Day 2366: Are police even police if they don't police?

Yesterday, two massive explosions ripped through occupied buildings in Uppsala and Stockholm, the former in a night club and the latter in a fully occupied apartment block. These explosions miraculously did not kill anyone, but they did blow out all the glass in the area and give all the inhabitants an understandable shock. Explosions are currently a popular tactic with criminal gangs, last year in Sweden there were over 100 explosions in inhabited areas. These explosions are so common that the Swedish police were forced in November last year to begin "Operation Rimfrost" which focuses specifically on criminal gangs blowing shit up.

https://www.svd.se/kraftig-explosion-i-stockholm-asn8

I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that there are criminal gangs up to no good in England, but I am pretty sure if they blew up occupied buildings on a regular basis for several years there would be 1) a national emergency 2) a media shitstorm 3) protests 4) the intelligence service raining down hell. Or, at the VERY LEAST 5) people talking about it and being concerned. Are any of these things happening in Sweden? No. "Big fat explosion in central Stockholm and another one in Uppsala" is not front page news today, despite happening just yesterday. Nobody at work was talking about it. Among friends and family, the most reaction I've had is a raised eyebrow and a concerned tut.

Why there isn't national outrage over gangs using explosions on citizens as a casual form of revenge? The nation is sticking its head in the ground and pretending nothing is happening! How has Sweden become a place where explosions are so everyday that society hardly bats an eyelid? I mean really, what the actual fuck? I hate to use the phrase "wake up sheeple" but....wake up sheeple! Just because this shit is being downplayed in the media, doesn't make it no deal. It's a deal. It's a very big deal! "Operation Rimfrost" was only brought into action after nearly a hundred incidents, and even now, if you read what it says on the police website, they are promising that their efforts "are going to have effects". Not that their efforts are already doing something, no, they are PLANNING on doing something, soon. The last time I called the police was in December about a break-in. It took them 8 minutes to connect me to a switchboard and more than an hour to dispatch a car, which arrived way after the intruder had left and driven by two officers who had not been given the description of said intruder.  I teach CHILDREN more effective than that! Are there monkeys working in the police station?

https://xkcd.com/1013/

Day 2263: That's not tea.

I work in a lot of different places so I can say with some authority that the picture above is quite representative of a generous tea selection at the office. Some places have NO tea, some places have worse than no tea, which is Lipton yellow label, and some places look like this. All workplaces have coffee. The coffee quality might vary, I wouldn't know, I don't drink it. Nevertheless, to be a tea drinker in this country is to be eternally disappointed. Look at that picture above. I mean, really look at it. Do YOU want to drink decaffinated green tea chai? Lipton raspberry? Lipton Russian Earl Grey? Energising blueberry? Rooibos with fake chai flavour? Someone's "on-second-thought-I'll-leave-it"-Lipton teabag? No.

Who is the mystery 1% who drink enough energising blueberry to encourage the caretaker to order in 2 more boxes? If it's you then do everyone a favour and fuck off.

Last week I had an American child laugh at me because he was mocking me for being British, making all kinds of jokes about how I probably love tea and carry it around with me, only to discover that I had emergency teabags in my rucksack. Yes, I may have contributed to the perpetuation of a stereotype but I am truly desperate when a forlorn sachet of Twinings English Breakfast counts as a better cup of tea than whatever is available in the staffroom. Once somebody at work made Tetley's and it was like a miracle. For reference, I wouldn't be caught dead drinking Tetley's in England. And don't get me started on the Swedish obsession with single-use tetra pack milk which makes tea taste like, well, milk thats been in a tetra pack on a kitchen counter for a year.

What hurts the most is the fact that coffee is such a religion in Scandinavia that you are never more than 6 feet away from a good cup of coffee. I would even wager, without even drinking it, that the shittiest coffee from the shittiest machine is still a better coffee experience for the coffee drinker than the discovery of a whole cupboard of NON tea is for a tea drinker, who basically won't drink any tea in that situation. I'll have a tap water and seething, deep-seated rage to go, please.

Even cafes here have shit tea, and I don't mean the cheapo places that give you a lipton teabag, a glass of tepid water and an ice cream spoon the length of your arm. I mean the good places, even they get tea wrong. Loose leaf tea here comes in a variety of flavours, often never just plain tea, always some kind of chai-ripoff bullshit that has as much to do with chai as a castrated man in half a furry cow suit has to do with a bull. Either that or it has summer fruits, or winter fruits, or autumn fruits or some other kind of season, monsoon moonbeam or WHATEVER WHO IS NAMING AND CREATING THIS HORRIBLE SHIT. Mostly I get stuck with Earl Grey (pronounced Öörl Grej) which bears no resemblance to Earl Grey, and tastes very much like what my Yorkshire friend calls "Gandhi's Flip Flop". I have to pay £5 for the PRIVILEGE of this experience, because I am bound by the traditions of the Swedish Fika to sit with a warm drink alongside my bun. And it's always a bun, because the cake selection is nearly as thin as the tea selection. But alas, that is a rant for another day.

Day 1514: A very Swedish theory test question

This question came up on my practice theory test:

A person has been drinking a lot of alcohol until very late at night. What should he or she think about the following day?

1. If he runs a lap he will burn more alcohol and therefore drive without risk in the afternoon
2. If he drinks lots of water and then has a sauna he will burn more alcohol and therefore drive without risk in the afternoon
3. Since he can't affect the amount of alcohol he burns he should not drive for safety's sake 

As far as I know, there is no focus in the English theory test on alcohol (or how to best drive to reduce environmental impact). There is definitely no mention of running a lap (who outside Sweden stays up all night drinking and then goes for a run in the morning?!) or having a bloody sauna (In Stockholm you're never more than 6 feet from a sauna, while in London it's 6 feet from a rat.)

Furthermore, most commercial passenger vehicles like taxis, buses, logistics trucks and even my learner driver car are fitted with "alcolås" or alcohol lock, and the engine will not start if the driver fails an alcohol breath test!

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.

Day 908: Stick your signalfel up your ASS

Are you hours and hours late for work, fun or getting home?

Do you have no idea at all how you're going to get there?

Are you utterly complacent about this, and will not attempt to make any change to the status of your shitty transport system through positive action or negative reaction?

Are you not even expecting the news to pick up on the hell of your, and thousands upon thousands of others' journey or the plight of hundreds upon hundreds of freight wagons over the course of a whole day, several days or even weeks?

You must be commuting in Sweden!

With this in mind, it's important that you learn my:

 

1. Obehöriga på Spårområdet (unauthorised person on the track)  

Ah yes, god bless this wonderful shitbag who has wondered about on the railways for fuck knows what reason. Whether they were stealing some copper wires, trying to kill themselves in a quiet, understated manner or just out for a fucking stroll somewhere they don't usually fucking stroll, god bless them. They really deserved that time they effectively stole from me just for being the wonderful, considerate human beings that they are.

 Annoyance factor: 

2. Elavbrott (Power Outage)

This is Sweden, an incredibly advanced western nation with a perfectly good electricity producing industry and no drops in service even during the winter when every man and his dog has all the lights on, three heaters and an oven. There is no way the railways are having a power cut. This is just code for "Sven fucked up the wiring".

Annoyance Factor:

3. Kraftiga förseningar (Heavy delays)

This isn't an explanation. We know there are delays, we've been standing in -10 for the last 40 minutes looking at a screen which has said that our train is one minute away. Fucking liars. I'm pretty sure this is actually code for "Expect a #4"

Annoyance factor:

4. Stopp i trafiken (Stop in service)

Here's what kraftiga förseningar really means. No trains are going anywhere. (Except sometimes the trains that cost more money than your shitty commuter train, they're fine.) They don't have a reason though.

Annoyance factor:

5. Signalfel (Signal problems)

I don't know who is in charge of the signals around here but they should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. There are signal problems so often I think that train drivers would be confused if the signals were signalling. They should just burn down the whole fucking signal rig, because the smoke would be more effective at actually signalling.

Annoyance factor: 

6. Omfattande (extensive)

Omfattande elfel, omfattande signalfel, omfattande whatever. Oh god you're really fucked if they wheel this one out. Just go to the pub and sleep there instead of trying to get home.

Annoyance factor:

7. Växelfel (Interchange Fault)

Just book a holiday and go to the beach. Last July there was a track interchange fault in the south station of Stockholm. No trains could go north or south for nearly 2 weeks. Fuck that shit.

Annoyance factor: