As my wife is Norwegian I am instantly qualified to socio-analyse the Norwegian people, particularly their inability to queue, and their national obsession with Grandiosa brand pizza.

I spend most of my time when I’m there moaning about such things, I’m telling you: the radio stations’ play-lists haven’t been updated for 20 years - seriously 20 years. It’s the same every time I go. I like Alphaville’s Forever Young as much as the next person, but it doesn’t belong on a modern radio station - Move on Norway!

In a recent advertising campaign offering Norwegians the chance to vote for a new kind of pizza (beef and onion or ham and pepper) more people voted for the eventual winner (beef and onion) than voted for the party that won the Norwegian national elections. Enough said.

However every time I go there I also have a look around the bookstores. The first thing you notice is that they don’t do offers in Norwegian bookstore’s. There’s no 3 for 2, there’s no discounting, no money off, no Buy One Get One Free or Half price.  Everything is full whack, asking price, RRP.

This leads you notice the second thing about Norwegian bookstores which is the price of the books. To pick an unrelated example at random I picked up Gone by Michael Grant in hardback.

Guess how much it was? Go on guess?

Nope.

Nope.

You are way off.

Gone was on sale for 339 Norwegian Kroner.

That’s £32!! or $48!!

£32!! or $48!!

It’s supposed to be a kids book! What kid can afford that on a weeks allowance?! Well - Norwegian kids apparently because there was only 1 left on the shelf.

So as a publisher I’m jealous of Norwegian bookstore’s enormously high profit margins, but not their attitude towards politics and pizzas.

Actually the biggest tragedy is that reading isn’t big in Norway, despite the fact that it’s dark and cold most of the time. They’d rather watch blu-ray DVDs on big screen TVs instead. Oh - and occasionally they go skiing.