Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

22nd June, 2025

Letters from 68 degrees has been about Kiruna. It’s been from our perspective, Rolf’s and mine, but almost always looking out at what was around us, rather than focussing on ourselves, though it has included us reflecting on how the experience has affected us. Writing it enabled us to pay attention to what we were learning, and we’ve learnt a lot.

We came to Kiruna eighteen years ago, wanting to experience the extremes of darkness and light. We rented an unfurnished flat (unseen) for six months, and drove up from England with only the basics in the car. We thought we might not last the whole six months, but we stayed for a year and a half. In the end, responsibilities back in the UK, and a lack of local contacts – work or otherwise – made it seem the right decision to leave. After that we missed Kiruna and sometimes wondered if we might find a way to get back. Three years later we were here on holiday and bought this house. It wasn’t a logical decision, and it was definitely a risk.

We only thought of running a bed and breakfast after we’d bought the house, and we weren’t at all confident we’d be able to do it. After a slow start it took off and then we were almost fully booked in the winter months. Having guests from all over the world was challenging and stimulating, and was a big part of our Kiruna experience. These have been some of the happiest years of our lives.

I wrote the following story, a work of fiction, a few years ago. It’s about what it feels like to be letting go of familiar things and not knowing what’s round the corner. It’s also about facing that future with enthusiasm, which we hope we will do.

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The Road Ahead

Most people in town are asleep. If they can’t sleep (are up, looking at their phones) they hear a low rumble, then check the time. It’s nearly two in the morning. They feel a slight movement underground, a barely perceptible shake in the foundations.

Some of the buildings nearby are empty, and some streets are entirely unoccupied, with fences cutting them off from the rest of town. Threatened by collapsing ground, people have been moved on, to other streets further away, and then carried on with their lives. This town is on the move.

Soft yellow light pushes its way round from behind the humped shape of the mine, slants across the rooftops, creeps round the edges of black-out blinds. The one, long, relentless day of summer – lasting for many weeks – will soon begin.

***

Thomas is on the morning shift. His alarm goes off at four thirty and it only takes him ten minutes to get out the door. Most of that time is spent pulling on his coat and boots. The sun is shining through a mist, but it’s ten degrees below.

He drives slowly past the old road to the mine, now closed off because of unsafe ground. He always wants to drive down that road, the old way, the road used for eighty years. This new road doesn’t feel right, it feels like a side track. At the office he lets himself in with the code, leaves his coat and boots in the changing room and takes the lift up to his office on the seventh floor.

‘Alright?’ he says, sitting down to face the screen.

‘Right,’ Gunnar replies, without looking up.

‘See the hockey?’

‘Yeah,’ replies Gunnar.

Thomas’ machine is in a middle cavity, one thousand three hundred metres underground. It was checked last night for faults and got the all clear. It’s newly positioned and he has two fans of ten drilling holes to complete this morning. On the screen there’s a green outline of his machine underground, like a child’s drawing of an animal. Above the animal a fan of thin red lines reach out into the iron ore. These are his target holes. With his joy stick he lines them up with another figure of blue lines, waiting for confirmation of positioning. His screen tells him everything’s ready. He starts drilling and ten blue lines begin to throb in front of him.

***

‘Watch what you’re doing with that!’

Thomas’ son Sean is swinging the remote around on a wire above his head in their living room. Sean’s dumper truck careers over the floor and crashes into a wall. Sean picks up the joy stick, squats in front of the screen and disappears into another world.

Thomas leans back against the worktop and stares at the fridge door. Then he opens it, pulls out a can, flips it open.

***

In another street, Karin goes to the bathroom to wash. She steps around the packets lying on the floor, careful not to trip over. Her gaze shifts from a face in the mirror to five identical pink bottles on the shelf over the sink. She combs her hair (is that why she came in here?) and returns to the kitchen.

She sits at the table to write a list. She tries to think what it is she wants to buy. (Some fish, yes, potatoes, salt, milk.) As she writes she begins to feel dizzy. She knows the feeling well (breathe deeply, it will pass). Last night it happened in bed. Her book just fell out of her hand. She’d wanted to pick it up but her arm wouldn’t stretch out to it. She lay there, willing her arm to move, but it wouldn’t. Then it was two hours later. There was the book, still on the floor. She stared at it for a while, lying there. Then she leaned out of the bed, picked it up and carried on reading.

There aren’t many people in the restaurant at this time in the evening – just some young lads over by the window, and a woman on her own in the other corner. Thomas takes a minute to recognise the woman; it’s Karin. She’s aged. He remembers her coming to meet his old work colleague, Mikku, after a shift. It must be eight years since Mikku died of a heart attack, at sixty. Yeah, shit happens.

He smiles in Karin’s direction but she doesn’t seem to recognise him. The lads begin flicking sugar at each other. Thomas notices Karin is repeatedly moving a salt cellar from one side of the table to the other. He watches her, trying to understand what she’s doing.

She isn’t sure about the spaghetti. She’d wanted something else, but couldn’t remember what it was called, so she got spaghetti. While she’s eating the spaghetti she notices she can’t see so well, the side of her face hurts. She can’t pick up the salt on the table. She doesn’t want anyone to know, so she just sits there, and waits.

After about twenty minutes things come back into focus. She reaches out and finds she can move the salt. So she moves it again, and again, just to be sure. The girl in the pizza place orders a taxi for her. Karin says she doesn’t need a taxi. She gets into the taxi anyhow (the girl insists) and the driver asks for her address. She can’t remember the street name, so she says, ‘Oh don’t you worry about that, I’ll tell you how to drive there.’

***

Thomas steps into the road and turns right towards a tall wire fence. There’s a house behind the fence, boarded up now, with a distant view of where the land has collapsed ahead. You can’t see it from the road, but if you climb up the hill you can see it all – roads coming to an abrupt end and a vast, dusty pit.

When he reaches the fence he turns left in front of it, down an alleyway. It’s a familiar manoeuvre, avoiding areas now closed off for demolition. You have to find other ways through. The alleyway connects with a road a bit further south, running parallel to the dead-end road, skirting past the pit.

***

Karin likes this feeling, leaning against warm rock with snow all around her, underneath her and next to her, and above her an orange sky. There are no buildings nearby, though she can see the mine office in the distance. Behind the rock is the road that leads to the mine entrance. The road she came on. She walked here this morning – but why has she come?

She fiddles with a piece of paper in her pocket. She pulls it out and looks at it. Now she remembers, she went out to buy fish. But there aren’t any shops here – did she take a wrong turn? She decides to stay put, until she feels a bit better.

After a few minutes she tries to stand up, but as she moves her legs crumple beneath her and she falls back into the snow. She rolls to one side to push herself up, but can’t make her arms work. Her head nestles inside her hood and it feels like being in a tent. It’s reassuring, to be in the hood – though everything’s at such an odd angle. Tall strings of grass wave in front of her face. They poke up above the level of snow, their roots deep frozen.

Sometime later – how long? twenty minutes? two hours? – there’s a whirring noise behind her, a vibration disturbing the grasses and a smell of fuel. A rough, bearded face appears next to hers, low down in the snow and grass. She studies it carefully. It’s her husband. Why is he here? Has he just come from work?She smiles. ‘Ah, Mikku,’ she says.

‘It’s Karin, isn’t it? It’s Rune, Karin – Rune. Are you alright?’

‘Oh. Yes.’ She wonders why he is kneeling in the snow.

‘How about taking my arm and seeing if you can stand up? Here-’. Rune puts one arm under hers, and the other round her back, and pulls her up onto her feet. Karin brushes the snow off her coat and moves to pick up her bag.

‘Let me, Karin,’ Rune bends to pick it up for her, ‘here you are.’ He frowns as he hands it to her. ‘You thought I was Mikku,’ he says. She looks at his face. Did she really think he was Mikku? Isn’t Mikku dead?

‘How long have you been lying there? Shall I take you into the hospital for a check-over?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘I want to go home.’

***

Leaving his office, Thomas comes down in the lift and goes to the changing room. On the wall is a picture of a man and woman running, their hair trailing in the wind, legs high as they leap. He feels tired today, sluggish. He’s only thirty, and his father could have run twice as fast as him at his age.

Rune strides into the changing room. ‘Thomas. I have a favour to ask.’

‘Ah-huh.’ Rune always has a favour to ask.

‘I wondered if you’d give someone a lift home.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s Karin – married to Mikku? I found her – she’s a bit confused so I picked her up. But I’ve to get back to the office, and I wondered if –’

‘Sorry, no can do Rune. My machine’s broken again. I’ve got to take a part down to the first level before I head home.’

‘Damn.’ Rune strokes his beard. ‘But – couldn’t you take her with you? It won’t take you long. Then at least I’d know she’d be in good hands.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Thomas. I can’t take her, I can’t leave her here – I don’t think she’ll find her way home. It’ll only take you twenty minutes there and back. Use my truck.’

Thomas remembers Karin in the pizza restaurant, moving the salt cellar from side to side.

***

In the silent truck Karin watches a couple of reindeer standing beyond the fence, ears pricked to the breeze. Until eighty years ago the herds came this way on their migration. Then came the mine; but still, every year, some reindeer wander back, drawn by a genetic memory that sits deep.

A man opens the side door. ‘Karin. How are you?’ It’s someone else now, she’s sure. She wishes she was at home. ‘I can drive you home, if that’s alright?’

She looks straight ahead while he climbs into the driver’s seat. He straps himself in and starts the engine, turning to look at her. ‘You don’t remember me do you? I’m Thomas. I used to work with Mikku.’ He starts the engine. ‘Rune said you were over by the fenced-off entrance to the old mine.’

She looks over to where Rune found her, by a rock, facing the mine entrance. She’s puzzled by the fence. There never used to be a fence there. Why is there a fence there?

‘What were you doing there? I mean, it’s far from where you live isn’t it? Did you get lost?’

She doesn’t feel lost. She knows the area very well. Sometimes she came here to bring Mikku a meal. Other times she and Mikku sat outside in the sunshine, before his shift, drinking coffee from a flask and eating sweet buns.

She is looking in the direction of the town when Thomas swings the truck sharply to the right, towards the mine. ‘Won’t take a tick,’ says Thomas, meeting her look of alarm with a smile, ‘I have to deliver a part to the first level before I can take you home. You just sit back and enjoy the ride.’

She stares ahead. She doesn’t want to go into the mine. She doesn’t want to go down there at all.The gates part upwards and the security guard waves them through. They’re entering the tunnel, rolling down the sloping road into the mine. She looks out the back of the truck at the receding hole of daylight, then ahead at the sparkle of lights on the tunnel roof. What can she do? She grips the door handle with her right hand. Shuts her eyes.

‘Karin – are you ok?’ asks Thomas.

***

The doctor shone a torch into her eyes. She just wanted to shut her eyes, escape all this. ‘Look straight at me, please,’ he said. She did as she was told; she always did as she was told.

Afterwards he asked her to sit down at his desk. He turned his computer screen towards her. ‘You see this,’ he said, pointing with his pencil at a small bundle of lines, leading into what looked like a cabbage, ‘this is where a clot formed, and you can see the damage – here.’ He pointed again, this time at the cabbage. ‘It’s not major damage. You had a small stroke, that’s all. In fact, you’ve had quite a few strokes. And I’m afraid there will be many more. But not to worry. The brain finds other ways through – you’ll manage.’

The doctor tried to explain things to her but she doesn’t entirely remember, now, what he said. It means she’ll forget things, and she will slowly get worse not better. She remembers he told her, ‘You’ve lots of life still to live, Karin.’

***

Karin looks at the curving road ahead, the lights in the tunnel roof, blinking at her as they pass. In the darkness the dials of the dashboard glow, green and red. The windscreen wipers move slowly across, clearing rock dust from the screen.

She hasn’t been here before. Mikku came this way five days a week, for most of thirty years. He didn’t talk about it much. It was nothing to do with her. She wishes she was at home with Mikku, in the kitchen, cooking steak, listening to the radio. These days she’s alone in the kitchen.

‘Oh, perhaps you haven’t you been down here before?’ Thomas is looking at her a few seconds at a time, his eyes flitting between her face and the road. ‘It’s just like any other road – just a bit darker, and with a few more twists and turns,’ he says. She wonders how she got here, sitting in a truck in the dark, going downhill, next to a man she doesn’t know.

It only takes them ten minutes to reach the first level. Thomas is worried about Karin. He guesses she’s anxious, maybe even about to panic. She looks pale, and very tense. He wants to get her back to the surface as fast as he can. He reaches behind the seat for the box.

‘Won’t be a tick, Karin. Do you want to grab a coffee while I deliver this?’ She shakes her head. ‘There’s a café here – just like any other. It’s even got windows. Only there’s no view – just the tunnel. But the pastries aren’t bad.’

In the office Thomas finds the duty foreman to hand over the machine part but the foreman won’t take it from him. His manager has told him that Thomas will take it to the mechanics working at the lower level. Thomas protests – he has a waiting passenger – but the foreman is insistent. Thomas heads back to the truck.

When he gets there Karin isn’t in the passenger seat. He spots her on the road, heading to the lower levels. As he comes alongside he winds his window down. ‘Karin!’ he shouts. She ignores him, and keeps walking. ‘Karin!’ he calls again. He pushes open the side door. She stops but doesn’t turn towards him. ‘You shouldn’t be walking along these roads. It’s not safe. It isn’t allowed. You need a hard hat before they’ll let you do that.’

She turns to him. He wonders, for a moment, if she recognises him, and what he would do if she just ran off. Then she climbs back up into the passenger seat and shuts the door. ‘Are you ok?’ he asks for the second time.

Thomas is speaking to her. She doesn’t know if she’s ok or not. She no longer feels she can influence anything. She can only go along with what comes and try not to think about it too much, try not to worry, try not to think about the enclosing darkness, and how deep they’ve come already. Not think about all that weight of rock above, the exploding rock below, the shaking land.

She looks out of the window at the tunnel sides and sees roads going off to the right, marked with numbers and symbols she doesn’t understand. There are machines there, but no people. She feels dizzy and shuts her eyes.

Thomas glances at Karin as he eases the truck round the dark bends. He will have to try and keep her calm. He doesn’t want her freaking out on him at this depth. ‘It’s got a lot deeper since Mikku’s time,’ he says, trying to make conversation, ‘let’s stop here and get some air.’ He stops the truck, and goes round to her side to open her door. ‘It’s so deep these days, you need to get acclimatised. Five minutes should do it.’

Karin steps down out of the truck, holding on to Thomas’s arm. ‘It’s perfectly normal to feel dizzy,’ says Thomas, ‘we drive down a bit too fast these days – the body needs to catch up.’ Karin lets go of his arm and leans against the door. Her eyes are shut. He wonders what to do. What if she runs off screaming and he gets the blame? He needs to keep her talking.

‘Not many people work down here now. Just maintenance, and the guys that place the explosives. I’ve only ever done remote drilling myself.’ He’s trying hard to engage with her. It’s odd, he thinks, that he’s down here, trying to talk with an elderly woman who won’t talk back.

Then he says, ‘I wonder if I could do that – sit down here in a machine all day, drilling. Did Mikku talk to you about what it was like?’ At last, he hears her speak.

She says, ‘Quiet. He said it was – quiet.’

‘That’s the ear protectors then. Must be a racket when those machines start drilling. All I hear in the office is a beeping on the screen. I kind of like the idea of making a lot of noise with a machine. Or an explosive, yeah, that would be fun.’

She doesn’t respond. He continues, ‘Well, best be getting back in then.’

He helps her back into her seat, walks round to the driving seat, starts the engine and moves off. The headlights illuminate a sign, Z458cAP, and an arrow to the right. He has no idea where that leads, but he knows the way down to the lower level. He turns left and the road continues to descend.

‘I’m really sorry about this, Karin. I’ll get us up and you back home as soon as I’ve delivered this. OK?’ Still no reply. He knew this was a bad idea. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with her – something is. He agreed to take her because he felt sorry for her. Sorry for Mikku. He died way too young. Could it happen to him – a heart attack? Suddenly. Jeez. Being down here in the dark takes your mind to strange places.

He tries to think. What’s the practical thing to do in this situation? They have to keep going somehow. How can he make it feel alright? Sometimes he has to do that, for Sean – make things feel alright.

‘You know, my kid – Sean – he’s eight years old. Full of energy. He’d love to come down here. Thinks it’s the most exciting thing in the world. I’ve shown him pictures, but he wants to come down here and see the real thing.’

After a short pause, Thomas continues, ‘So here we are, you and I, seeing the real thing.’

The road descends, bends, descends.

Then he says, ‘You know what? I’ve an idea.’ He pulls a small camera out of his pocket. ‘Sean’s always wanted to see what it’s like down here. Do me a favour?’ With one hand he presses a few buttons on the camera, and holds it out to Karin. ‘Hold this up in front of us?’

He sees she has opened her eyes again and is staring at his hand, and the camera. ‘Please, Karin.’ She takes the camera. ‘Just press the button on the right when you’re ready.’

She holds the camera up. She looks at the small screen and the image of the tunnel walls rushing by, the front of the truck bobbing up and down, the lights flicking past. She thinks about what it’s like, being eight years old, a boy wanting to go down a mine, thinking it thrilling to be in a dark, windy tunnel.

Once her parents said they were going on a boat trip. She didn’t know where they were going, but she didn’t care. She’d been so excited, wondering what it would be like. She imagined them all arriving there, pulling the boat onto land, building a hut to live in, fishing for food, sleeping on banana leaves. She would have a parrot as a friend, and a collection of seashells. She hoped they would never come home. When they arrived, it wasn’t like that of course. But it didn’t matter. At night she lay with her head at the tent entrance and looked out at the rocks and grass and the dark sky and stars.

Funny, how easy it is to remember that. This is a sidetrack, she thinks; I can get stuck in sidetracks.

She concentrates on holding the camera up. She imagines Sean watching it, watching them hurtle through the dark tunnel.

Then she hears music. It’s coming from the phone propped up on the dashboard. Thomas is singing along, ‘Get your motor running – head out on the highway..’

‘It’s Steppenwolf – Sean really likes this one,’ he shouts.

Karin still looks at the camera screen, at the winding road ahead, dark and mysterious, each bend revealing another, steeper road.

Thomas drives a bit faster, then faster. He winds his window down and a rush of warm, recycled air enters the truck. His arm must be out, resting on the side of the truck, because she hears him tapping to the beat of the music on the side of the truck.

He’s singing – even louder now, ‘Looking for adventure, and whatever comes our way.’

She looks up. Thomas’ arm is thrashing from side to side out of the window. She feels the wind in her hair, pulling it behind her, blowing strands of grey into her face. Thomas is thumping out the beat on the steering wheel, turning occasionally to smile at her.

‘Fire all of your guns at once and… explode into space…’

As they approach the bend ahead, Thomas leans back and the truck accelerates forward. She wonders what’s round the corner.

The road ahead is steep. The sides of the tunnel bulge like rows of massive tree trunks, an impenetrable forest of rock, becoming denser as the road goes deeper. Driving into the distance their heads are silhouetted through the back window. The truck follows the line of lights in the tunnel roof, turns to the left, and disappears from sight.

Lynne Woodward

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Lynne and Rolf

If you’ve enjoyed reading ‘Letter from 68 degrees’, I’d be really pleased to hear from you.

lynne.8stap<at>68degrees.se

END

In the nearby fjäll the canyons are bursting with foaming white water, blasting its way downhill, gushing into lakes, into rivers, into the sea. Released from the frozen hold of winter there’s no stopping it.

We feel a bit like that. When our house didn’t sell we just had to hold on, make the most of it, keep fighting for a life here, but now it’s sold there’s a tremendous release of energy. We’re emptying cupboards, dismantling furniture, making plans, moving things, packing things, rejecting things, keeping things.

Everything’s on the move in all directions. We’re sorting into wood, electricals, metal, plastic, paper, cardboard, textiles, recycle or resell. Boxes of china, tables and chairs, piles of curtains and rugs trickle out our front door, rushing faster and faster back to the secondhand shop they came from. Bags of metal parts, electrical items and textiles sweep out of sight on a strong tide, drawn on an irresistible current out to the recycling centre. Like the Sea of Tears in Alice, our things float away so easily, and everything going backwards, back to its origins.

It might feel sad, but it doesn’t really. You build something up and then you let it fall apart. Kiruna’s the place for that – areas built out of the landscape return to the landscape. Places we’ve known are rushing away from us at speed. Streets knocked down only last year are already grassland, with no trace there was ever anything else there. Destroying the town doesn’t happen in a big bang – buildings are taken apart piece by piece, materials sorted into piles, and eventually, with a little assistance from a giant metal scooping claw, remaining structures just slide to the ground, and are gone.

We haven’t liked watching the destruction, but now we’re dismantling our own lives here there’s no more resistance, just a feeling of going with the flow – soon we too are gone, without a trace.

Although we’ve been planning to move from here for a couple of years, it’s strange how things have come together, or rather, apart, at the same time.

Take my indoor leggings, for instance. A favourite pair with a jazzy pattern that I’ve had for most of the time we’ve lived here. They were damaged by bleach on the knees a few years ago, and then developed a couple of tiny holes last year. In the last two weeks these holes have joined up, and now there’s a big hole, and it’s getting bigger. Next time we go to the dump, so will they. A sad loss.

There’s the swimming pool. It’s been doomed ever since the mining company paid the local council to build one in the new town. A project that has nearly bankrupted the council, but that’s another story. A pool in the new town is no use to me and I had been hoping I’d have use of the old one for as long as we’re here. Now it’s closing, the week before we leave. ‘Thankyou, swimming hall!’ say the posters, and we are invited to a valedictory Aufguss (since you ask it’s a German sauna experience where you let someone wave a towel around you and waft nice smells in your direction). I didn’t attend the Aufguss, but my last swims feel like the end of an era for both of us – me and the pool.

Then round the corner from us, Kiruna church. It will move in style, on a grand platform, to its new home next month. At the moment it’s all packed up and ready to go, just like us.

Opposite the church, my dentist. A former priest’s house. Likewise packed and ready to go.

It’s as if a tiny bolt has been removed, and from that everything has been freed to move on, including us.

We’re leaving, and packing, and every day things get taken away, or packed up, and we live with less things. A table disappears, or a bookcase, or a saucepan. Then there’s no side light, or no dish to put the fish in. The books are packed – you can’t look up to see what the bird of prey was we saw today – there’s only one jacket, no spare towels, and only one table (so everything is put on it), and the sofa is the next to go. It’s like musical chairs – when the music stops at the end of the day you have to find somewhere to sit.

It’s the repeat of when we first came to Kiruna 18 years ago, driving here from England to an unfurnished flat with only what we could bring in a car, which was no furniture and two of any essentials, a couple of camp beds, and a music system. It was probably the happiest time of my life, so I’m looking forward to the repeat.

There’s a hare in the shape of a ball, neck deep in its furry back, sitting in the grass facing our neighbour’s front door. It looks like it’s waiting for something. Just next to it is a very small spindly bush, not yet in leaf, possibly not even alive. Soft rain drizzles over the hare and it seems content.

In my mind I imagine it’s waiting for our neighbour Aina to return. She was the kind of neighbour you hope to find in a new place – characterful, outspoken, short on small talk. Not the kind that is happy discussing the weather, smiling at you through clenched teeth as if you were her best friend, but someone who tells you how it is, and doesn’t care what you think about it.

We have many stories to tell about our encounters with her – about her ability to speak her mind mainly. When she hadn’t seen us for a while she’d ask us if we’d been at home ‘counting your money’. She had a good view from her kitchen window of our entrance. She kept an eye on all the comings and goings in the bed and breakfast, and knew what our guests had been up to, when they’d arrived and when they left, and was happy to report on them to us later.

She cast a beady knowing look at us when we first arrived and claimed to like snow, and said nothing. Later that look came to haunt us, when we were cursing the endless need to shift snow from our driveway. She displayed a stoic acceptance of the suffering brought by the summer insects, listing the relentless arrival of each variety from June to September, ensuring a full season of torture for all of us living here. She was born and brought up in a village nearby, and stoicism was the way to cope. She gave us advice on things in the garden and showed us how to leave a mound of hay for hares over winter.

One day we were with her in her kitchen, watching our guests leave the house. It wasn’t until half an hour later we realised we hadn’t brought our key and the door was now locked. We realised if we could reach her son in town we could access the internet, find the guests’ phone number, and call and ask them if they could come back and let us in. But it was minus 16 and we had no outdoor clothing with us. No problem, Aina, announced, beckoning us down her stairs into the basement, where she opened a creaky old door and revealed a clapped-out looking old car, which we’d never known about. She handed us the keys. And so we found ourselves on a bit of a wild chase across town, and later out of town, to locate our guests, but that’s another story. . .

We nearly fell out with her when her pigeon-feeding reached epic proportions and our area was swamped with defecating birds morning and evening. ‘They also have to eat’, she wailed, in a kind of mock defence. She transferred her feeding area to the other side of the house and the problem was switched to her other neighbours.

When she died we felt the heart had gone out of Kiruna. During her last year she never left the house, and her son planted some bushes she could see from her kitchen window. We could imagine her response, and gratitude was unlikely. I guess she said it was pointless and a waste of money, but being a dutiful son he did it anyway. Sadly the bushes never thrived, and every year after her death there were fewer and fewer of them.

You have to be tough in this environment, so one shouldn’t be surprised, but also one of the main threats to new growth in bushes is hares, who just love those fresh young shoots. We’ve seen them nibbling away at them – only a little bit, but very often, and this way, over time, a whole bush can disappear.

This morning there’s a hare there, sitting next to the one remaining bush, in the rain, waiting. No doubt Aina had another goal in mind when the bushes were planted, and it wasn’t getting something to admire in the garden. ‘They also have to eat!’, comes to mind. The hare is waiting for some more.

Fairly early on in our days here I reflected on the subject of reindeer bottoms. That is, if you were lucky enough to see reindeer, and you felt like taking a photographic reminder of the event, the chances were you’d only record a shot of their backsides as they retreated into the birch scrub. We have very many photos of reindeer bottoms.

This led to the realisation that this was the joy of reindeer, and of all experiences of wildlife here – that you just can’t pin them down. Trying to share this with our visitors was difficult though, because they were always so disappointed if they didn’t get that perfect shot of reindeer, or the northern lights.

Coming to the end of our period in Kiruna we were inspired to make a book recording some of our memorable experiences and placing them in the landscape on a drawn map. This was an overlap of our imagination with the geographical reality. I used the real map to find and record the real names of prominent features, and alongside these we wrote the name we had given to our experience at the place.

Yesterday on a journey into the fjäll we took that book with us to help put names to the various peaks you can see from the road. So many times we’d wondered which was which, but somehow we’d never got round to doing the research. Now was our chance, armed with the drawn map we peered up at them as we passed. A solitary peak could be named, but groups of peaks were problematic because they blended into one another, depending on which direction you looked at them from. And then as the road curved sharply round one wasn’t at all sure which peak we were looking at – was it the same one we’d seen half an hour ago from another angle?

Reindeer bottoms revisited, I thought. After all these years we still had to learn that not being able to pin something down, photograph it, or name it, was the best thing about the experience.

At first I was drawn to the devastation, wanting to know what would be knocked down next, and when, and recording changes with photos. Now the battle ground that is old Kiruna town is spread over such a wide area it just makes one feel weary, yet another scene of destruction, yet another lost street. I no longer want to look, or record this and I feel weary.

People living in nearby areas have to cope with seeing the destruction of their past on a daily basis, and I guess they are weary too. A woman recently complained to Rolf that the mining company didn’t seem to care anymore about making the area around this destruction look cared for. When they first began knocking things down they made ‘parks’, put up large pictures to cover dead shop windows, made sculptures out of rubble and added street furniture nearby. Now broken wires, rubble and dust blows around the streets, and all there is to look at are lines of blue fences and digging machines peering over piles of debris. A half torn down building displays the message, ‘check for asbestos here!’ next to protruding cables and shattered brick.

Streets once near the church have become a large mud desert. There’s no attempt at making a park here, though we see they’ve placed a picnic and barbecue facility in the middle of it. Is this a joke? A little further away a run of concrete steps still stands in this desert, connecting nowhere, to nowhere.

Locals are battle-weary. It is perhaps for this reason the Swedish military decided last week it wouldn’t affect Kiruna at all if soldiers carrying guns appeared in residential streets without warning, leaning into houses and backyards as if on the attack. I’m sure the army reasoned that people here are used to living in a war zone.

Later, some Kiruna people interviewed for the Swedish television news indicated they weren’t so weary that they no longer knew what was ‘normal’. ‘Soldiers were running up here with guns near the children’s nursery, and we had no idea who they were or why they were here’, one said in shock and disbelief. It’s very hard to imagine such a thing happening in Stockholm, where you’re still allowed to have expectations of what would be considered normal and safe in your environment.

It was a surprise a few years ago when a guest referred to the ‘slag heap’ in Kiruna. We had no idea what that was, and then realised she meant the remains of the overhead part of the mine.

Which, when we thought about, we could see is a kind of ‘slag heap’. But it’s also a notable structure in town, blanketed in white snow or sprouting summer flowers, lit up at night like a cruise liner, and at Christmas sporting a lit-up tree on top. Hardly a ‘slag heap’, but it depends on your point of view, and your imagination.

I’m finding my views on things more slippery than ever these days. Buildings are removed and reappear somewhere else, and an old building in a new place isn’t really the same building. Will Kiruna’s church still be one of Sweden’s favourite buildings after this summer, when it is taken from its green hilltop park of birch trees, with a view of the mine and the distant fjäll, and deposited by the roadside outside the new town, with a view of the airport and the wetlands? Will I still like the old priest’s house when it has a view of the external water chute in the new swimming pool?

Floating on my back in the current (old) swimming pool, I was able to look out over town through the pool window. I could see the top of Kiruna church – a red spire on a round bulbous tower, silhouetted against a snow covered backdrop. Weirdly, it’s a view that evokes in me thoughts of a small southern European village in the Alps.

In a few years’ time it will be hard to think this picture ever existed. No longer a pool here, no longer a church there, and – after we leave Kiruna – no longer my brain in the water thinking of the scene. Imagine that.

Kallasjärvi, a small village by the Kalix river, very scenic.

It just doesn’t seem right to me – what do you think?

I don’t really recognise it. Wasn’t there a mountain to the left back there, and a hot geyser? Where have they gone? And where’s the flippin’ party? It should be packed by now, it’s the April bean feast, it’s always packed. But there’s no-one else here! Where are the volcanic eruptions, did the volcanoes just disappear? And that horse over there – doesn’t seem right somehow. Too big, wouldn’t you say?

Maybe, maybe we got our directions a bit wrong? I mean, it was a strong westerly when we came over and we might have just been chatting and allowed ourselves to veer a bit off track. It’s possible, isn’t it?

In which case, where the hell are we? If it isn’t Iceland…. It must be, er, Norway. Or Sweden. Or worse still, Siberia. No, can’t be Siberia, not cold enough.

Seems there’s stuff to eat, but there’s a lot of ice in the way to get to it. Now that’s not right, is it? Ice in Iceland, in April? Nah, not where we usually meet up.

The three of them look disconsolately at the frozen river. There’s a patch of water though, much inhabited by whooper swans, who are a bit territorial. They waddle up the hill to snuffle around titbits in the snow. This trip is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare.

We see them from the track, three Greenland white-fronted geese. They have probably over-wintered in southern Ireland, or south west Scotland, and now was their time to head back north, stopping over in Iceland on the way.

We’d been walking on the river when we’d had one of those ‘Tales of the River Bank’ experiences. A man skied past below us where we were sitting on a log, and we watched him take his skis off and disappear onto the track. Five minutes later he returned, but this time walking determinedly, in the same direction he originally came from. He disappeared round the bend. Then after ten minutes or so he returned, with a woman, and this time he’s skiing again, but the woman is walking.

We get talking and the explanation is that she found the skiing too slippery so he took the skis back for her so she could return walking with more ease. We are talking about birds, as there are a lot of small feeding birds nearby. She tells us enthusiastically that there are some rare birds here, from Greenland. They’re causing quite a stir in the village where they seem to have paused for a break to reset their navigation system.

When we went looking for them they were not where they were supposed to be. Another wild goose chase, we thought. But we spotted them eventually, a little further away. They did look a bit puzzled. They also looked rather ordinary to me, but anything out of its normal place can be exotic.

I don’t know what Sweden could do to make them feel more welcome. They’d clearly rather be in Iceland.

It’s not often you feel sentimental about a dental surgery, but my eyes are repeatedly drawn to my old dental surgery with a rather surprising sense of longing, and loss.

The building is wooden, painted yellow with red details, picturesque window frames and interesting sloping rooves. Built in the 1920s as a house for the priest, it designates his high status in the early society of the new built town. In the time I have lived here, half of it has been occupied by my dental surgery. Which has been a charming place for a rather unenjoyable activity.

One winter I had a 6.30 morning appointment, on one of the coldest, snowiest, darkest days of the year. I took my kick sled and pushed it through thick mounds of light snow for the 15 minute walk. Ice crystals sparkled in the air. My route passed the church and it’s grounds, and I walked through them rather than on the road, feeling the tent-like architecture of the church fitted well in the morning’s sense of magic. I was in a fairy tale, on my way to the fairy dentist, to have, well ok, an oral hygiene appointment, but apart from that it was a magical feeling.

So back to the building, as charming as ever. Only now it stands alone, in a war-torn landscape. The buildings around have all been pulled down, so now there is just rubble, fencing, and keep out signs. In the distance a three storey block is having it’s outer wall knocked out. Large skips stand ready to take waste. The dental surgery stands tall above the flattened streets, once a smaller feature on the skyline but now towering above the debris, like a single tooth left standing in a gappy old mouth.

Around this building has been significant reconstruction. The old town’s roots have been anaethetised, and removed, bit by bit. It’s been a painful process, but now we’re at the stage when we feel almost nothing, just an overwhelming sense of loss. It’s the gaps we notice.

Advances in technology mean that a building can be moved and implanted elsewhere, with entirely new roots. Near to the dental surgery, Kiruna’s church is currently being prepared to be moved to the new town (a few kilometres away), and to move it requires foundation work to widen the route, and the building of a brand new bridge.

The dental surgery’s destiny is also magic sleigh ride to the new town – it’s life has also been spared. It stands blinking into the sunlight, waiting to be rescued. No-one has said where exactly it’s new home will be, but any place will do, so long as it gets out of this battleground. Implanted there it will sparkle among the concrete buildings of the new town of Kiruna, like Madonna’s gold grille.

I’ve been to a few LKAB (the mining company) information meetings in my time. I know what to expect – a fairly slick, but very slow, presentation, lots of words projected on a screen, reassuring smiles, and ‘fika’ – a coffee and bun. In the early days of discussing the need to knock down the town and rebuild it somewhere else there were many such meetings. They were never very well attended, but a number of Kiruna residents would make the effort, possibly mainly for the ‘fika’.

Meetings followed a pattern. After a rather tedious presentation by a couple of LKAB staff, there would be questions. Someone would ask a detailed technical question that no-one would be able to answer properly, and then another person would ask a question no-one understood, because it was off the subject, or at such a tangent no-one knew how to respond. The meeting would get a bit confusing, the audience lose interest, and then it would be brought to a hasty close so that we could have ‘fika’.

So it was last night in Kiruna’s church. LKAB held a meeting on how they planned to move the church building. It followed the usual pattern, except that a vicar was involved, and there was no ‘fika’.

We learnt virtually nothing about technical or engineering aspects of moving the building, the thing we were interested in. Instead we got a vague description of the process that we’d already read about in their information leaflet, plus a lecture on the history of the church. After that there was the expected technical question or two from the floor, and the predictable ‘difficult customer’ or two – who expressed that they didn’t want the church moved at all (who does?) – and then the meeting ended. It didn’t feel like it had hit the right note.

People in Kiruna probably care more about the church building than any other. What they wanted last night, it seemed to me, was recognition that this was an emotional issue as much as a practical one. They wanted reassurance. Instead they got a project management style description of a process for moving a building, and they didn’t even get a coffee and a bun.

They were worried that something might go wrong in the move and the church might be damaged. Were LKAB’s project team up to the job? someone asked. The man from LKAB replied with a smile that this was the responsibility of Mammoet (the Dutch company who physically do the moving) and they had lots of experience – implying it was not a concern of LKAB’s, or ours.

The man from Mammoet should have been there – the one with the joystick on a tray hanging round his neck. We saw him move three buildings in town a couple of years ago. We watched him at close quarters, through a wire fence, as he carefully lowered a large two storey building down onto its new foundations, controlling every millimetre of movement. When it was safely down he lit a cigarette and gave us a thumbs up. He knew we wanted that reassurance.

It was a sunny Sunday, and the temperatures had been over zero for days, so we didn’t know quite what conditions to expect for skiing on the Kalix river. The snow would be soft, that’s for sure, and indeed as we lurched down to the river from the road we sometimes sunk up to the hip in snow. But once on the river where we could get our skis on everything was plain sailing. Smooth fast snow, perfect for gliding.

Now and again there were a few people out on the sides of the river. Cooking sausages, or just sitting in the sunshine.

A man on skis, warm enough to ski in just a lumberjack shirt, stopped to chat, and brought news of the fisherman’s hut, our destination, when we asked if there were people using it. There were, but he thought it might be possible for us to reach other places to sit.

Some intrepid skiers wanting a rest in the sun had ploughed their way with a lot of trouble through the deep snow to one side of the paths where they had made themselves a raised snow seat. We greeted them, impressed with the seat, remarking that life could be worse. They agreed it was indeed awful out here today.

As we always do when we come here, we passed the man who lives nearby who makes sure there is always firewood in the hut, puts food out for the birds, and keeps the snow pressed down so we can ski on it. He is a very kind, considerate local resident. He shouted hello from a nearby track and pressed on, dragging his dog behind him.

Further on we found the fisherman’s hut unoccupied, and better still, a wooden bench with no snow on it, right by the river, with snow around it forming a wind shelter. We were especially grateful for this, having watched a woman prepare it for us – a week ago. We’d been there then and met two women in the hut. At the time the wooden benches nearer the river were deeply covered in snow. We watched one of the women use a bit of driftwood to sweep the snow away. It was hard work – she only managed to get a bit off, and what was left was a soggy mess. ‘But’, she said, ‘that will be ok to use later’. Later, like, the next week, when we arrived wanting to sit in the sun. What a wonderful unselfish act that was. We appreciated it.

While sitting there we saw the people we’d greeted earlier on their snow seat, carrying their fishing rods. They skied on and out of sight.

Later a lone figure reappeared. It was the man, with his fishing rod, but now he was alone. I tried not to think he might have pushed his wife in the river, or buried her under the snow, but it was difficult because I’d just been reading a book of short stories in which there were a lot of murders. We smiled at him, rather uneasily. He skied on.

We listened to the rippling water and ate our lunch.

When it was time to return we passed that man again, the one without his wife, sitting on the snow under a bare birch branch. He was talking on his phone. Reporting a murder, or arranging an alibi perhaps. So we just said hello again, and skied on.

I was looking for the whooper swans. They’d moved up river since we were here last. I left Rolf talking with the man with the lumberjack shirt, now settled on a bench by the bird feeders. I found the swans not far off – about five pairs. They appear in that particular stretch of water for just a few weeks every year, and it feels very reassuring to see them there again. There’s a timeless quality about their drifting around there, gathering for the next leg of their journey. I expect they have their own tales to tell, but all I heard was honking.

I returned to find Rolf still talking. He’d discovered that the man in the lumberjack shirt had used the computer program that he’d made for the mining company when he’d worked for them 25 years ago, long before we were living here. They had quite a few things to discuss. It was a rather surprising intersection of two people’s lives, uncovered one sunny day on the river.

Not wanting to go home yet we continued by car towards Nikkoluokta, heading for a place on the river where we knew there was a good view of the mountains. There was nowhere to park, so we intended just a pit stop. I got out briefly while Rolf turned the car round, and then the car got hard stuck in the soft snow. Oh the shame. We had a spade in the car so Rolf tried to free up the wheels.

Another car arrived and a man got out and started making helpful suggestions, and he and I and his partner were all pushing the car but still it wouldn’t budge. The man went to his car and brought out a spade neatly wrapped in plastic, before realising we already had one. We brought some gravel over to the wheels and tried pushing the car again. Eventually the car was released.

Obviously we were very grateful to the couple. They asked us where we lived and we said Kiruna, and then we asked them, and they said Stockholm. Now that was a surprise, Stockholmers not being known for their practicality or helpfulness. But they were both from Kiruna originally and were coming to stay in their family hut for a short while. (Aha, that explained the thoughtfully brought plastic covered spade, to move mushy springtime snow.)

On this one day on the Kalix river, we remarked in the car going home, we’d met several helpful, friendly people, and possibly, a murderer.