It's funny the things you find

 when you're looking for something else.

Which is what I was doing the other day when I found this

Waaaaaay back in 2012 the OH and I took a Baltic cruise. Barring the norovirus, and the Viking Ship Museum being closed the two days we were in Oslo due to filming being done there by the appalling* Neil Oliver it was a great experience. 

We took the opportunity of being in Norway to meet up with my long standing Norwegian penfriend Elisabet and she took us to a lovely coastal village where there was a famous cafe and several Christmas shops. It was in one of those that I bought Sven, a julenisse, or Christmas sprite. In fact Nisse are for life not just for Christmas and are therefore always about, but you have to be particularly nice to them at Christmas time. They're sort of the equivalent of a UK brownie, the ones that used to live on farms and would sometimes help out with household or farming chores if you were kind to them. 

Anyway it's a tradition to have a few about as decorations at Christmas time and there were some lovely ones in the shop,so after some thought, and trying out my pidgin Norwegian on the woman at the till I bought this one and looked forward to getting him out and placing him with some of our other Scandinavian decorations at Christmas. Except when the time came I couldn't find him. Subsequent searches in likely places over the years failed to turn him up and in the end I decided I had probably just looked at them and decided they were too expensive to buy. 

Not so in fact, as I discovered on Monday when I was looking for something else and he turned up in a carrier bag in a totally unexpected place. As I don't want to lose him again he now has a shelf space  to sit on in my office and we'll move him at Christmas to supervise  the Swedish Tomte and keep him out the rest of the year. Because I'm not 100% convinced that he wasn't hiding. 

* Incredibly to me, other opinions of Oliver  are, apparently available.