Swine into pearls. Is it possible to spend an hour or so walking the busiest and blandest streets in any city, then go back to your hotel to write hundreds of pages of impressions, and pass it off as an image of the entire city? Magicking the most mundane street into a candidate for a World Heritage route. That's just the notion that a friend and I amused ourselves with wandering around Oslo. No, can't be done, it'd be something beyond waffle... and you know by the fact I've just written that, that yes, it actually has been. At least in a sense.

I found out today in yet another idle moment that DH Lawrence often rode into town, got the gist of the place, then holed up in a hotel to thrash out pages and pages; mostly as a method of exorcising his own demons.

And I thought this was a novel idea we'd had in Oslo. There are no new ideas. Confirmed.