Endless tourist tours are our modern purgatory - Joe Bennett

We tourists love, a virtuous sense of cultural improvement. Photo / 123rf

St Olav Gate in Oslo, and a sleek red bus draws up beside me. The destination board says “Helsfyr”. The doors swoosh open. The driver looks at me.

“Does ‘Helsfyr’ mean what I think it means?” I ask. Bus drivers, like everyone else in Norway, speak splendid English.

The driver nods and waits for me to come aboard. Several passengers at the front are eyeing me with flat expressions. I shake my head. “Maybe not today.”

The driver shrugs. The doors close. And the bus takes off without me down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.

Apparently, elsewhere in Norway, there’s a town called simply “Hell”. The authorities lure tourists there by promising to stamp their passport “Been to Hell”. But there are other ways to get there.

On the rural fringe of Oslo stands the Norsk Folkemuseum.

It’s a chunk of farmland on which they’ve parked a variety of wooden farm buildings brought from all over Norway. The most recent were built 200 years ago, the oldest 800. And very pretty they are too, time-hallowed, dark, low-ceilinged, bone simple, many raised on stilts to surmount the winter snows.

But the most noticeable thing about them is how the oldest hardly differ from the youngest. The only significant change that happens over 600 years is the advent of glass, and not much of it. Otherwise, continuity.

Every one of these buildings bespeaks a life of simple purpose, that being to grow enough food and to hew enough wood to survive the winter, and then to do it again.

And the purpose of all that was to get a child or two through to adulthood so that they could carry on. Century on century.

It was a pre-industrial way of life without any of the benefits of modernity that we so enjoy – no television news, no online influencers, no tagging, no art installations, no urban alienation, no obesity and of course no tourism. The legacy of the industrial revolution is not just the way of life it altered, but the leisure it has foisted on us, the hours that have to be filled.

So it is that tourists by the hundred disgorge from buses to pay the museum entrance fee (nothing is free in Norway, nothing. I paid $6 for a pee yesterday and was so put out I could barely deliver) and set off dutifully around the acre or so of former houses, cowsheds, granaries, smithies and so on.

Every building comes with a small explanatory board to be perused and instantly forgotten, but it provides the illusion of learning that we tourists love, a virtuous sense of cultural improvement.

The children see right through it from the start and just go scampering about and then get bored and pester for food and drink. But the cellphone-toting adults persevere. It is, after all, something to do, to kill the hours before we can decently go for a drink.

For, as a species, we are just no good at idleness. Lions on the Serengeti, sated from a kill, do nothing with a rich aplomb. They lie, yawn, digest. Lazing is a luxury.

Not so for us.

We must be up and about. We must tour and gawp. And oh what hells we have contrived to visit upon ourselves by doing so, from airport security queues to – cross your fingers while you whisper it – guided tours.

I watched a guided tour party this morning on the waterfront of Oslo.

Ye gods. It would have softened the heart of Caligula. Here were grown men and women, who ought by rights to have achieved autonomy, wearing lanyards with their names on them, like evacuee children. They were a group of 15 or so only one of whom was having a good time, the jaunty guide, who bore the pink umbrella of leadership, who saw himself as Gielgud of the Oslo waterfront and who was being paid. While those who were paying him trudged in his wake and longed for it to end. Their eyes were the eyes of a fish on the slab. They’d boarded a bus there was no getting off.