A few posts back I made cider and squirrelled it away until it had matured. I can now happily report that it tastes great! Hurray!
Well, I think it tastes nice. But some Swedish friends (and others of non-british origin) were not so keen. But they just reaffirm that I succeeded, since you've got to be a true Brit to like that true, bitter, cloudy cider that doesn't taste like cheap soda.
Monday, 30 November 2015
Monday, 23 November 2015
Day 838: Swedish English Learning
What happens if you think you're better at something than you actually are?
I recently attended a conference for English teachers in Stockholm and by far and away the most interesting piece of information I took away from the event was this: Swedish school students' motivation for learning English is low because they think they are already good at English and they don't need to study it at school.
It's a commonly accepted fact that Swedes are good at English. If you come here on a visit and can't even manage a "Hej" or a "Tack" you won't have too many difficulties getting around and about. Sometimes you'll meet someone who'll explain that they're "terribly sorry for my lack of English" and use a whole host of words you would never use yourself in doing so. You also meet Swedes who take the piss out of other Swedes speaking "terrible" English while you smile on, and nod, thinking about your own, utter lack of Swedish.
But while it's all well and good being able to communicate with people on an everyday level, a sad truth about English is that when it comes to certain situations, be they academic, business related or formal events, the language is a total bitch to master. More than this, if you're not a native speaker (and let's face it, sometimes even if you are a native speaker) there are times when you won't use a subjunctive, or a whom, or a pronoun, or some other finicky piece of shit word, and your fabulous idea suddenly won't pack the punch that it's supposed to.
This is in fact true of all languages, of course, but the particular problem with having English as your second language is that you're up against a globalised world full of millions, perhaps billions, of other people using English to reach out to the English speaking world in the best way possible. If you end up in a job which requires you to write formal, or academic, or business, or sales, or any of the other myriad forms of English then you'll either be glad that you had the chance to learn these things or spend a lot of frustrated time trying to do it as an adult. And I'm all for the adaptation of language over time, and the natural changes that come through regular use, but I don't think there's any escaping the need to use the language "correctly" according to the currently accepted model. If you write an academic paper with no apostrophes whatsoever, your reader is going to ask you where they are, instead of thanking you for pioneering a new form of apostrophe-less English.
Where am I going with this? Well, in the study which I was shown at this conference, the presenter (a very interesting academic called Alastair Henry, whose research can be found here) explained that motivation in class comes from a variety of sources. One of these sources is the perceived gap between how good the learner thinks they are at the current moment, and how good they think they will be in the future. If this gap is big, then students accept that they have some work to do and feel motivated to do it. If the gap is small, then the students feel no pressure to work hard, since they think they don't have too far to go. What does this have to do with Sweden? As part of the study, the results from Swedish students were compared with several other countries:
The numbers in the first red circle, under the r, show the mean size of the gap between how good students ranked themselves currently and how good they think they want to be in the future. Sweden's average was .34, which is almost half as small as the next smallest gap in Iran at .62. This basically means, as I already said, that Swedish teenagers think they're nearly the fucking DON at English and that they don't have to do anything because they're only .34 away from being the actual fucking DON at English.
Why do they think this? They think this because:
a) On average they spend >20 hours a week interacting with English on the internet or in games or on TV etc
b) They are actually quite good. I work in a lot of schools and when kids find out I'm English they follow me around and talk to me because they want to show off.
c) Sometimes they can express themselves better in English than in Swedish. Some kids asked a colleague of mine "how do you say 'coincidence' in Swedish?" in English in the middle of a Swedish speaking exam.
Why is it dangerous to think this?
a) Because you're never the fucking DON of a language. There is always more to learn and more to write and more to read. Unless you're J.R.R. Tolkien, then I'm happy to call you the fucking DON of English (although I'm sure he'd agree with what I just said, being an academic)
b) Because the kids I teach might be able to talk fluently and express some complex ideas but they sound like Jessie Pinkman from Breaking Bad all the while
c) Because as much as I like and use them, there are more adjectives, modifiers, verbs and just general vocabulary than just "shit" "bullshit" "motherfucking" "fucking" "poop" "fuck" "dick" and "ass".
The advice of Alastair Henry at this conference was something which all teachers should know and do all the time, but which in any case bears repeating, essentially it is the job of the teacher to show the student a different future self, one which is a bit further away from that which the student has created for him or herself. This future self can achieve more and be even better that the one which the student imagined and can inspire motivation.
No motherfucking pressure then. Poop.
I recently attended a conference for English teachers in Stockholm and by far and away the most interesting piece of information I took away from the event was this: Swedish school students' motivation for learning English is low because they think they are already good at English and they don't need to study it at school.
It's a commonly accepted fact that Swedes are good at English. If you come here on a visit and can't even manage a "Hej" or a "Tack" you won't have too many difficulties getting around and about. Sometimes you'll meet someone who'll explain that they're "terribly sorry for my lack of English" and use a whole host of words you would never use yourself in doing so. You also meet Swedes who take the piss out of other Swedes speaking "terrible" English while you smile on, and nod, thinking about your own, utter lack of Swedish.
But while it's all well and good being able to communicate with people on an everyday level, a sad truth about English is that when it comes to certain situations, be they academic, business related or formal events, the language is a total bitch to master. More than this, if you're not a native speaker (and let's face it, sometimes even if you are a native speaker) there are times when you won't use a subjunctive, or a whom, or a pronoun, or some other finicky piece of shit word, and your fabulous idea suddenly won't pack the punch that it's supposed to.
This is in fact true of all languages, of course, but the particular problem with having English as your second language is that you're up against a globalised world full of millions, perhaps billions, of other people using English to reach out to the English speaking world in the best way possible. If you end up in a job which requires you to write formal, or academic, or business, or sales, or any of the other myriad forms of English then you'll either be glad that you had the chance to learn these things or spend a lot of frustrated time trying to do it as an adult. And I'm all for the adaptation of language over time, and the natural changes that come through regular use, but I don't think there's any escaping the need to use the language "correctly" according to the currently accepted model. If you write an academic paper with no apostrophes whatsoever, your reader is going to ask you where they are, instead of thanking you for pioneering a new form of apostrophe-less English.
Where am I going with this? Well, in the study which I was shown at this conference, the presenter (a very interesting academic called Alastair Henry, whose research can be found here) explained that motivation in class comes from a variety of sources. One of these sources is the perceived gap between how good the learner thinks they are at the current moment, and how good they think they will be in the future. If this gap is big, then students accept that they have some work to do and feel motivated to do it. If the gap is small, then the students feel no pressure to work hard, since they think they don't have too far to go. What does this have to do with Sweden? As part of the study, the results from Swedish students were compared with several other countries:
The numbers in the first red circle, under the r, show the mean size of the gap between how good students ranked themselves currently and how good they think they want to be in the future. Sweden's average was .34, which is almost half as small as the next smallest gap in Iran at .62. This basically means, as I already said, that Swedish teenagers think they're nearly the fucking DON at English and that they don't have to do anything because they're only .34 away from being the actual fucking DON at English.
Why do they think this? They think this because:
a) On average they spend >20 hours a week interacting with English on the internet or in games or on TV etc
b) They are actually quite good. I work in a lot of schools and when kids find out I'm English they follow me around and talk to me because they want to show off.
c) Sometimes they can express themselves better in English than in Swedish. Some kids asked a colleague of mine "how do you say 'coincidence' in Swedish?" in English in the middle of a Swedish speaking exam.
Why is it dangerous to think this?
a) Because you're never the fucking DON of a language. There is always more to learn and more to write and more to read. Unless you're J.R.R. Tolkien, then I'm happy to call you the fucking DON of English (although I'm sure he'd agree with what I just said, being an academic)
b) Because the kids I teach might be able to talk fluently and express some complex ideas but they sound like Jessie Pinkman from Breaking Bad all the while
c) Because as much as I like and use them, there are more adjectives, modifiers, verbs and just general vocabulary than just "shit" "bullshit" "motherfucking" "fucking" "poop" "fuck" "dick" and "ass".
The advice of Alastair Henry at this conference was something which all teachers should know and do all the time, but which in any case bears repeating, essentially it is the job of the teacher to show the student a different future self, one which is a bit further away from that which the student has created for him or herself. This future self can achieve more and be even better that the one which the student imagined and can inspire motivation.
No motherfucking pressure then. Poop.
Monday, 9 November 2015
Day 824: You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
On taking a trip to England to see friends and family I realise I've gone beyond just looking the wrong way on the road and getting in the wrong side of the car. Now I've started to do subtly Swedish things while back in the home land...
1. Forgetting my Oyster card when leaving the tube station and expecting the barrier to open for me like it does in Stockholm. Standing there like a lemon.
2. Wincing when sitting in the passenger seat and watching the car make a turn.
3. Closing the entire lid of the toilet seat when flushing and wondering why it's not closed in public places.
4. Having to use a skanky scourer that's been sat in the sink for a week or two, instead of one of these:
5. Going to get a drink from the bathroom tap but remembering that's not a thing in England and having to go all the way to the kitchen.
6. Apologising to my friends for being late and texting them afterwards to say thanks for having me.
7. Taking up two seats on the train.
8. Getting knocked down by the STENCH of too much laundry detergent on everybody's clothes
9. Using Swedish words for things around the house when I need them urgently.
10. Wishing there were toilet brushes in public bathrooms.
1. Forgetting my Oyster card when leaving the tube station and expecting the barrier to open for me like it does in Stockholm. Standing there like a lemon.
2. Wincing when sitting in the passenger seat and watching the car make a turn.
3. Closing the entire lid of the toilet seat when flushing and wondering why it's not closed in public places.
4. Having to use a skanky scourer that's been sat in the sink for a week or two, instead of one of these:
5. Going to get a drink from the bathroom tap but remembering that's not a thing in England and having to go all the way to the kitchen.
6. Apologising to my friends for being late and texting them afterwards to say thanks for having me.
7. Taking up two seats on the train.
8. Getting knocked down by the STENCH of too much laundry detergent on everybody's clothes
9. Using Swedish words for things around the house when I need them urgently.
10. Wishing there were toilet brushes in public bathrooms.
Monday, 19 October 2015
Day 803: Make Simple Cider
Of all the things I thought I would miss from England, Cider was not high up on my list. But here in Sweden, Cider is a byword for shitty, sugary, fizzy syrup with a vague apple hint somewhere behind the sweetness. If Swedish cider is an annoyingly perky teenage girl who talks in incessant high pitched babble about vacuous nothing, then English cider is a wizend, contemptuous, sardonic old man who knows his way around a pub or ten and won't associate himself at all with the former.
As you may have read, a not-so sneaky apple thief came a-scrumping a month or so ago and I had no apples. Fortunately a friend, actually two friends, came to my rescue and rekindled my cider-making motivation. One friend knew where we could get some apples, and the other had the right kinds of bottles to store the maturing cider. If you know where you can get these two things, then you might benefit from my simple step-by-step instructions for how to make your own cider.
We did not have the means to weigh our apples, but an educated guess puts these three boxes at around 60kg. They are autumn apples, as summer apples like the Transparence Blanche that my scrumping thief stole from my garden are no good for making pressed apple juice. Apparently they just bruise and taste bad.
In Sweden you can look up your local musteri or juice press. For a small fee per litre they have the capacity to press the apples quickly and efficiently. We pressed ours at Vårdsätra Musteri and they produced 40 litres or delicious juice, ready to drink or brew into cider. You can press the apples yourself, there are plenty of tutorials online, but you need extra materials and lots of space and these factors put me off. It's supposed to be simple!
Your juice should not have preservatives in it and can go bad quickly. Therefore if you want to gather together the things you need and not feel rushed into brewing straight away you can freeze the juice and keep it for up to 3 months. Just make sure you thaw it completely and bring it to room temperature before you add any yeast.
This is a water lock (vattenlås, jäsrör) you can buy this and other useful things (such as larger containers if you want to brew more cider, bigger corks and lids, yeast and siphons) from www.humle.se. I brewed my cider in the plastic bottles provided to me by Vårdsätra Musteri and just bought the cap and water lock in the picture. You put water in the water lock (no shit Sherlock) and it lets the gas out of the cider while stopping air from going in and contaminating the cider. Make sure all the things you use are clean to avoid contaminating the cider.
As for yeast I bought Safcider Yeast for Cider because it was cheap and had a good tempearature range. My bathroom is always 20 degrees and that's right in the middle of this yeast's range.
I also bought 1 metre of plastic tube to use as a siphon, which is really useful for transferring the cider from the big bottle to small bottles without all of the yeasty crap following along.
If you live in England, you can buy all of these things really, ridiculously easily. Even Tescos and Wilkinsons sell home brew kits.
If you want to be precise, you can also buy a Hydrometer to measure the alcohol content of your cider and to work out how much sugar needs adding.
If you are impatient, like me, and just want to see how it turns out, then add some white sugar (I added 100g to my 5L batch, I will let you know how it turns out!) to your apple juice and then add some yeast (a 5g packet like the one above is good enough for 20-30 litres) and then guess how alcoholic it is at the end when you drink a bottle and fall over (or not.) According to some websites, if you add no sugar at all you will end up with 5-6% alcohol in your cider.
Put your airtight waterlock on the bottle.
I left mine in the bathroom for 10 days at 18-20 Degrees. I knew it was working because some froth formed (and left the brown smudge on the neck of the bottle) and for a few days in the middle you could hear the "sploop" of the air escaping from the lock. After 10 days I knew it was done because the air sploops had stopped.
I was able to get my hands on some Czech and German beer bottles with resealable rubber/metal/ceramic lid contraption dealies. I boiled the lids to sterilise them, for 10 minutes on a rolling boil.
As for the bottles themselves, I soaked them in soapy water for 10 mins to remove the labels and then baked them for 20 minutes at 120 degrees to sterilise them.
I let them cool completely before putting any cider in them!
Some people re-bottle the cider in another large container and let it sit a bit longer before bottling, just to get rid of the dead yeast and make sure the cider is really ready.
Since my cider had completely stopped making any bubble noises, I decided to put it straight into bottles. This may or may not be a giant mistake, watch this space...
I took the bottling process as an opportunity to try the cider and it tasted ok, like the old man mentioned above but maybe not quite wizened. I hope me comparing the taste of cider to the taste of an old man isn't putting you off completely.
And now I wait, to see if some time sitting in bottles in my basement will make the flavour mature at all, or just turn all my hard efforts into vinegar.
As you may have read, a not-so sneaky apple thief came a-scrumping a month or so ago and I had no apples. Fortunately a friend, actually two friends, came to my rescue and rekindled my cider-making motivation. One friend knew where we could get some apples, and the other had the right kinds of bottles to store the maturing cider. If you know where you can get these two things, then you might benefit from my simple step-by-step instructions for how to make your own cider.
1. Get apples
We did not have the means to weigh our apples, but an educated guess puts these three boxes at around 60kg. They are autumn apples, as summer apples like the Transparence Blanche that my scrumping thief stole from my garden are no good for making pressed apple juice. Apparently they just bruise and taste bad.
2. Press apples
In Sweden you can look up your local musteri or juice press. For a small fee per litre they have the capacity to press the apples quickly and efficiently. We pressed ours at Vårdsätra Musteri and they produced 40 litres or delicious juice, ready to drink or brew into cider. You can press the apples yourself, there are plenty of tutorials online, but you need extra materials and lots of space and these factors put me off. It's supposed to be simple!
3. Freeze the juice
4. Buy yeast, a water lock and a siphon
As for yeast I bought Safcider Yeast for Cider because it was cheap and had a good tempearature range. My bathroom is always 20 degrees and that's right in the middle of this yeast's range.
I also bought 1 metre of plastic tube to use as a siphon, which is really useful for transferring the cider from the big bottle to small bottles without all of the yeasty crap following along.
If you live in England, you can buy all of these things really, ridiculously easily. Even Tescos and Wilkinsons sell home brew kits.
5. Add sugar and yeast to the apple juice
If you want to be precise, you can also buy a Hydrometer to measure the alcohol content of your cider and to work out how much sugar needs adding.
If you are impatient, like me, and just want to see how it turns out, then add some white sugar (I added 100g to my 5L batch, I will let you know how it turns out!) to your apple juice and then add some yeast (a 5g packet like the one above is good enough for 20-30 litres) and then guess how alcoholic it is at the end when you drink a bottle and fall over (or not.) According to some websites, if you add no sugar at all you will end up with 5-6% alcohol in your cider.
Put your airtight waterlock on the bottle.
6. Let it ferment for 1-2weeks
7. Sterilise some containers to put the cider in
I was able to get my hands on some Czech and German beer bottles with resealable rubber/metal/ceramic lid contraption dealies. I boiled the lids to sterilise them, for 10 minutes on a rolling boil.As for the bottles themselves, I soaked them in soapy water for 10 mins to remove the labels and then baked them for 20 minutes at 120 degrees to sterilise them.
I let them cool completely before putting any cider in them!
Some people re-bottle the cider in another large container and let it sit a bit longer before bottling, just to get rid of the dead yeast and make sure the cider is really ready.
Since my cider had completely stopped making any bubble noises, I decided to put it straight into bottles. This may or may not be a giant mistake, watch this space...
I took the bottling process as an opportunity to try the cider and it tasted ok, like the old man mentioned above but maybe not quite wizened. I hope me comparing the taste of cider to the taste of an old man isn't putting you off completely.
And now I wait, to see if some time sitting in bottles in my basement will make the flavour mature at all, or just turn all my hard efforts into vinegar.
Monday, 12 October 2015
Day 794: Amirite?
Imagine you're at school and you are waiting for the teacher to give you a test back so you can see your score. The teacher hands you your test and most of your answers are marked with THIS:
You think "I done fucked up big time!" (It was probably a grammar test if you think in that voice). To your horror only one or two of these feature on your test:
"The world is so unfair!" you whine "I really, actually, truly studied for and/or cheated on this test! There's no way I could have failed!"
You actually did really well. In Sweden, ticks mean WRONG! and crosses mean RIGHT! as I discovered when handing back tests to my students, and as I explained to my team mate at a pub quiz last week when some Swedes marked his answers. If you don't believe me (because this is the only country in the DAMN WORLD THAT GETS TICKS AND FUCKING CROSSES MIXED UP!) then you can see for yourself on this teacher's blog.
You think "I done fucked up big time!" (It was probably a grammar test if you think in that voice). To your horror only one or two of these feature on your test:
"The world is so unfair!" you whine "I really, actually, truly studied for and/or cheated on this test! There's no way I could have failed!"
You actually did really well. In Sweden, ticks mean WRONG! and crosses mean RIGHT! as I discovered when handing back tests to my students, and as I explained to my team mate at a pub quiz last week when some Swedes marked his answers. If you don't believe me (because this is the only country in the DAMN WORLD THAT GETS TICKS AND FUCKING CROSSES MIXED UP!) then you can see for yourself on this teacher's blog.
Monday, 5 October 2015
Day 787: Plastic not so fantastic
Today marked the first day of the new rules in England forcing everyone to pay 5p for their plastic bags. Once again, as with the "Poo Bus" last year, I am left wondering how the hell England is so far behind environmentally. Well, I say that feeling all smug over here in Swedenland, but actually it turns out Sweden doesn't use that many fewer bags...
God knows what the Czech are doing with their bags, making a fort? Brewing them into bag beer? Oh wait, I know, making LE FASHION.
A hundred bags per year in Sweden? Really? I don't think I collected that many last year. But my boyfriend recently developed an obsession with reusable bags with cute print. He buys them "for me" you understand...
We do have a plastic bag full of bags in the cupboard though, which I am sure everyone has (unless you live in Finland or Denmark. There you have a plastic bag containing exactly 3 bags). What do Finns and Danes do when a friend visits and needs to carry something home? "Do you have a plastic bag I can use" "Piss off it's my last one". Reminds me of a Rolo advert. Do you love anyone enough to give them your last plastic bag?
What about when you run out of bin bags? Then what do you use? I guess a nation prepared enough to live life on the edge with only 4 plastic bags per year is also prepared enough to never run out of bin bags. This is something Brits will take some time to adapt to, culturally. We're not the most prepared folk, we'd rather just deal with the problems when they show up rather than pre-emptively tackling them.
"You've put asbestos in that wall"
-"Yeah we'll take it out when we find something better".
"Are you going to put insulation in that house?"
-"No we'll wait for people to move in and they can install it themselves".
"Let's make lots of nuclear power plants!"
-"What about the nuclear waste?"
"Oh I'm sure we'll find something to use it for".
-"Is it a good idea to encourage dependency on Diesel fuel?"
"Sure why not! What's the worst that could happen?"
-"What will happen when you sell all those NHS contracts to private companies?"
"Only good things, I'm sure!"
And so on, and so forth. Perhaps this would be a good time to take some advice from the Danes? On this handy dandy website there are some top tips for how to avoid using excessive plastic bags, with such classics as "carry it yourself" and "make your child carry it". With the BBC already worrying on behalf of the pound shop who, poor them, will have to charge 5p increments instead of nice, round figures, I can only wish good luck with your reduced bags, England. I think you'll need it.
 |
| Source: BBC |
 |
| Katerina Smejkalova, Miss Czech Republic 2005 |
A hundred bags per year in Sweden? Really? I don't think I collected that many last year. But my boyfriend recently developed an obsession with reusable bags with cute print. He buys them "for me" you understand...
 |
| okay...he didn't buy ALL of them, |
What about when you run out of bin bags? Then what do you use? I guess a nation prepared enough to live life on the edge with only 4 plastic bags per year is also prepared enough to never run out of bin bags. This is something Brits will take some time to adapt to, culturally. We're not the most prepared folk, we'd rather just deal with the problems when they show up rather than pre-emptively tackling them.
"You've put asbestos in that wall"
-"Yeah we'll take it out when we find something better".
"Are you going to put insulation in that house?"-"No we'll wait for people to move in and they can install it themselves".
"Let's make lots of nuclear power plants!"
-"What about the nuclear waste?"
"Oh I'm sure we'll find something to use it for".
-"Is it a good idea to encourage dependency on Diesel fuel?"
"Sure why not! What's the worst that could happen?"
-"What will happen when you sell all those NHS contracts to private companies?"
"Only good things, I'm sure!"
And so on, and so forth. Perhaps this would be a good time to take some advice from the Danes? On this handy dandy website there are some top tips for how to avoid using excessive plastic bags, with such classics as "carry it yourself" and "make your child carry it". With the BBC already worrying on behalf of the pound shop who, poor them, will have to charge 5p increments instead of nice, round figures, I can only wish good luck with your reduced bags, England. I think you'll need it.
Monday, 28 September 2015
Day 781: Scrumping
Every now and then I come across a list on the internet of words which exist in other languages but which we are lacking in English. Like "backpfeifengesicht" from German, meaning a face that needs a slap, or "hygge" from Danish, meaning a good, pleasant, comfy feeling (I guess the same as the Swedish mysig). But recently I was lacking a Swedish word for an English concept: Scrumping.
Scrumping is stealing apples from someone's garden or orchard to make Scrumpy, a small batch of local cider. Although I guess you can also scrump just to eat the apples. Or, you can do what someone did in our garden and hire a fucking trailer and pick all the apple trees in the private garden totally bare in broad daylight with the residents watching you, and then sell them for a profit. That definitely counts as scrumping.
I myself have been thinking about making some non-scrumped-cider out of all the apples in the garden which nobody is eating. But before I can get my special apple picking tool (yes, every good Swedish residents association has some) I look out of the window to see a guy with a bike trailer full of apples. Since I live with the CHAIRMAN©® of the building, I sent him out to find out why this guy was entitled to pick ALL THE APPLES.
The conversation was as follows:
CHAIRMAN©®: Hello.
GERMAN GUY: Hello
CHAIRMAN©®: I see you have picked quite a lot of apples and I was wondering if you live here or if you're staying with someone here?
GERMAN GUY: Oh yeah, my friend said I can pick as many as I want.
CHAIRMAN©®: Who's your friend?
GERMAN GUY: Oh, er, I, er, forgot his name. He has a beard.
CHAIRMAN©®: I see. Well, you're welcome to pick the apples since we don't want them to go to waste, but next time I would appreciate it if you called someone from the residents association *points to phone numbers* to ask, as there are some people in the building who would like some apples for themselves.
GERMAN GUY: Oh yeah totally I will do that.
Great! Fine! Wonderful! Nobody's being an asshole over the apples, all was solved. Lovely. 5 Days later at the weekend GERMAN GUY texts to ask if he can pick ALL THE APPLES on the remaining trees that the CHAIRMAN©® scared him away from. The CHAIRMAN©® says "sure." because, hey, apples. Who cares. Apart from me, who will never get any cider at this rate, since there are about 2 apples left on the trees.
BUT THEN
The following weekend we're having fika (not a euphemism for sex) with a retired lady in our building, when she says:
RETIRED LADY: Your friend was here on the weekend.
CHAIRMAN©®: My friend?
RETIRED LADY: Yes, the one who picks the apples.
CHAIRMAN©®: He's NOT my friend.
RETIRED LADY: Oh, he said he was your friend. "My friend told me to go ahead and clean the fuck out of every. single. apple tree." that's what he said.
CHAIRMAN©®: He's NOT my friend.
RETIRED LADY: Well, he's gone now and he said he would sell all the apples at the local market
CHAIRMAN©®: He's not my friend.
You know you've lived in Swedish societal harmony too long when you use your Monday nights to write a frikkin' soap opera about a man stealing your apples. Apples which nobody was eating and you were paying money to have cleaned up by a gardening service. The irony is, now I have to go and scrump some apples of my own because I still want to make cider. I go now.
Scrumping is stealing apples from someone's garden or orchard to make Scrumpy, a small batch of local cider. Although I guess you can also scrump just to eat the apples. Or, you can do what someone did in our garden and hire a fucking trailer and pick all the apple trees in the private garden totally bare in broad daylight with the residents watching you, and then sell them for a profit. That definitely counts as scrumping.
I myself have been thinking about making some non-scrumped-cider out of all the apples in the garden which nobody is eating. But before I can get my special apple picking tool (yes, every good Swedish residents association has some) I look out of the window to see a guy with a bike trailer full of apples. Since I live with the CHAIRMAN©® of the building, I sent him out to find out why this guy was entitled to pick ALL THE APPLES.
The conversation was as follows:
CHAIRMAN©®: Hello.
GERMAN GUY: Hello
CHAIRMAN©®: I see you have picked quite a lot of apples and I was wondering if you live here or if you're staying with someone here?
GERMAN GUY: Oh yeah, my friend said I can pick as many as I want.
CHAIRMAN©®: Who's your friend?
GERMAN GUY: Oh, er, I, er, forgot his name. He has a beard.
CHAIRMAN©®: I see. Well, you're welcome to pick the apples since we don't want them to go to waste, but next time I would appreciate it if you called someone from the residents association *points to phone numbers* to ask, as there are some people in the building who would like some apples for themselves.
GERMAN GUY: Oh yeah totally I will do that.
Great! Fine! Wonderful! Nobody's being an asshole over the apples, all was solved. Lovely. 5 Days later at the weekend GERMAN GUY texts to ask if he can pick ALL THE APPLES on the remaining trees that the CHAIRMAN©® scared him away from. The CHAIRMAN©® says "sure." because, hey, apples. Who cares. Apart from me, who will never get any cider at this rate, since there are about 2 apples left on the trees.
BUT THEN
The following weekend we're having fika (not a euphemism for sex) with a retired lady in our building, when she says:
RETIRED LADY: Your friend was here on the weekend.
CHAIRMAN©®: My friend?
RETIRED LADY: Yes, the one who picks the apples.
CHAIRMAN©®: He's NOT my friend.
RETIRED LADY: Oh, he said he was your friend. "My friend told me to go ahead and clean the fuck out of every. single. apple tree." that's what he said.
CHAIRMAN©®: He's NOT my friend.
RETIRED LADY: Well, he's gone now and he said he would sell all the apples at the local market
CHAIRMAN©®: He's not my friend.
You know you've lived in Swedish societal harmony too long when you use your Monday nights to write a frikkin' soap opera about a man stealing your apples. Apples which nobody was eating and you were paying money to have cleaned up by a gardening service. The irony is, now I have to go and scrump some apples of my own because I still want to make cider. I go now.
Monday, 14 September 2015
Day 767: Surströmming
Last weekend a friend from England was visiting for a whistle-stop tour of Sweden and so I did what any good friend would do and took her to eat partially rotten fish from a can.
Surströmming (sour herring) is actually a bit of a novelty food item that many Swedes from southern Sweden have never eaten and many Swedes from northern Sweden have. All promulgate the idea that surströmming is semi mythological and can only be eaten outdoors because there is a rule against opening the can where people can smell it and be offended or killed. It's actually partially fermented herring, left to mature in a can, which rots slightly. The rot is washed away in running water and the remaining fish tastes like FISH+++++
As we discovered you are allowed to open the can indoors and the smell is more offensive than the average fart but less offensive than a sewage treatment plant. Both of these comparisons are shit (har har) because surströmming doesn't smell anything at all like human waste. It actually smells, well, sour. Think if sour had a scale of sourness and we were looking at the absolute end of the sour scale. I don't even think it smelled fishy, but maybe I'm remembering poorly because my nose was being stabbed with sour forged into metaphorical sour shards. Actually it wasn't so much the nose that registered the sour as the whole olfactory system including the tissue at the back of the throat. As to the idea that you shouldn't open the can indoors, I don't think the smell could actually forge non-metaphorical tools and force its way into adjacent rooms or apartments. I'm not exactly selling the product here with my description, the smell wasn't half as dire as I imagined the smell should be after two years of living here and hearing others hyperbolise about it, but in any case it's not a smell which inspires lip smacking and salivating.
The person hosting the sour fish event was a northern Swede and just got on with the damn eating as soon as possible. She took the fish whole from the can and carved out the entrails and got some big bits of fish in her face before the smell from the can opening had time to waft to my end of the table. My English friend was much more hardcore than me and, despite gasping at the the stench and asking herself thrice why she was doing it, got stuck in straight away without instruction, using her hands to pull out the bones. I ummed and ah-ed about whether I was even going to eat one, before realising I would be annoyed at myself if I didn't. Putting the fish in front of you is basically embracing the smell wholeheartedly into your life and welcoming it onto your hands and into your aura. I'm quite bad at deboning regular fish, so I was not doing too well with the surströmming. I managed to pick a few meagre shards of fish away from the frankly disturbing swim bladder, bones and entrails and I shied away from the roe which the other guests were so keen on. Amateurs usually go for the ready filleted fish, but it was no regular who bought these fuckers.
The redeeming feature of surströmming is that you don't generally eat it by itself unless you're some kind of demented purist living in a shack in the woods with the bears, wolves and elk somewhere up north. Instead you make a sandwich using crisp, cracker-like bread, onions, potato and västerbotten cheese. If you wish to further disguise the fish you can add sour cream (which I did) and drink milk (which I did). My sandwich was about 1% fish in the end, but I still got goosebumps while eating it. Probably from looking at the swim bladder on my plate while I chewed. To best describe the taste I would probably use a combination of two comments made at the dinner; one person said the fish tasted like "the sea", namely the smell you get a low tide when there is some old seaweed struggling on the sand and there's a salty flavour in the air; I myself commented that it was like being punched in the mouth by a bodybuilder fish with hench arms. Put these together and you get a sensation akin to a knuckle sandwich from Neptune himself.
Would I eat surströmming again? Well. Yeah, probably. If there was a decent crowd, plenty o' vodka and good times to be had as a novelty, rare occasion. Would I go northern native and eat sour, rotten fish for my dinner on any old regular day? No.
Surströmming (sour herring) is actually a bit of a novelty food item that many Swedes from southern Sweden have never eaten and many Swedes from northern Sweden have. All promulgate the idea that surströmming is semi mythological and can only be eaten outdoors because there is a rule against opening the can where people can smell it and be offended or killed. It's actually partially fermented herring, left to mature in a can, which rots slightly. The rot is washed away in running water and the remaining fish tastes like FISH+++++
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| source: wikipedia |
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| Västerbotten cheese, source:wikipedia |
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| Sandwich: source here |
Monday, 7 September 2015
Day 760: Swedish Cinema
Last Friday I went to see "Inside Out". It was really great, some of the script may go way over children's heads but adults will enjoy it. But enough of that, you want reviews go to Rotten Tomatoes.
Really I'm here to compare Swedish cinema-going with English. It's essentially the same thing; first you go to a dodgy back-ally doctor and sell your kidney on the black market to scrape together enough for the entrance ticket (a kidney and a lung if the film is 3D); enter the cinema 20 minutes late in a vain attempt to avoid the adverts at the beginning; buy your ticket from a teenager who is dead behind the eyes and whose friends identify them from 100 metres by the approaching popcorn smell; be tempted by the popcorn smell for about half a second until you remember a) the popcorn is the same popcorn that's sat in the case for the last two weeks and b) the popcorn costs the same as unicorn tears and leprechaun charms; finally you sit uncomfortably close to a stranger for two hours feeling jealous as they stuff their faces with popcorn that you have the moral fortitude to walk away from.
There are some key differences though. You have to wait a considerable amount of time before the films actually appear in Sweden..."Oh did you see XYZ film yet! It's fucking awesome! The bit with the skdfouserfbhoejfboergf and the other bit with the oaiusdq8uiwegfpieaur are my favourites!" say my friends and my facebook feed and my English news sources and my family and the in-flight magazine on long haul flights months after the film has appeared on fucking in-flight entertainment but STILL not Swedish cinema screens. "They have to take time to dub the film" WRONG. Well, half wrong. There are dubbed versions for the little kids who can't read the subtitles, but a lot of families see a lot of films in English. This is part of the reason why Swedish kids are scarily good at English.
Once seated in the cinema, film's rolling etc, that's when I notice that Swedish cinema-goers are the noisiest fucking eaters in the WORLD. (I've been to the cinema in England, France and Sweden so let's call that the world for now) They love their fucking rustling packets of popcorn and penny sweets. Yeah alright, there are some rustlers in England too but not like this. This is rustling on a new scale. It goes all the way to 11 on the rustleometer and breaks the needle on the rustle scale. But as compensation for this, Swedish people don't talk during the movie. They talk all over the adverts, laughing and shouting and singing, making me really nervous that they're going to ruin the film. They always stop when the actual movie starts. This doesn't happen in England. If there are rowdy rowdy people in the screen then they're rowdy rowdy throughout.
There is one thing, though, that could put me off going to the cinema entirely here and that's SNUS.
Having never tried snus I can only assume from the smell that it is made in a factory where cats wee on things and then said things are gathered into little pouches so that people can shove them inside their upper lip. Some may argue that snus is made from tobacco and provides a more socially friendly alternative to smoking. I am not one such person to posit this view. If you break out the cat piss teabags in the cinema to have a cheeky snus and think you're doing me a favour by not smoking you can think again. I would rather watch the movie from the inside of the popcorn cabinet in the lobby than sit next to someone who breaks out a cheeky snus.
On Friday I was treated to the double whammy of olfactory excitement that was a lady who had bathed in shitty cheap perfume sitting with her chainsnusing boyfriend. If your perfume smells like Impulse body spray (basically Lynx/Axe for women) then you probably shouldn't pay more than a pound for it, though if you like kissing someone who tastes like cat urine you're probably not the worlds most discerning consumer.
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
Day 746: Closed for summer!
This blog hasn't been updated in a while because it was SOMMARSTÄNGT.
If the local tax office, police, certain hospital departments, pensions service, service for protection against unfair dismissal from work, job centre, national insurance centre, gynecological clinics, youth intake and sti clinics, government departments, train station offices, childcare facilities, restaurants, theatres, museums, attractions, shops and bars can all take a bunch of time off for summer, then so can I.
If the local tax office, police, certain hospital departments, pensions service, service for protection against unfair dismissal from work, job centre, national insurance centre, gynecological clinics, youth intake and sti clinics, government departments, train station offices, childcare facilities, restaurants, theatres, museums, attractions, shops and bars can all take a bunch of time off for summer, then so can I.
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