Day 2998: Never be normal, part one.

2998 days is around 8.2 years, and 8.2 years is approximately 25% of my life on this planet. So having spent a quarter of my life in Sweden I can say with reasonable certainty that the following things will never feel normal.

1. Not closing curtains, or even having curtains to close.

Here's a picture of my neighbors this evening. Bottom floor: 3 different kitchens which you can see all the way into. That neighbor bottom left I feel I know fairly intimately even though I've never met her. Second floor, bedrooms with mood lighting. Third floor, a mix. Fourth floor, not home, go burgle. 

I say this after closing the blinds myself, because my Swedish boyfriend is happy to sit in a brightly lit room after dark with all everything open. 

I've learned how to have all the curtains open in the daytime otherwise there isn't much light in these parts, but full visibility at the end of the day when I'm trying to loaf around in fucking old pyjamas and a headscarf, picking my nose and watching embarassing TV? No.  

2. "You're from England! I love England!"

I'd like to get to know you person to person, not really fetishized nationality to fetishized nationality, ya know? Ya get me? Ya understand? Oh you have relatives in England OK. Oh, you holiday there at least once a year, OK. Oh, you're continuing to talk to me in English even though we're in a workplace and other people are here who aren't necessarily interested in conversing in English, OK, I'll just keep speaking Swedish, OK? 

Oh - it's been a few weeks since I last saw you and you're going to greet me with over the top British greetings every time, aren't you. Right. OK. 

No I don't really have time to "explain Brexit" right now, sorry. 

Can we talk about all the things that are weird in Sweden and that Swedish people do? No? That's a bit uncomfortable for you? OK. FISH AND CHIPS. CUPPA TEA. RULE BRITANNIA. Ah now we're friends again. 

3. Calling the police and not getting an answer

I've had to call the police about four or five times since living here, once it was extremely urgent because I saw someone breaking and entering, and another time it was less urgent because I found a stolen bike and wanted to report it. For the bike, I had to wait an hour, hang up and call again, wait another fifteen minutes and then be told there was nothing they could do. For the break in, I had to wait fifteen minutes, describe what I had seen (past tense, it was over) and then several hours later an officer called me while I was at work to ask where the crime was, to which I replied that the criminal was most certainly long gone. Another time I saw some teenagers on a stolen police motorcycle so I called to report that, and after waiting to be connected I was told that I had not seen what I thought I saw, and it was impossible, goodbye.

Shitty police services which are chronically underfunded and reactionary rather than a help to the community I am completely used to. Not even being able to get through on the phone when there is an emergency is... mind boggling. I sincerely hope I am never involved in an emergency for which I need an emergency service fast. 

4. Dry, dry, dry, dry, DRY

 Seriously though, it's dry.

Some positive benefits of this include less mould in bathrooms here than in the UK, washing never smells damp, fewer pests in homes, that cold-to-your-bones-creeping-damp feeling doesn't happen, and you can watch your tea evaporate in swirls. 

5. Exactly the same objects in different people's houses

Honestly I just took the first thing that came into my head (svenskt tenn candle holder of which everyone either has an exact version or some cheaper version of swirly metal blah) but there are MANY examples of this. 

I'm used to people having similar decor or following trends, but these trends that transcend time and everyone having inherited the same object/getting it for a wedding/being gifted it/buying it for themselves after queueing for hours to get into svenskt tenn (yes, people do this. Even during a pandemic) is just....nuts.

Also the very staunch "I am an individual and my choices should be respected" stance that Swedes strive for is really undermined by the "I own exactly the same items as everyone else" stance - not because I don't think they should be respected, but maybe because there's not a whole lot of individuality going on... 

Also how do I know people have the same things? See #1

6. Energy Drinks

For such a little country with such a small selection of everything else, Sweden has an absolute shit tonne of different energy drinks. That fine venn diagram crossover of sugar, caffeine and sports marketing just really gives such a massive boost to this pile of shit industry in a country that loves consuming, and then consuming ways to burn off the consumption.

7. Baptized?!

For a country which is supposedly three-quarters non-religious, there's a whole lotta baptism going on. 4/10 babies apparently is the latest figure. And among people my age and older, there are a lot more baptized non-religious people.

That's all for now, folks. Tune in again eventually for part 2. 😉

Day 2803 - The Toarp Crown (Toarpskronan)

I've just been on a weird research journey that I thought I'd share. After eating my waffles (today is waffle day) and sending some pics of the waffles and the Easter decorations I put out, someone in England asked me if I could get them "one of those candle holders", namely this one:

This strange black contraption is made of pointy, jagged, metal, and when you see it without any candles or chicks or little figures it looks a little bit like a torture device: 

I picked it out from a house full of things that my boyfriend's grandparents had in a cabin that we had to clear. The reason I liked it was because it came with three sets of little figurines that you can swap out for different seasonal celebrations, and I am definitely a fan of kitchy yet practical, cutesy yet odd, household items. Nobody else wanted it... And indeed once we had it at home, any Swedish visitors would remark "oh you've got one of those. My grandparents had one" which essentially means it's an old, unpopular, forgotten-about, out-of-fashion bit of tat, which just makes me like it even more. 

Anyway back to being asked whether I could buy one. How do you search for such an item? I did various Google searches in Swedish on the theme of "black metal candle holder easter christmas midsummer"  which didn't help. On Tradera (the Swedish version of ebay) one person was selling a modified version of it, but they didn't have a name for it, they called it a candle crown and they didn't have any different sets of figures. It was only once I started to look for replacement sets of figurines that I came accross the name - Toarpskronan - and made the wallet endangering discovery that the company Kinnox still distribute these crowns and little sets of figurines for every conceivable occasion! 

According to Kinnox, the crown candle holder was first made by Per Persson, if a name could get more Swedish, in the town of Toarp in the 1800s. It was designed to be a replica of the crown that many Swedish kings and queens wore ceremonially as a lucky power-giving item (see the whole story here). 

It would literally put Toarp on the map, if people only knew that the bloody thing was called a Toarpskrona! The crown is used as a claim to fame for Toarp parish:

And might be, at least according to me, the most important item in the very small and very easily missed Museum of Borås. They whip out the crown on special (non-covid) occasions, and invite the public to dress it with accessories. 

 

That was my weird journey for today, thanks for coming with me. I'll see you in Borås for a bit of crown dressing!

Day 2785: I'm so done with this Corona bollocks

There's an old adage that says "if you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all". But if I followed that rule I wouldn't have said a good seven tenths of the things I've ever said, and a good nine tenths of the things I've ever written. 

The only thing I've said about Corona on this blog is that people hoarded stuff way back last year (my god, that time span. Depressing.) at the beginning of the pandemic. I think I, like many others, was just hoping the whole thing would go away and I could go back to thinking about other things. But it's not going away. And I'm not thinking about other things - well I am, but Corona always crops up in there somewhere. 

If your life is based in a single place, your family and friends are in that place, your job is there, and your hobbies too, then your life became complicated in the sense that you were restricted from engaging in your usual routines and social habits. You probably have some kind of resentment (even though there's nowhere to direct it really unless you have a punching bag with an anthropomorphised corona face stuck to it, or one of the world's worryingly more common authoritarian governments) about losing out on a year of your life that you planned to use to greater effect. 

 

If your life is based in more than one place, that is to say your family, your friends, your job or your hobbies are not within reasonable range of your residence, then this year became fundamentally, world shatteringly more complicated. The situation may even have made you question the whole foundation of why you moved, and ended up living in what is possibly one of the world's most boring, antisocial, cold, quietly self aggrandising, disappointing, overrated and dark places in the world. Yes, I may have crashed out of the hypothetical there somewhat. 

Doubtlessly, life is miserable the world over thanks to Covid, and it is foolish to blame all negativity on any one place. The grass is always greener. A nasty side effect of moving from your home is that you forever wonder whether life is shit because life is shit, or because life HERE is shit, but if you were THERE it would be better. If you live in one place and one place only, you know for sure that life is just shit, you don't have this nagging pull at the back of your mind that you are much better suited to life elsewhere (though let's be honest we're all better suited to life on an environmentally friendly, politically autonomous, fully catered, private equatorial island). 

If half of your spiritual self is in one place, the other half is elsewhere, and a pandemic prevents you from uniting the two... well. You're basically living in a perpetual state of colossal FOMO, a self-developmental limbo, impostor-syndrome autopilot, in which you try to act like you're living your best life in Sweden even though you hate minus temperatures, you don't own a holiday cottage with a bit of land, you've never been, or wanted to go, skiing, you have no intention of queueing in the snow to use a virus ridden gym, you don't suddenly feel the need to contribute to an ongoing housing sales boom, there really is no need for you to get a dog just because everyone else seems to be getting one and above all else you absolutely, under no circumstances, will watch mello or any of the other drivel that this country calls television. 

"But there's no lockdown in Sweden!" I hear you cry. I can tell you now, hand on heart, that pubs being open until 8pm for people who sit in groups of maximum 4 people drinking beers at 8 quid after sitting at home on the computer for ten hours of the day really doesn't compensate for having the slimmest opportunity to leave this place and be with old friends and family that you havent seen for months and months. Worse still, that gnawing guilt you had about all the air travel your lifestyle required is now multiplied tenfold by the knowledge that everyone will be jetsetting all over the place when the time comes for holidays to be on the cards. Do you really want to be a part of that gas guzzling, carbon monoxide spewing, consumerist frenzy? Is there any choice in the matter?

Answers on a postcard.

Day 2734 - Post Brexit Post

I travelled from the UK to Sweden on the 4th January, having turned off roaming on my Swedish SIM at the stroke of midnight of the New Year like some kind of digital Cinderella who didn't want to pay excessive charges to her telephone fairy godmother. 

The truth is so many small kinks in the fabric of British/Swedish life have yet to be ironed out that it is anybody's guess what will happen with phone charges. The latest new feature of the post-Brexit life is the slowness of post between two countries, a post system that used to be so breathtakingly efficient that sometimes I would recieve post within 24 hours of somebody sending it with normal postage prices. Now post sits for a week at the least in a customs depot somewhere. 

Brexit effects have not been cataclysmic so far...can I expect a death by a thousand cuts type scenario where myriad bureaucratic processes become slower and red-tape-ier in turn, or should I be lulled into a sense of security?