Day 1014: All you need is a dead parrot and you've got yourself a sketch

I've written before about catastrophic fuck-ups made by the local transport services in Sweden and even though I risk turning my blog into an unending rant about how piss poor communication is for passengers in the event of a service problem I feel like I have to share what happened today on a seemingly innocent replacement bus.

Now, it might not be as stupid as last week when my bus driver terminated early and ordered everyone onto the bus in front, which had done the same thing with its own passengers, before two completely empty busses drove off leaving a hundred or so very baffled commuters behind, but it probably could serve as a Monty Python sketch (or at the very least, a Benny Hill circular chase.)

Essentially what happened is that a vital tube line had a "power outage" (could be a code word, who knows) for a large portion of the route. When I went downstairs into the bus station as directed I could feel that there were a lot of very angry people wanting to get somewhere in a hurry. I don't really know where I got this mysterious feeling, but it may have had something to do with the two couples having a massive shouting match in the middle of a bus door about whose buggy got on first and is entitled to space. Or the crowd of people jostling to get on another replacement bus. Or the number of people shouting and swearing and cursing and yelling....bear in mind this was on a pleasant, sunny day in the middle of the afternoon and not in a blustery, miserable rush hour (if it had been, I would probably now be dead, judging by the patience levels of the people present).

I decided not to take the shouting-buggy-crazy-parents bus to the local train station, and opted for what I thought would be the safer choice, a rail replacement bus.

Oh how wrong I was!

First and foremost, I should have noticed that the bus driver had no idea what he was doing when he couldn't figure out how to close the doors. By the time he actually managed that, at least 20 additional overenthusiastic people had crammed themselves onto the bus. Some passengers were so angry about this that they began heckling, shouting and swearing at anyone who even looked like they might consider, maybe, turning their head towards the open doors. It was around about this time that I noticed there were two slightly, shall we say, unhinged people centred in the bus who wanted to complain, loudly, about things and get some feedback. Having worked in a library I have a wealth of experience with these kinds of people who, having nothing else to occupy them at around midday on work days, thrive in spaces with seating, warmth and plenty of people with nothing better to do that sit and listen and/or respond to them. Unfortunately, most other people don't have this wealth of experience and are like cannon fodder.

The part that these unhinged people enjoyed the most about the journey was when the driver took off in completely the wrong direction, heading north instead of south for 5 minutes along a road which only ended when you got to the roundabout to come back again. The driver, sensing that this was perhaps not the best thing to do with a bus full of very angry, very crowded nut-nuts, decided to tell everyone via intercom he had driven in the wrong direction because he was feeling stressed. This triggered a near riot and a scrum of know-it-alls shouting different suggestions for the best way to drive. Because, naturally, when you're stressed and driving a large vehicle, what you need is 30 different suggestions for the best route.

After what might have been the longest 20 minutes of my life covering ground that the usual train covers in 2 and standing in the middle of a crowd of people screaming either directions, complaints or "leave him alone he's stressed" we eventually arrived at the next tube stop. A good number of people chose this point to abandon ship, and I was relieved to see that the craziest were among them. But my relief was short lived since they were replaced by equally as crazy people. One man began punching the doors when the driver didn't follow his advice about what route to take. Although I was rather inclined to join him, since the route he had in fact taken was one that went twice around Raspberry Mountain, yes that really is a real place, rather clearly demonstrating that he had no fucking idea where he was. His response to the door-punching man's cries of "where are you going? why are you going here again!?" was to point one of the members of the scrum and say "he told me to go this way".

Eventually door-puncher was released from his bus-prison (which had many windows that were locked shut for some unfathomable reason) and the crowded bus calmed down a little bit. Just in time for a parade of old people with zimmerframes to come and try to find some space on the bus. Cue a host of aggressive and very warm (no windows, remember) passengers finding any excuse whatsoever to yell "help him! help her! stand up! move!" under a thinly veiled guise of helpfulness. At the next stop, I reached my tolerance limit for all the crazy, old, unhinged, hot, know-it-all or overly-helpful fellow passengers and managed to get a skeleton service train. At this point I had very much decided that the whole situation was almost a textbook definition of ridiculous and deserved a blog post. Unfortunately there was no way to take pictures of the events for the blog, so just imagine a bus full of angry people instead. I'll leave you with an image of Raspberry Mountain.

*Not the same Raspberry Mountain

Day 1012: Give us this day our daily sourdough

England has some really, really shite bread. The number one brand is Kingsmill but it's certainly not eaten by royalty and it's probably not really a mill, either. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Kingsmill factory was just a room full of newspapers, wood shavings and disgruntled workers shoving small quantities of these into moulds before injecting them with air and dipping them into vats of bleach until the resulting product is so white you could squish several loaves together into a human shape, leave it on a beach somewhere in Alicante and have people assume it was an average British person. But hey, you are what you eat. Such is the nature of food culture in England that "healthy bread" means the same old shit that you used to eat but with a spattering of bran, not too much though or, heaven forbid, the kids will find out what real food looks like.

Some people try to convince themselves that they are actually healthy by buying brown bread, because they heard some spiel somewhere about whole grains. But companies in the UK are ahead of the curve on that one, and sell regular old white bread with a handful of other shit thrown in to make it LOOK like it's brown. "It's got 900 kinds of seeds in it! Wow!" Yeah...but is it brown? Is it fuck.

It is actually possible to buy wholemeal bread though, and you know it's the real deal because it's got a giant heart on it, in case you missed the memo about WHOLE WHEAT AND YOUR HEART. DID YOU KNOW IT'S GOOD FOR YOU, YEAH? But even if it didn't have a heart on it, you would know it was the healthy option because, just like brown rice and brown pasta, it offers not even a hint of the enjoyment of the unhealthy option and the eating experience is very much like gnawing desperately on an MDF table at 8am when the breakfast hunger pangs take you.

You might as well just give up and go for a bread that is totally devoid of any content whatsoever and designed entirely around toasting and slathering with butter (and this is England so I really mean it, get that knife in that butter block, or just, fuck it, put the whole butter slab on the toast and then add half a jar of Robinson's jam)

Sweden on the other hand, well, there is no other hand. In this respect England and Sweden really are similar. Sweden can boast as much as it likes about its class equality (most poor choices about food are linked to lack of understanding about good food, or economic inability to buy good food) but all that means is that theirs is a nation of people who really should know better about bread and who still buy the same old shit that their British neighbours do.

They also seem to fall for the same marketing tricks, believing that additional items ground into the loaf somehow magically make it more, well, magical. Like root vegetables. When have you ever been struck by the thought that your bread is missing something and that thing...is ROOT VEG?

Even if sometimes the bread comes in a different shape here, don't be fooled! It's still full of sugar. In England the bread is full of salt, some loaves have more than a gram per slice, but over here it's all about the syrup and the sugar. I confess I do enjoy a good rye or wheat cake, but I should have known what I was getting myself into when I saw the word cake...sugar by the bucketload!

This post was inspired by my search for a new daily bread, since moving to a new city we no longer have access to the delicious bread that was made in small, local factory that did its own deliveries. Now it's all about the big supermarkets and their big selection of SHITE. Everything is either bad, sourdough or a combination of the two with something experimental thrown in. Ah yes, sourdough. That's a big trend here. Everything is sourdough all the time. Especially when you don't particularly want sourdough. Here have some sourdough, it wouldn't be a complete blog post about Swedish bread without some.