Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

Kiruna’s Snow Festival – if you search for it you can read about the winter wonderland and the fun to be had at the festival. The winter and wonderland bit are true of course.

I wouldn’t want to run it down. The reindeer rides look fun, and every year the snow sculpting competition results in some weird and wonderful works of art, as well as some clumpy, uninteresting blocks of hacked-at snow.

If you’re into snowboarding you can catch some fancy footwork displays, and if you’re into snow scooters you can admire the ones lined up in the town square. You can get a burger from ‘Empes’ (always a pleasure, even if, like me, you don’t actually want to eat the burger) and you can watch the children larking around in the snow maze playground below town.

Then, the highlight of the occasion, you can watch the snow clearing competition – machine pitted against machine, 30 cms of snow moved in an hour – it’s a tense but exciting battle. It’s fun for all the family, as they say, at Kiruna Snow Festival.

Still, despite all these activities, at the end of the day – and the end comes fairly quickly at this time of year – the festival is a winner because of its main ingredient, snow.

I noticed today, clearing snow from the driveway in our garden, that the snow coming down is the best, most beautiful, most luxurious snow we’ve had all winter. It’s soft, it’s light, it’s smooth. As you push a sled it ripples ahead of you like moving water, and then it settles again in mounds like whipped cream.

It’s the Snow Festival and the organisers have specially ordered snow that feels like silk pyjamas.

One of the things about running a b and b is that you come across all kinds of people. Now and again I’m reminded that some people’s lives and circumstances are really, really tough.

Take Susannah and Robert (not their real names), for instance. They’re from a continent far away – let’s not say which – and times are so tough for them that they have decided (they tell us) to ‘take a working holiday’. Now to you and me that might sound like a lot of fun – work, that’s a holiday? What could be better! But no, in this (and many other cases) ‘working holiday’ means impoverishment and hardship. Really.

True, they’ve had to spend a lot of money on their airfare to get over to Scandinavia in the first place, and also to fund their tour of Europe. (They’ve come all this way,- they can’t not see the Eiffel Tower!). They’ve been to Berlin, Paris, Zurich, Venice, Stockholm, Copenhagen. It’s been really hard. They’ve been jet-lagged. They’ve been moving on every few days. They’ve had to pay for ALL their meals.

Anyway, I digress a bit, because here they are now, writing to us about staying in 68 degrees bed and breakfast for a couple of nights. The thing is, they say, our rates are ‘way too high’ for them, but still they’d really, really love to stay with us. They’re students, on a working holiday, so, they suggest, maybe they could stay with us in a smaller room, or sleep on our couch – perhaps in return for a bit of ‘help’ in our backyard (though they’re understandably unclear what sort of help we might be in need of).

I’m a bit resistant to Susannah and Robert, at first. I don’t think our rates are high, given that we provide very comfortable spacious accommodation, a good breakfast, and lots of friendly help and advice. But then I have to check myself. It’s a good idea to put yourself in other people’s shoes before you judge them.

You see, Lynne, I say to myself, you have to remember the particular circumstances. When Susannah and Robert come all the way to Kiruna, like many poor students before them, they’ll have to go on a northern lights trip. And that’s not cheap. It costs double our nightly rate, just to sit outside in the dark for three hours in some loaned warm overalls, hoping the northern lights appear. But it has to be done, and, obviously, they can’t ask a tour company for a reduced price.

Then they’ll also have to go on a husky dog tour (you can’t come to the arctic and not have pictures of yourself with huskies!). That’s going to cost three times our nightly rate – for a three hour tour, going round in circles in the forest – and they can hardly ask the dog sled company for a free ride! The dogs have to eat, after all, and Bear Grylls – that’s the charismatic tour leader that’ll be taking them out – he has to eat and keep himself stocked in mountain jackets and survival trousers.

Then there’s Susannah and Robert’s meal out in ‘Spis’ – they’ve read on Trip Advisor that the special six course local specialities platter has to be experienced. They can hardly go to a nice restaurant like that and offer to do the washing-up! So that’ll cost them too.

Then there’s the entrance fee to the Ice Hotel, the souvenir champagne glasses from the Ice Hotel shop, and the pair of all-singing all-dancing Tecnopro Capri Pink Thermal Leggings they’ll have to buy (because it’s damned cold up here and they didn’t bring enough clothing). Shops won’t offer them a reduction, and they can’t very well ask for one without being seen as scrounging beggars.

No, the only way Susannah and Robert are going to be able to manage their budget on their trip to Kiruna is to ask us, very nicely, and with as sweet a smile as they can muster, if we’ll reduce our rates or let them stay for free. You can see their problem.

Sometimes, sitting at home in the evenings, I notice how quiet it is. Kiruna seems hidden away, closed off. There are no cars passing by, no people, no sign of life. It feels a sort of Lake Wobegon of the north.

The snow can make you feel cut off, even though the roads are all kept open. Only some areas are kept clear, and these are usually where cars need to go, or where people need to walk to reach their houses. Where a path isn’t considered necessary a wall of white will quickly fill it and then you can’t see there was ever a path there.

Around our house we keep clear the area up to our front door, and a path down to our garage. The other parts of the garden all disappear. Everything is a soft white marshmallow of gentle ups and downs, swirls and hills.

In and around Kiruna we can only follow the paths that are open for us. As a runner, that’s roads and paths in town, or snow scooter tracks on the edge of town. As a car user there are only four routes out of town and two of them are dead ends, but they are all kept free of snow. Whenever we are out on a winter path or on a road we’re always on the look out for new ways through in the snow, new places to explore.

A few days ago on one of the regular roads out of town we saw a road we hadn’t seen before. How could we have not noticed it, leading so clearly into the forest? There was a large warning sign at the junction, which maybe we’d registered unconsciously before and assumed it said ‘no access’. But now we looked at it we saw it warned off walkers and dogs, but cars could use it ‘at their own risk’. Irresistible.

It didn’t appear to be going anywhere. We knew from the map that all there was here was low forest, and beyond that, a lake, which we had been on at another point further away. The ‘road’, we noticed, wasn’t a real road. Snow had been cleared from the ground in the forest and vehicles had driven over the thin layer left behind. At this time of year a road like that isn’t an easy option – you have to work hard to keep it free from snow, and given the length of this road, someone had worked very hard indeed.

We drove along it cautiously, noticing nothing unusual along the way. Then we reached the lake. The road continued down onto the ice, and a wide expanse of snow-free ice stretched far ahead in three directions. It felt like we’d crept through a secret door in the forest and stepped out into another world.

A heavy duty snow clearing tractor was out on the lake, a spray of snow shooting to the side. Near the tractor there was a man standing by a snow scooter. Nothing else to be seen but broad motorways of ice in all directions. We couldn’t work it out. There were no villages on the other side, no reason for ice roads, no reason for such a vast area to be so precisely and perfectly cleared of snow that the ice surface glistened in the low sun’s rays. What was all this for?

The great thing about going through a secret door in Kiruna is that you know it very likely leads to a memorable experience, not to a full stop. Anywhere else we might have just gone home, puzzled, but here the obvious thing to do was park the car, walk out onto the ice, and ask the man with the snow scooter what it was all about.

It was below minus 20 degrees out there and we felt it as we walked towards him. The man was dressed in boots and warm clothing, but it was hard not to notice his bare hands. Mine were smarting from the cold inside my gloves so I couldn’t take my eyes off his while Rolf was asking him what he was doing. As expected he was friendly and pleased to talk, and still the hands remained outside the pockets. Those hands, I thought, are used to cold temperatures.

So what were the ice motorways for? Well cars of course. Fast, new ones specifically. Companies come here to test drive their new cars (and, maybe, to show off a bit). The man we were talking to was employed every year to keep the lake area free of snow for the test drives, which usually took place in February.

It was quite a task, he explained. It’s a very large area of lake, and they can’t keep it clear of snow with just a snow scooter and a clearing tool. But to take a snow clearing tractor out there the ice needs to be at least half a metre thick to hold its weight so they can’t do that at the beginning of the season when the ice has only just formed. They can’t, either, just wait until it’s colder and hope the ice will be thick enough for a tractor, because if snow falls heavily it keeps the ice layer warm so the ice is less thick. So at the start of the season, in November, they have to clear relatively thin layers of snow from the ice with a snow scooter, and keep doing this until the ice is thick enough. Clearly it was thick enough now, because we were standing on the lake next to a tractor.

Before I even looked up at the driver of the tractor I’d guessed it would be a young woman. So typical in Kiruna.

A few minutes later the man on the snow scooter went back up the road, and the tractor moved further out on the lake.

I found myself thinking what it must feel like, being up there in the tractor’s driver seat, with a view out over the empty expanse of ice, shooting snow into the air. Later in life, I reckoned, she’d find it hard to think of a better job.

We went out in the bright low sunlight a few days ago and I took lots of photos. They’re amazing (do you want to see them?). The vivid red bands in the sky, the orange paint washes spreading over snow-covered hills.

Now we have some daylight our excursions are always around that time. We go out to see the colours thrown up along the horizon, the candle effects shooting up from the sun into the sky, the ice crystals in the sunrise.

It’s impossible to resist taking photographs, and if you can find a bit of running water (rare here in the winter – you need to know where to find a very narrow passage in a wide flowing river), and if you can catch the sky’s reflection too – that’s the jackpot.

At this time of year our guests are excited by the amazing shots of the sun and the sky they’ve caught on their phones. I don’t like to dampen their enthusiasm but I’ve seen it all before. I take hundreds of them, every year, and every one of them’s a winner. It isn’t hard.

Then each day, after these spectacular scenes, the long hours of twilight return, and I really don’t mind. I’m used to it. Everything comes down a notch, retreats a bit, becomes a bit more mysterious. You see, but not so well. Daylight is a torch shining on the world and, most of the time you just don’t need it.

Perhaps I’d be a sort of slow, white slug, living in perpetual half-light. But too much light, too much stimulation, can make us stressed, anxious, over-active, and in need of ‘mindfulness’ courses to calm down. This time of year is almost perfect; an hour or so a day of seeing the sun is enough, I find, and then the blue twilight washes around me the rest of the day like soft amniotic fluid.

After our trip out the other day the sun had sunk completely before we began our homeward journey.

I looked back at the sky and took one last shot.

The landscape’s shapes were marked out in soft grey tones, and the moon hung low over a blue whale-shaped mountain.

A visitor to Kiruna doesn’t just go somewhere dark to see the aurora, they have to go somewhere that sounds spectacular and special – to the ‘Aurora Sky Station’, ‘The Aurora Dome’, or ‘The Aurora Coliseum’. They have to have a Very Special Aurora Experience, in a magical make-believe world, out in the forest, ideally in something resembling a scene out of ‘Frozen’.

Alternatively they have to go ‘chasing the lights’ in a car, all night, for no apparent reason, driving to Abisko, or all the way to Finland, because perhaps, just perhaps, they might see the aurora there. Or maybe not. And if not, at least they’ve had an exciting car journey, in the dark, when they can’t see anything.

It’s a problem, obviously. You sell an northern lights tour but your customers don’t necessarily get to see any aurora so you have to give people something else to focus on. A Sky Station, a Dome, a Coliseum, a snow scooter trip, stories around the campfire, scouting for boys, anything – as long as it takes their minds off those pesky, non-appearing aurora.

Maybe tour companies are missing a trick here. The amazing thing about seeing aurora in Kiruna is that it happens in unspectacular settings, in ordinary life. You go out shopping and on the way there you look up and see the northern lights. You’re walking home from town, and suddenly, you see the northern lights. You’re packing up the car, calling in on a friend, going to fill up with petrol, taking the dog for a walk, having a pee in the back yard, and you see the northern lights. It’s totally laid-back, take it as it comes, for real.

So here are some ideas on how to maximise this aspect of the northern lights.

Cut ‘n Blow Dry Aurora

This one could work so well. You sit back in a chair to have a haircut, wash, blow dry, and there’s a viewing glass above you so you can watch the aurora at the same time. Could work for a nail parlour too. Or even a dentist. Hours would have to be night time, obviously.

Aurora and Chips

You have to trust me on this one. I’ve seen it work with the wildlife safari. What you do is you have a chip shop or stall, and then if people see northern lights they pay more for their chips. If they don’t see any, then the chips are cheap – as chips. Pink aurora are really expensive chips. Green are moderately priced chips. All you need is a chip fryer and some benches.

Parking Aurora

Another version of ‘Aurora and chips’. Present your time stamped ticket on departure, no recorded aurora, reduced parking fee.

Drive-in Aurora

No-one wants to get cold. No-one really wants to sit in a dome or igloo with a load of other tourists and make polite conversation while waiting for the northern lights to appear. What they want is a drive-in aurora – bring the car, turn off the engine, watch and wait. We’ve tested this one; it works.

Aurora Run

You run. You might see aurora. If you don’t, at least you get fit. There doesn’t need to be any fancy building to keep you warm while waiting for them to appear. This business is very cheap to set up.

Aurora Bingo

Aurora hunting is a gamble which involves a lot of sitting around feeling bored, just like Bingo. So at Aurora Bingo people fill in their bingo sheet, and if aurora appear, then their numbers get lucky. But only if they also line up in the right combinations.

Auroramon Go

Virtual aurora. A game supplied with local aurorastops, and players have to find and ‘capture’ aurora. Just like the real thing. Only, not.

(And our favourite….)

Backyard Aurora

Stand in our backyard at ’68 degrees bed and breakfast’ to look for the aurora (see below). Prop yourselves up between the wooden stair railings and the snow shovel, with a view out over a (scenic) garage. If you stay with us you can do this one for free. If you’re cold, just come indoors and have a cup of tea. Go out again when you know they’ve appeared. Or try going shopping – that sometimes works. Backyard Aurora – the closest visitors will ever get to the real experience. Sorted.

The sun returned today after a month of lolling casually below the horizon. It only just peeped over the top but it felt like a bolt of lightening delivering an electric shock to us desensitised, chilled-out locals.

Sitting in my living room wearing dark shades against the glare of daylight got me thinking. Kiruna’s a quiet kind of hood. No real problems.

Or are there?

The latest ‘Scandinoir’ TV crime drama series, ‘Midnight Sun’, is set in Kiruna. Violence, rampant criminality, murder, wild animals, gang warfare, racism, drug dealing – all part of everyday life, apparently, and I’d never noticed. It’s dark though, that’s for sure, and they say that makes us all a bit mad.

I’d not noticed that people calmly walking along the dark streets are really tense, unpredictable, and ready to crack at any moment. In the summer they wear peaked caps the wrong way round so you know they’re rebels, but in the winter you just can’t tell – they’re just hoodies, in ‘the hood’. And there ain’t nothing good in the hood.

Did I mention crack? Everywhere you turn its white, white and more white. The streets overflow with the stuff. You can’t escape it. You try and try to clear it away, but the next day it’s there again. There’s no escaping the stuff. Legalising hasn’t helped at all.

I start seeing the town differently.

At the end of our street a sign says ‘Hud’. That’s a beauty parlour – ‘hud’ means skin. And yet…. the town has always had its hoods – there’s the company hood, the railway hood, and the commercial hood, and now we also have the New Town hood (nobody will live there), the secret shopping hood (everyone shops there but no-one admits to it), and the husky dogs galore hood (people visiting spend time in this hood, and the rest of us don’t know where it is). Are any of these hoods bad?

Further up the street another neon sign tells us. ‘BAD’ it screams. I’d thought it was a reference to the swimming pool, but now I’m beginning to wonder.

Street gangs, we have a few. They deal of course. Mainly in maggots (fishing is the drug of choice here). It’s too cold to hang out on street corners so you’ll find them chilling out in ‘Empes’, Kiruna’s oldest hot dog stall. Only this year it’s had a facelift – the cold outdoor area is now indoors and heated, the drab wooden building now boasts bright leather seating. But how can you chill, man, on a plush red banquette? ‘Empes’ is a symbol of our lost cultural identity and that is making us all a bit crazy.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, 2016 is the year that brought us Danish ‘hygge’. Tourists arrive expecting to find it. But Kiruna never has and never will be party to the movement of ‘the art of building sanctuary and community, of inviting closeness and paying attention to what makes us feel open hearted and alive’. Celebrating the everyday? Kiruna? It’s not an everyday sort of place.

For comfort, teenagers turn to their Ride. That’s the snowscooter of course. It ain’t perfect for the mean streets, but it works on the white stuff. Actually, Kiruna’s the home of ‘Pimp My Ride’ – it invented the ‘EPA tractor’, the pimped-up car made to be legal for a teenager to drive. But not all the dudes are that lucky, some have to make do with a kick sled. No pimping possible. It can be tough, being cool in Kiruna.

Then, in this hood, where plenty of shit goes down, there’s the derelict, empty buildings, the abandoned streets, the demolition gangs. One day there’s a housing estate, the next day, nothing. That’s the way it is in Kiruna. When the Godfather says something will happen, it happens. One day houses, next day, rubble. Deal with it.

You don’t forget things like that. In the badlands of Kiruna, on the edge of the mine’s pit, they’re blasting, Star Wars style, beneath you. In bed, at two in the morning, the whole house shakes. I’m trying not to lose my head. The Godfather has decided. You pay your protection money, you get rehoused.

Kiruna. Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge.

I try not to be sentimental but knowing that some of Kiruna’s historic buildings will be knocked down this year has me repeatedly wandering around them, running near them, looking longingly back at them.

Among the buildings due to disappear this year are Kiruna’s station and the old Railway Hotel. If you look at photos taken around 1903 the area looks just the same. The old railway track runs right next to the buildings and was in use here until just a couple of years ago when the station was moved out of town making this bit redundant.

I read that at one point there would have been fifty or so trains a day so this wouldn’t have been a quiet part of town. It’s deathly quiet now. I like to run on the walking path that goes along the old track. There’s no longer any reason for anyone to come here; it’s just me and the ghosts. When the mining company (LKAB) knock these buildings down, the path will still be there, and then there will perhaps be even more ghosts – homeless ones.

The week before Christmas LKAB put out a full page announcement in the local free paper, listing all the buildings they’re going to knock down or move this year. It was a long list. It was very matter of fact, with no attempt to cushion the blow. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise – we’ve known what was going to happen for a few years now, but somehow the announcement of the details and the months that it would happen, and that it would all happen this coming year, came as a shock.

Now if it had been an information piece from the local council it would have felt much less of a blow. When they say something is planned to happen in relation to the moving and rebuilding of the town, then it might happen, or it might not, and if it does happen it most likely won’t happen when they say it will. But if LKAB say something will happen, then it most certainly will.

The timing is strange you might think. It brought me down a bit to read it, the week before Christmas. But LKAB are masters at the art of managing expectations. Or as is often said, nowadays in Sweden people are good at informing you first, in a nice warm consultative way, before they run you over. As I ran towards the mine offices, the office windows’ lights spelled out ‘GOD JUL’ (‘Happy Christmas’) from LKAB to the town. God Jul indeed.

Photo of Kiruna’s rail station, by Borg Mesch.

We sometimes have guests who now live in places where the winters have become warm and green. They come here to experience again the cold winters of their childhood.

You know you’re in a real winter landscape when you can safely walk out onto the river. Especially if someone has already turned it into a road (‘Warning’ says a sign, ‘Don’t fish in the road’).

Today we were talking to the man who lives on the other side of the river. He clears the ice of snow every year, tests its weaker parts to ensure the quality and thickness of the ice, and then makes it obvious to all-comers that this is a road. He isn’t paid to do this, and he said when he sees groups of visitors there on a paid-for tour – specifically brought there to be impressed by ‘a road on the ice’ – he does wonder whether it’s the tour company that should be paid, or the man who made the road.

He was joking of course. He doesn’t do it for payment; it’s a public-spirited gesture. But we agree it feels strange when something like this brushes up against a commercial, self-seeking tourist industry.

There have been warnings this winter about melting temperatures in the Arctic. Although we haven’t quite experienced the level of warmth they seem to have predicted, this winter has certainly been warmer than average. One day a couple of weeks ago it reached plus seven degrees, which is not at all common in December. The top layers of snow melted, our environment became icy, grit had to be spread everywhere, and all the usual ways of making things work had to be adjusted to new conditions. They say that at least there’s a ‘snow guarantee’ in Kiruna, but if we continue to get those sort of plus temperatures this could change.

The Ice Hotel has been good up to now at marketing its extreme brand of winter to people looking for an icy thrill. I had rather fallen out of love with it, after last year’s rather dull sculptures, unimaginative designs, and an ice bar which collapsed in the first month. This year, though, they’ve pulled out all the stops and the ice rooms and sculptures are unusual, beautiful, and impressive. They’ve made a ‘normal’ ice hotel, which will melt in the spring, and next to it they’ve built an ice hotel which is only ice on the inside, so that means it can be open all year round. Solar panels will keep the ice cold in the summer.

The idea of the 365 day ice hotel didn’t win me over at first. Why would you want to visit an ice hotel in the summer?

But then, perhaps they’re on to something. If our real winters are going to disappear, perhaps in the future the whole of Kiruna will be inside a giant 365 day environment bubble. Like the opposite of a giant greenhouse – a giant white house, where the temperature can be monitored and maintained at a steady minus 5 degrees and the snow kept cold.

Then visitors will have a guaranteed winter city, and, more importantly, someone will be able to charge an entrance fee.

We live at the end of the world. Some 17th century graffiti in Jukkasjärvi church says so, and for travellers coming from mainland Europe it must have felt like that.

Some strange ideas are still floating around today. Many of them are connected with the northern lights, as many of our visitors remind us. One guest walked for two hours in minus 20 degrees because a friend had seen them at a particular spot out of town so she thought that was where she was most likely to see them.

The same belief is displayed in a question we’re repeatedly asked – ‘where should we go to see the northern lights?’ My usual reply, ‘in our garden’, is instantly dismissed. ‘So,’ they say, ‘where would be a good place to see them?’

If you’re running a tourist company in town you’ll tell them that the best place to see them is in your own very special place out of town, and one of your tours will take them there. If you are the local tourist organisation (privately owned and run) you will tell them they have to go to Abisko, where they can pay to go up the mountain to the ‘Aurora Sky Station’.

No-one, it seems – except us – will tell you, ‘in the sky, where it’s a bit dark’.

Strange ideas begin with the visitor’s (often false) preconceptions and can be confirmed by the business of tourism and the need to give people clear answers, even if that means they’re false ones.

Take the ‘Arctic Circle’, for instance. Leaving aside the fact that most people couldn’t mark it anywhere near accurately on a map – it must be below Iceland they reason (it isn’t) – when people come to Kiruna they’ve usually at least understood that we’re above it. They believe in it as fact – but like Father Christmas and the flat earth, it isn’t that simple.

A comic musical in town last week focussed on this issue. A village was in disagreement with the local council who wanted to move their sign, ‘The Arctic Circle’, further up the road where more money could be made in the nearby facilities. The audience laughed, but knowingly. Because they knew that the ‘Arctic Circle’ doesn’t really exist.

You did know (didn’t you?) that the line that is ‘the circle’ is a representation of the southern most point you can see the midnight sun, or experience polar night. That means that ‘on the line’ this happens for just one day a year, and the further you go north of it, the more days of midnight sun and polar night you have. But, you say, yes yes, but you can mark it on a map in that case, so it sort of exists.

Well, no, actually. Did you know (I didn’t, I confess, until yesterday) that due to the gravitational pull from the planets this ‘line’ is moving north 15 metres every year? That means that every year the ‘Arctic Circle’ is in a different place.

But don’t worry, if you want to hold on to the map you have it’ll be right again in 10,000 years’ time when the ‘Arctic Circle’ has started to move back south again.

Even in Kiruna you can’t get away from sentimental music you’ve heard for too many Christmases. The only reason to rush around here at this time of year is when you want to get out of the shop before they play ‘Last Christmas I gave you my heart….this year, to save me from tears I’ll give it to someone special’ for the second time.

Otherwise Kiruna’s leisurely pace continues over the festive season and no-one seems to be making any special effort.

Except, perhaps, ‘hemvändare’ – home for Christmas, the relatives who moved south and are ‘home’ for Christmas, get to hang around on street corners smoking, meeting up with old school friends and filling up the bars and restaurants with determined celebration.

And the tourists. There are many in town, though the town isn’t where their focus is. It’s on the tours, the northern lights, the husky dogs, the snow scooters. Tales around the camp fire, wildlife safaris, make your own igloo, and the Ice Hotel. Their schedules are hectic – a counterpoint in double time to Kiruna’s slow, steady pace.

Our last guests had a fully-packed week, but the aurora had refused to appear through the clouds. But the last night they were here there was a clear sky and a bit of auroral activity visible on the sky camera, so we sent them out in the car to a dark road nearby to try their luck for the last time. They were tired, it was the end of their holiday, and they would have preferred to stay at home and go to bed. But they reluctantly gathered together their warm gear, got in the car and drove off.

A few minutes later the aurora appeared in a spectacular way. When our guests came home they said they’d just got out the car, and the lights appeared. ‘It felt like it was specially for us,’ they said.

The aurora can make you feel like that – as if you’re favoured, as if you’re special. Someone once said you can never feel sorry for yourself when you see the northern lights.

Our guests left and it was the day before Christmas Eve, the day of celebration here in Sweden. We thought we’d got everything in, but the crucial spices for the homemade glögg had already been used last year and you can’t have glögg without spices. And you can’t have an evening at home before the Eve without glögg. So it was an emergency dash to the supermarket. We were in danger of rushing.

Throwing ourselves out the front door Rolf headed off for the car but for a second I looked up, and saw pink and green running across the sky. Everything came to a halt – we just stood and gaped. That aurora puppy was pushing it’s balls of colour around the sky, hiding them out of sight and then launching them from behind us. The shop was forgotten. The glögg was forgotten. The thought entered my head that we lived in the kind of place where a trip to the supermarket could begin with a display of northern lights. We felt very special.

At this time of year it’s tempting to stay in. The darkness encourages a healthy inward-looking approach. It was snowing steadily. There was one thing, though, that I wanted to do before we gave ourselves over to the feasting, I wanted to go and see if Father Christmas was in his usual spot.

Every year he appears on Christmas Eve, sitting on the front porch of a small house in a nearby village, the one where the Ice Hotel is. He just sits there, surveying people passing by, and plenty do. Tourists walk past on their way to meet tame reindeer at the end of the road, to go to the restaurant down the road, or perhaps to visit the local church. He just watches them, quietly, from a distance. They don’t see him.

There’s nothing to make you look that way, no sign telling you this is the way to Santa’s grotto or anything like that. Just an ordinary little house, and ordinary man sitting on the porch – only he has a long white beard and a red coat. We saw him. He is someone special, so this year I gave him my heart.

Postscript:

The day after writing this I learnt that George Michael, the person who wrote and performed this song (‘Last Christmas’), had just died.

Temperatures are fluctuating wildly, and the snowy environment turns from friendly snow pillow to vicious ice rink at a moment’s notice. I’m trying not to complain, not to resist, though I don’t like it.

There are a few benefits. The arctic hare in the garden is having a feast in the driveway – she’s found precious summer grasses poking up through the snow and ice. The street is shining, the shade of Snow White’s dress, a glassy glare of blue-white. Collections of snow around the house are taking on a new appearance; in a part of the world where it’s usually too cold to make a snowman, the temperature is smoothing out animal faces in the snow.

Outside the house our attention has been drawn in the evenings to a round white animal figure with eyes, ears and a long protruding nose. In the morning, when there’s some twilight, the figure is almost gone – at least it is just a small pile of snow. The dark and light contrasts play tricks so it’s common to imagine you see things in the snow. You look and look, not sure if you see what you think you see, wanting to see it. You know it’s not real, but, like Father Christmas, you want to believe in it.

Before the ice arrived – and the town became this season’s show, ‘Kiruna – Dancing on Ice, a Christmas Special’ – I did my usual run out to the mine offices. It’s a good path with good views in both directions. The view on the way out is of the mine, or at least, what you can see of the mine. It’s what remains of the mountain, after the early days of surface mining, and this area is always lit up, so it looks like a cruise ship has come to town. At Christmas the company decorates a Christmas tree shape on the top, and last year they spelled out ‘God Jul’ (‘Happy Christmas’) by lighting up certain windows in the tower of offices.

As I ran towards it this year I was looking out for the Christmas message. You can only see it a bit closer and at certain angles. There was the tree, and the usual lights, but I couldn’t see the message. Then I saw, ’21’. It made no sense so I tried to imagine it actually said something else, but however hard I looked, it still said ’21’.

Somebody’s birthday? A new door code? The current price of iron ore in Venezuelan Bolívar?

Or could it be a countdown to Christmas? It should have said ’23’ then, but perhaps it was counting down to the start of most workers’ holiday. It had to be, and it was a great thought that unlike last year’s message, this year’s message would require complicated arrangements to leave different office window lights on every night. I imagined some bored office worker having worked out a program for it, and offices left instructions for every night of December – or perhaps there was a programmed timer to leave the right lights on.

It cheered me up actually. A silly thing, but its pointlessness was its charm. Only a company as rich as the mine could be bothered with it.

The only doubt left was what hour of the day they did the changeover, and whether they were counting down to the day before Christmas Eve or to the Eve itself. Well when you’re running your mind focuses on some funny things.

A couple of weeks later as I ran closer to the mine I was trying to work out what number I should be looking for. It all depended whether they changed the number at the end of the day’s shift, or maybe at midnight. It could have been a ‘7’, an ‘8’, or even a ‘9’. I couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t a very good number whichever one it was – not very clear. I thought it might be an ‘8’ because of the curvy shape at the bottom, though the top wasn’t curvy at all.

Looking over my shoulder running back I reckoned it was going to be an ‘8’. Soon the people in the top offices would turn their lights on or off and make the rest of the figure. I’d decided – it was an ‘8’. Definitely.

The start of the season is tough because wherever you start to store the snow is where it will be for the next five months. If you store it too close to the paths or driveways, by January there will be no room left to store snow. You have to push it way out to the boundaries and pile it up there, hard to do when there are no paths. A laborious process of pulling a sled of snow backwards up the hill is the only way to do it.

As we slowly cleared a path down towards the garage I peered over the fence at the neighbour’s ‘gård’. Winter is the time he collects his extra vehicles and equipment down there, and there they languish under piles of snow until the spring. I see a 7-Up drinks dispenser machine has been added to the collection this year, looking rather out of place in the snow.

After six days of shovelling and hauling we reached the garage. Our car, nestled inside, has its own engine heater and it seems it didn’t mind resting there at all. It started without complaint, but it needed winter tyres to be legal.

Two tyres were changed but then the jack broke, leaving the car stranded in the air. We needed a new jack, and we needed a car to get to the spare parts shop to buy one. Mm. Kick sled to the rescue.

Rolf described a feeling of amazement, sliding down the path by the main road, that he was off to buy something using a kick sled. He wasn’t brought up in this part of Sweden, and the kick sled is really a form of transport for the far north. It felt a delicious kind of novelty, he told me afterwards, despite the head winds and snow flurries.

Arriving at the shop he realised he really was a novelty. This was two months too late to change to winter tyres (we’d been away for the start of the winter) and in addition Rolf was strangely concerned about the size of the box – it needed to fit on the kick sled, he explained.

‘You came to buy this using your kick sled?’ The sales assistant looked charmed.

A kick sled is a common form of transport here in the winter. For people doing their shopping. For teenagers on a joyride down a hill after an evening’s drinking.

But why use one to buy something heavy from a car spare parts shop? Why not use your second or third car, your old disused car, your classic car, or even your tractor?

We are people living in Kiruna with only one car. Now that’s a novelty.