I am getting better and better! I want to say thousands thanks "Tusen takk!" to all my friends for  encouraging comments, good wishes, prayers and emails. Some express their heartfelt care in this way: "I am glad that you are at last listening to your wife. All great men of Faith sometimes have to listen to their wives. Even if they have to be pushed to it like Abraham!!"

Others are translating the Norwegian idiom on biting the sour apple into proper English. Paul left four alternatives and Matthew decided which one was the best. Well done!

I find it very interesting that when the English people speak of biting the bullet, the Norwegian choose a more peaceful, organic and softer approach to explain the bitter experience of swallowing one’s pride or giving up resistance to advice. The reason must be that most of us have never ever touched a bullet, far from biting it! But sour apples used to be around everywhere, especially when I was a child. The sour apples grow on wild apple trees and are quite small. But my father also used to grow sour apples in our garden. They were certainly not small but rather huge and hard! If you tried to eat them in the authum they were so sour that you never tried again! But my father harvested them when the frost came and then he stored them under the veranda safe from the winter frost. We forgot all about them, but in March he brought them forth. A miracle had happened. They were no longer hard, nor bitterly sour, but rather freshly sweet, or perhaps sweet and sour. At Easter the sour apples become sweet! When one take one’s medicine and swallow the bitter pill, healing is normally the outcome!

I can’t see that to bite the bullet can have any such effects as biting the sour apple have on people. But perhaps some of my English friends could tell me how many teeth they broke when they tried to bite the bullet!