Friday Diary: From Norway to the Olympic Pool

Shelagh Fogarty describes the moving scenes in Norway and the media scum at the Olympic swimming pool.

By Shelagh Fogarty

29 Jul 2011, 08:00

Paying tribute in Oslo

* If ever a week illustrated how unpredictable and varied anyone's life can be, this has been that week. Seven days on from the truly terrible bomb and gun attacks in Norway, sorrow and disbelief still fill the streets of Oslo where I've just spent forty eight hours. By the time I arrived on Saturday night, small tributes of candles and flowers had already cropped up on the corners of streets which led to bombed out Government and newspaper buildings. Outside the city's Lutheran Cathedral was a small collection of the same.

* By now, that modest unremarkable square is completely covered with thousands of individual attempts to replace evil with something good, to offer kindness after blistering violence. Everyone I spoke to said they just wanted to do something, anything, to show solidarity with the bereaved. The murder of so many children - because that's what they are - at Utoeya Island has forced a reserved nation to take to the streets and insist that Norway be what THEY want it to be. Anders Breivik's vision for their country is rejected by every flower placed on the ground and every person who left their home on a rainy Monday evening to be in Central Oslo with their neighbour, peacefully.

* I also wonder if we are too quick to call Norway naive to want to retain the equality and openness that exists between the people and their leaders. On Sunday we'd parked very close to the Cathedral as we reported on the service attended by the King and Queen and political leaders. Expecting to be moved on as they brought the royal car back to collect Harald and Sonia, instead we were politely asked if we'd allow the police to use our wing mirror to secure the tape creating their very temporary cordon. It struck us immediately how differently that scenario would have played out in the UK. Rightly or wrongly, we wouldn't have been free to park so close to, say, Westminster Abbey, and the police would surely have searched our car if we had - 24 hours after a major bomb attack close by. Naive or not, it felt different and it felt good.

* I come back to find a corner of London openly mourning the loss of Amy Winehouse, a girl whose death was perhaps all too predictable but no less tragic for that. I looked to Wednesday for welcome relief from what had so far been a saddening week. To the Olympic Aquatics Centre to present my Radio Show in a swimsuit and towelling robe! A promised swimming race with fellow journalists turned into a one on one with my old Breakfast Show mucker, Vassos Alexander (now at Radio 2). He won but I didn't mind. We'd got to swim in the Olympic Pool. It's a beauty!!

Boris turned up and while grabbing a few minutes on air with him, I found myself in a huge media scrum. Not nice. I was the only one going out live and I was the only one in a dressing gown! Again, not nice. I won't share the Jacques Rogge incident here. Best to leave you wanting more.

Until next Friday....

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