Skiing at age 2
Skiing at age 2
This is an outline of the main events in my personal life so far for anyone who's interested. For my educational and professional achivements, see my CV.
I was born in Oslo in 1964, but my family moved to Kolbotn, a small town of the outskirts of Oslo, when I was just a couple of years old. This is a quiet place, with gardens and woods to play in for a child. It has short warm summers and long snowy winters.
At school I was well-behaved and got good marks in all subjects except one, Christianity. I was an atheist from, well, as soon I as I became aware of the issues of religion; and saw the religious classes at school as an opportunity for quiet intellectual rebellion.
I officially ended my membership of the state church of Norway with a visit to the local priest at the age of 11. Why was I even a member at that young age? Well, in Norway babies become registered members of the national church when they are christened, and parents who are members of the church are constitutionally required to christen their children in it. No wonder the church still counts 83% of the Norwegian resident population as its members although this number is falling relatively rapidly with increased consciousness of these issues. (At that time I think it was over 95%.)
Norway actually defines a legal ‘age of religious maturity’ of 15, before which a child is not considered old enough to decide for himself or herself whether to join or leave the church. Thus, children in Norwegian may be held to be members of the church when they are either too immature to understand what this means, or they do understand it and it is against their will. Either way, this is a deeply offensive law.
As a welcome side-effect of leaving the church, I was relieved of the Christianity classes in primary and secondary school. This was unusual at the time, and made me the subject of some envy...
In high school (‘videregående skole’) I specialised and obtained top marks in all four available subjects in the maths/science curriculums: maths, physics, chemistry and biology. I was particularly interested in mathematics, and took the final school exam in this subject two years ahead of time.
After high school I did national service with 1 year in the army (1983-1984). The less said of this the better.
Undergraduate, 1985
Going to university, on the other hand, seemed an exciting opportunity to get to know another part of the world, and I was admitted to Churchill College in Cambridge University in 1984. I was initially in the Engineering Department, but moved to the Computer Laboratory in my 2nd year. I graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science in 1987.
After this I returned to Norway and worked for Norsk Data for three years. I had a good job as a junior programmer in this company, but with hindsight it seems now that I didn't really know what I wanted back then. I missed the thrills of living in a foreign country, and, considering I had only been to university for three years—the standard duration of an undergraduate degree in the UK—I was wondering ‘was that it?’
I was also feeling trapped and frustrated by my inability to come out as gay during these years. Why was it so hard? Well, as far as I remember, I felt that I was caught in an impossible dilemma: It seemed to me that it would be ‘embarrassing’ to tell my friends or family that I was gay at that age, without having done anything to explore gay life (such as going to a gay place or meeting other gay men), but at the same time the thought of seeking out other gay people seemed also too frightening. My impression was that gay people in Norway—as seen in the media—were politically and culturally very radical, completely the opposite of me. The fact that I was quite shy, and didn't feel very confident about going up to look for friendship in complete strangers, didn't make it any easier.
For several reasons, therefore, I went back to the University of Cambridge again in 1990. I started on a 1-year M.Phil. course in the Computer Laboratory, ‘Computer Speech and Language Processing’, and discovered a new interest in the linguistic element of this course (in the field of computational linguistics).
During this year I even, finally, managed to come out! First to a close friend in the M.Phil. class, later taking small careful steps out into the gay student events, but then discovering, of course (like everybody else, it seems), that once I had broken through the closet door all the fear and anxieties were blown away, and instead I had just an incredible feeling of personal liberation.
Having made the mistake once of leaving university and returning to Norway too soon, I wasn't going to do that again, so after finishing the M.Phil. I started on a Ph.D. project (in 1991)—still in the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory and in the field of computational linguistics.
The next five and a half years, until I submitted my thesis in Feb. 1997, were really good. I was working on research in a field—where computer science and linguistics meet—that fascinated me. I had rid myself of the burden and hopelessness of the closet. And, above all, I met Josep in a gay students' Valentine's day event in Feb. 1992.
Josep (or Josep-Anton, to use his full first name) was just a year older and also a Ph.D. student (of literature, in King's College). He was from Barcelona, smart and good looking, and we hit it off immediately. We dated for some time (about a year?), then moved together, and have basically been together ever since.
On the other hand, the work on my thesis turned out to be harder than expected. After having done very well (with relatively little effort, to be honest) throughout school and the earlier university studies, I began to feel that I had reached my academic limit. When I had finished and submitted the thesis I was wondering for a while if I should continue to pursue an academic career—and I worked as a postdoc in the Computer Lab for about a year—but in the end I decided it wasn't really for me, and got a job in Logica in London.
Meanwhile, Josep had got a job as a lecturer in Queen Mary College, the University of London, so we moved to the East End. The job in Logica was OK but nothing special, so three years later I started working in Morgan Stanley (the international investment bank) in Canary Wharf instead. This job was much more interesting, more educational, and much more lucrative, and I stayed there for about 7 years.
This brings me up to the first few months of 2007. Josep and I had decided (finally!, I was thinking) to move to Barcelona, and had found a great flat when we went there for Christmas 2006. Josep stayed in Barcelona after that, while I went back to London for a couple of months to sort out the London flat, my job and other loose ends. I finally went to Barcelona with a one-way ticket on 14 March, 2007.
I started working for Migoa, an Internet start-up company developing the property-oriented vertical search engine later rebranded as Nuroa (see nuroa.es and nuroa.de for the Spanish and German markets, resp.).
I also started studying Catalan more seriously (I had already gone to some classes in London), and for the second time of my life, I was enjoying getting to know a new country. Just to be clear, I am here referring to Catalonia, the old country straddling the Pyrenees, historically the core of the Crown of Aragon, originating in the marca created by Charlemagne, and today divided by the modern states of Spain and France.
At the moment of writing I am coming up to my second anniversary of my move to Barcelona. This city still excites me, my Catalan skills are improving day by day, I am enjoying my job, and, basically, I am still feeling great about being here.
Eirik Hektoen,
Barcelona, 2009-02-08