautiful, a 13-story tower overlooking the harbor and with views of the whole city. I could even see the Holmenkollen ski jump from the Munch's upper floors. The assortment of Munch's works was also great, though I feel like I might have appreciated a more biographical approach, seeing how his work evolved as he battled depression and drink over the course of his life.

The Munch Museum seen from the Opera House

The very first day, I went up to Holmenkollen, which was a trek because the T-Bane up there was out of service, so I got to enjoy a sweaty, crowded replacement bus service for half an hour; as an aside, I find it notable that rail replacement buses, the bane of my existence when I lived in Britain, are just as grim in Norway. As you can imagine, I took an Uber back into town at the end of the day.

The ski jump at Holmenkollen

Holmenkollen itself was nice, though - I got to walk around the hill where it's located, exploring some of the wooded trails surrounding it, and got to explore a classic Norwegian stave church. Under the ski jump was a little museum dedicated to skiing, which was nice for me to see as a northern Italian who learned cross country skiing at the same time I learned to walk.

The stave church at Holmenkollen

The food was uniformly good, whether I went to restaurants or ate a quick sandwich or focaccia at the museums. I've previously had bad experiences with food in Denmark and Sweden (or at least so unmemorable as to be etched in memory), so it's probably not too surprising that I ended up eating a lot of Asian food while I was in Oslo. But it's a good sign when a city has decent foreign food - it shows that there's a lot of openness to new stuff, which is good to see. And the city itself was pretty diverse: a glance at Oslo's demographics on Wikipedia suggests that immigrants or children of immigrants account for about 30% of the population, compared to 14% nationally.

In terms of other tourists, I was surprised to hear German as the most spoken language at all the tourist sights. There were Italians, Spanish, French and Brits, as well as a healthy smattering of Swedes and probably Danes, but it felt like wherever I went was a German, or at least a German-speaker (there were some Swiss around). The people of Oslo were themselves fairly unobjectionable, apart from their tendency to run red lights on those little electric scooters that were the plague of other big cities a few years ago. There was also the extremely drunk guy who wandered into the place I was having dinner on the second night, whereupon he announced he wanted to have sex with the waitress (I think that's what he said anyway; he was speaking English but slurring heavily).

Overall, I can't recommend the city highly enough. It might be different in other seasons, or even when the summers aren't as blazing hot as July 2025 was, but everybody seemed to be having a great time, whether tourist or local. There were people swimming at the beaches by the Opera House and the Astrup Fearnley Museum (and er, this is a good time to note how good-looking a lot of Norwegians seem to be), and the vibe felt to me like Sydney. If I was going to splurge irresponsibly on travel during this period of funemployment, then I'm glad I did it in Oslo. I can't wait to check it out again.

This good boi travelled with Amundsen, 13/10

James Gunn's Punk as F Superman

I just saw the new Superman movie yesterday, marking the first time in... gosh, years... that I've watched a movie on opening day. Of course, it's easy to do that when you're funemployed and able to hit the 3.30pm show at your local cineplex. I'm gonna write without fear of spoilers below the jump, but just in case you're skimming, my overall verdict is that this is a way better movie than we had any right to expect, and better than any other attempt this century. I'd say the original, 1978 movie with Christopher Reeves is still better, but this absolutely holds its own.

RIP Diogo Jota

Just a quick one, as I didn't know much about Diogo Jota as a person or as a player, but like everyone I was blindsided by the news this week that he'd died in a car crash in Spain. Coming so soon after Liverpool's Premier League victory, and after Jota's wedding to his long-term partner, it all feels like a bad dream.

Given that I'm not a Liverpool fan, and my knowledge of the team is based mostly on its storied history and my own travails choosing Liverpool players for Fantasy Premier League, I don't have much of a sense of him. He was certainly important, though, scoring a number of important goals over his years there. He may not have been one of the most high-profile names in a team that featured Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane, but he was surely more than a squad player. His Wikipedia page says that he scored 47 goals in 123 appearance for the club, which is an impressive feat.

In his time at Liverpool the club won the Premier League (2024-25), the FA Cup (2021-22) and the League Cup twice (2021-22, 2023-24), while also coming in as runners-up in the League Cup in 2024-25 and the Champions League in 2021-22. At international level, he was part of the Portugal teams that won the Nations League in 2018-19 and 2024-25.

These stats are obviously just numbers and dates, and sadly, his part in the history of Liverpool, Wolverhampton Wanderers and the Portugal men's team is over, carrying with it the question of where his career might have gone. If he hadn't died, one can question if he'd ever have won another trophy (football is after all a cruel old game), but at least he'd be here to savor the ones he did win, as well as getting to see his kids grow up. His death, and the hole it leaves behind in the lives of his loved ones, is a reminder that, in Arrigo Sacchi's words, football is the most important of the least important things in life.

RIP Jim Shooter

I heard about Jim Shooter's death last week, and I've seen obituaries almost every day since from comics professionals who got their start under him in the late 1970s and early 80s. Every obituary talks about what a divisive figure he was, but every obituary also talks about his kindness to them personally. There might be some survivorship bias here, in that the people who really had problems with him are probably keeping their thoughts to themselves, but it's still interesting that so many comics creators have banded together to praise him.

I always knew of him as the guy who got his start, aged 13, writing for the Legion of Superheroes for DC. When I was 13 myself, that was kind of mind-blowing, the thought that someone like me could do something like that. And while I never got to that level, that story is probably buried somewhere in my writing DNA, as one of my influences. Certainly it helped that he was associated with one of my favorite books.

He was also editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the 80s, which is where his reputation as a difficult person comes from. On the one hand, Marvel created some of its best comics under his leadership, like the Chris Claremont years of Uncanny X-Men and various sagas in the Spider-Man books. Daredevil got dark and gritty under Frank Miller and the Punisher became one of Marvel's most popular characters (for better or for worse), and big crossovers became a thing, starting with Shooter's own miniseries Secret Wars.

On the other, a lot of that period has been criticized as unadventurous both in terms of plotting and art. I've heard rumors that Shooter insisted on strict 2x3 grids with figures confined to each panel, and while Todd McFarlane has disputed it, it's true that panel layouts grew more adventurous after Tom DeFalco replaced him as editor-in-chief. 

Plotwise, Shooter has been blamed for the lack of LGBTQ representation in Marvel until the 90s - to hear Claremont tell it, Shooter was instrumental in vetoing any same-sex relationships between Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers or Illyana Rasputina, as well as Claremont's (frankly bonkers, but in the best way) idea for Nightcrawler's parentage: that the shapeshifter Mystique, who'd been implied to be his mother, was actually his father, and that Mystique's long-term lover Destiny had been Nightcrawler's birth mother. This plot point has since become canon in the comics, but you have to wonder where the characters could have gone if the creators had been allowed to tell these stories back then.

On the positive side again, a number of tributes to Shooter have also highlighted how he worked to get royalties and fairer contracts for freelancers at Marvel, and how those contracts were then abandoned after he left. Given how many creators were left out in the cold while the characters they created made millions for Marvel, it certainly adds some nuance to the controversy over Shooter.

In the end, being editor-in-chief of Marvel at that time must have been a pretty thankless job: riding herd on a bunch of fractious creatives who wanted to tell more advanced stories than what superhero comics usually featured, while also fighting his bosses in corporate over spending. There may have been some poor decisions on his part, or they may have seemed heavy-handed to creators who didn't get their way. That said, given how Marvel nearly went out of business in the 90s amid the speculator boom and an attempt to buy the main distributor, Diamond, maybe Shooter wasn't that bad?

Whatever the truth of the matter, it's notable that the stories I've read about him this week have highlighted those same points: Shooter gave a lot of people their breaks in the business, and he made sure various people got the credit they deserved for ideas that made it to print. He wasn't perfect, as so many of these tributes point out, but then, who is?