Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

Kiruna people love their motor vehicles. Every kind – classic cars, trucks, vans, tractors. Such is the obsession that even children have special dispensation to drive – a kind of car which pretends to be a farm vehicle and is supposed to have a low speed engine (usually a very noisy one). And yet, the transport of choice over a longer period has to be the well-named ‘Spark’, truly a transport of delight.

I don’t know how long they’ve been around, but long enough for there to be ‘Spark parking areas’ in town. They are most often used by elderly women, and so are seen as a kind of walking stick in the snow, but they are an extremely practical item for anyone in a climate of cold snow – why carry your shopping when you can slide it home? Uphill a Spark enables you to push shopping you wouldn’t want to carry. Downhill, a Spark delivers your shopping home as fast as a car.

The enemy of the Spark is grit. When the temperature rises and the council put grit on the pavements in case they turn to ice, the grit brings a Spark to a grinding halt. When we first moved here grit was spread on only half the pavement for this reason. These days it’s spread everywhere so the new gritters obviously don’t use a Spark.

I’ve discovered that the best way to be taken for a local is to use a Spark. If you want to blend in then using a Spark will do it. It announces you are not a visitor, and that you’re probably over 70. Cars are even more likely to stop for you. It’s a tremendous disguise for a would-be burglar – no-one would suspect anyone lurking around on a Spark.

So a harmless form of slow transport for the elderly – why would you want one of these?

Just before Christmas our car had a flat battery. We discovered it ten minutes before the shops shut for the four day Christmas break. We realised we had no battery charger. We called the garage who apologised it would take them 20 minutes to come out (as it was a Sunday this seemed pretty good to us), and then we realised if there was something wrong with our battery we would need a charger to keep us mobile over the coming days.

By now it was eight minutes before the shops shut. I kicked off down the street on my Spark. Fortunately, there was no new grit and the Spark flew downhill. Recklessly ignoring the rights of pedestrians on the pavement, I careered over humps of snow, manoeuvring my way across crossroads, reaching the shopping centre at two minutes to closing. After tying up my Spark (one minute) I entered the shop as they were dimming the lights. I made my way to the darkened till, clutching the item to my chest. I felt I had won the lottery. There are times when a Spark is all you need.

Kiruna is on the edge of an area known as ‘Tornedalen’. This region extends from Sweden into Finland (that part was given away by the Swedes to the Russians after losing a battle). The cultural identity of the region is still visible, and although strictly speaking Kiruna isn’t in Tornedal, there are many people from the area living here.

Tornedalen has it’s own language – Miänkieli – a Finnish-based language which has a recognised status as one of Sweden’s minority languages. As with many languages it comes with a pattern of thinking, an approach to life. Tornedal people have traditionally lived in difficult conditions, in small communities, frequently exposed to travellers, in close cooperation with local Sami people, and sometimes in conflict with the authorities. Their approach to life has often been expressed in stories, sometimes in song.

The stories are usually humorous and ironic and it’s hard to pinpoint what, exactly, makes them so ‘Tornedal’. Here’s an example.

Last week in Kiruna, a local musician, Daniel Wikslund, was telling an audience that he’d recently been in a much warmer country. ‘People always want to know what it’s like to live in the cold,’ he said. ‘I told them temperatures of minus 40 degrees can happen and then we tend not to wear flip flops. It can be very quiet in such cold, but wonderful. It’s so cold that things happen.

‘Have you heard about the experiment you can do in freezing conditions? You throw boiling water into the air and the water freezes into particles before it comes down again? Well, (he said), it’s like that with other things too. When you speak in the cold temperatures, the words come out but then they hang there in the air, in giant frozen speech bubbles. These bubbles hover around – you can feel them there, if you reach out with your mittens. Then much later, when the spring winds come and bring the warmer air, and the birds arrive from the south, then the bubbles begin to melt and the words get released. It can happen anywhere. You can be walking past an empty bus stop and suddenly you’ll hear talking, but there’s no-one there! Everywhere, lots of words in the air!’

The audience was quietly smiling, but not laughing. They knew that though this sounds like a fairy story, at another level it’s true. It’s very quiet here in the winter, and it can feel like people hold back from talking. But then later, when it’s warmer, people warm up too, and there’s more talk in the air.

‘So that’s the reason why people in this part of world never talk behind other people’s backs – because you never know when, or where, those words are going to come out.’