Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

Kiruna being quite far away from most other places in Sweden – did you know if you turn Sweden round 180 degrees on its toe it reaches as far as Rome? – when people come home for Christmas they usually stay for more than a night. These are Hemvändare – ‘Home returners’ – and they’re easy to spot around town.

They walk around in noisy gangs, meeting up with old school friends and reliving their wild teenage years. Couples wear slightly matching winter clothing, and they look cold. In cars they never stop to let people cross the road, and in shops they stand a bit too close to you in the queue and talk loudly in your ear. To keep them out of mischief friendly sports matches are arranged in town, and they’re encouraged to use up excess energy in the swimming pool, where they plough relentlessly up and down.

But this isn’t enough. After half a day back home, locals are desperate for ways to get them out from under their feet.

Suddenly, though people have not worried about it at all up to Christmas, when Hemvändare arrive it is absolutely essential that the snow on the roof is cleared away, before it causes a serious accident. Hemvändare, or, HemV to the rescue! They’re up on that roof, balancing precariously on the fire escape, shovelling off that snow.

The backyard, knee-deep in snow, as it is all winter, urgently needs clearing – for reasons that are not easily explained. HemV know how to work the snow clearing machines, and they’re off! Snow shooting in all directions and them occupied for the next two hours. Over the Christmas period you see them up and down the street, enjoying life as it used to be, when they were younger and had to live with snow – HemV are tough, they know the score, they can take it.

Then there are those old rusty vehicles, buried in snow at the end of the yard, haven’t been in use for over two months but now, over Christmas, they’re needed. They have to be dug out, the engines turned over, and if they aren’t working, they need HemV to get them working. They can fix it. The sound of revving engines echoes up and down Kiruna’s hills, exhaust fumes filling the cold Christmas air.

HemV are needed to get in the shopping, and they’re needed to walk the dogs. They’re needed to sort out that rubbish in the porch, and mend the broken stairs down to the basement. HemV – Your Town Needs You!

Then, after a few days, when HemV have fixed all the broken things, cleared all the snow away, and drunk the last cans of Lapin Kulta, they get back on a flight to Stockholm, pleased to be going home at last, proud to have been born in Kiruna, but relieved to be living somewhere else, where there’s no snow to clear and you can pay someone else to come and fix things that are broken.

And in Kiruna, locals breathe an even bigger sigh of relief, finally stop finding things to be done and at last just stretch out on the sofa and watch Netflix films. Peace returns.

There were a couple of sticking points over whether Sweden would join the EU. One was the right to continue to sell ‘snus’ – Swedish mouth tobacco – and the other was the right to retain state-run alcohol shops. The rest of Europe is indifferent to the ‘snus’ habit, but people find it strangely restricting that in Sweden you can only buy your alcohol from the state-owned shop.

In the old days that would be at a high counter, whispering your sins to the frowning sales person, peering at the rows of bottles behind glass cases and trying to remember the code number for the particular bottle you wanted. Then hurriedly taking it away in a plain brown paper bag, stuffed guiltily into your shopping bag. Now the alcohol shops are like any other, shelves of their wares displayed for self-service and paid for on the way out at a till. Except that these shops aren’t open evenings and weekends after Saturday afternoon, never promote alcohol, or make special offers to tempt people to buy more.

There is no doubt that this system – and it is a system, the shop’s name is ‘System Bolaget’, known colloquially as ‘the system’ – results in you drinking less. Spontaneous drinking, if you haven’t stocked up, just can’t happen. Usually, when you feel like a bottle of wine, the shop is already shut. Or if it’s open, you can’t be bothered to slog up the hill to the shop, inevitably never situated conveniently round the corner.

Imagine, then, if you will, Saturday 23rd December. On this day in Kiruna, the alcohol shop is open until 2pm, and then it is shut. Until 27th December. This is a curiously enlivening thought.

It’s Christmas, and although Swedes don’t drink more than many other European nations, like everywhere else here in Kiruna they really don’t want to run dry over Christmas, especially with all those relatives up from Stockholm camped out in the spare room.

So does the threatened closure of the only source of alcohol in the town lead to a shop full of tense angry shoppers, pushing each other out of the way in their rush to reach the till before closing? Does it make your average Kiruna resident bad tempered? Let’s see.

Stepping through the till gates people pause, look around hopefully to see who they might know. They will likely know someone. Or maybe most people. They’ll certainly know the staff – ‘how’s it going? busy yet? Happy Christmas!’

Someone asks a staff member about a particular type of Rioja, and decides, in the end, to have the Merlot. Or maybe, what about the selection of Californian reds this year?

But will it go well with the ham? It will? Not the way she cooks it!! Did you see what they wrote about him in the paper? Such a shame. You’re looking good though, wild nail colour!

Neighbours, brought closer together than they normally manage across their front yards, chat happily between the long shelves of lagers, leaning on their trollies and idly sifting through the enormous range of bottled beers. In the end they select the old favourites – it’ll be Finnish lager as usual – while asking after a parent’s recent heart attack, or explaining how they bought their son’s new dog.

Hemvändare – ‘home returners’ for Christmas – bump into one another, joyfully, while negotiating their way around the shelves of medium priced red wine.

Hello there! Great to see you again, how’s it all going? Norrköping? No, Västerås. Accountancy! hah! So sorry to hear that, how awful for you. Divorce goes through next month. Oh he’s at school now, plays in the junior football league. This one’s terrific – have you tried the white?

Brought together by a common purpose, people display concern, cooperation, helpfulness, amusement, curiosity, tact, and seasonal cheerfulness. So, while it may be true, in the words of Ian Anderson, that the Christmas spirit is ‘not what you drink’, you can still find it here, in the state alcohol shop, just before it closes for Christmas.

Who’d have thought it?

Pass us that bottle will you?