Oh, inspiration, come to me… Enough about that; here is today’s entry.

By spending five and a half hours downtown Saturday night yet another item is now stricken from The List:

#95. Volunteer for a good cause.

In most larger cities in Norway you’ll find Natteravnene, or directly translated, The Night Ravens. It’s not a goth posse as you might think from the name, but rather groups consisting of volunteer adults, who have a desire to make their neighborhood safer. Their main objective is to walk the streets among youngsters and to show responsibility and that they care, and by that prevent and reduce violence, crime and vandalism. It’s possible that this is something found in cities elsewhere in the world, too, but I looked it up and didn’t really find anything except for Nattuglorna in Sweden.

Yesterday me and Hans Olav joined the downtown Oslo chapter and went on our first watch. Whether or not we’ll do it again I don’t know. It was plenty of people out partying downtown last night, but from what I saw, they all behaved. The only thing we really did was to drive a guy from out of town back to his hotel and he wasn’t even drunk, just terribly lost and on his way towards the more shady parts of town.

Note to self: If you go to a city you don’t know, at least carry a piece of paper with the name of your hotel on with you.

Since I didn’t really observe any mischief I guess that either the concept of adults walking the streets in the middle of the night works very well or it was just a unusually quiet watch.

If you want to know more about Natteravnene, visit www.natteravn.no (click here for an English version).