FAR18.1: OK!

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that now and again I stop and think: ‘How did I ever end up here?’

I had another one of those moments this week, as I was standing on a hill holding a Danish-English dictionary, with one hand on my chin and a man taking a good twenty photos of me. Surreal.

One of the two big Faroese newspapers, Sosialurin, decided to write an article about me and about what I’m doing in the Faroes. The fact I’m from England, have come to the Faroes, have learned Faroese and am now writing about their language situation is apparently a little unusual. Pretty nervous, I walked down to the Sosialurin office in downtown Tórshavn. The guy who interviewed me was really nice and we were talking for a good hour or so. At the end he told me ‘We’ll need to get a picture of you’. That had come as a slight surprise, as I had assumed what he was going to write was just going to be a side column somewhere in the paper. But fair enough, I guessed a little picture would add a nice touch (I can’t say I was completely surprised. One of my friends had warned me that might be the case, and I’d worn my Faroese jumper specially).

What was a surprise was when I walked into the local supermarket on the day the paper came out, to see myself, my dictionary and my chin on the front page, accompanied by the words ‘pages 28-29’ – two pages?! I opened the paper up and saw that my article had indeed taken up two pages, including a huge photograph of me almost covering one entire side. OK! I have to say I was pretty chuffed with the whole thing – the article was really good, and made everything sound quite interesting, which is cool, because often when doing a PhD there are moments when you stop and think: ‘Why?’

That evening I went to a party, as one of my friends had completed his apprenticeship, and another friend said to me, ‘We heard about you on the radio!’ I smiled and said ‘You mean in the newspaper?’ ‘No, they were advertising the newspaper on the radio and mentioned you and the article’. OK!

The next day I checked online to find that, not only was the article also there, I was currently second in their ‘Most read’ column. Two places above ‘Deaths and Funerals’. OK!