Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

It’s June, nearly midsummer, the sun is high in the sky and it’s there for 24 hours a day – but the air is cold, and the trees are only just beginning to sprout a light, vivid, spring green. It doesn’t feel right.

It takes a while to accept that this day goes on for a couple of months. The adult comfort blanket of day and night is removed and each day is weirdly unstructured. The result is strangely exhilarating.

The sun moves around above us in a circle, and the long hours of light are mesmerising. Sometimes I feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights – it’s a shock – what to do next, what to do first? I might want to do any number of things at any time of the day and night, and, alarmingly, I can.

It might sound rather stressful, all those options and opportunities for activity – but no. When you can do something at any time you find you can always do it later. These are perfect conditions for enjoying moments, or hours, of pure inactivity.

Sometimes the inactivity can be forced on you. Travelling along some parts of the trails in the mountains now you would find yourself ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’. The lakes are no longer ice but they are not yet water, so crossing them on foot or by boat is impossible – it’s a no-go area. Hikers are very disappointed to find they can’t walk from A to B as they’d planned. They are advised by local tourist and hiking organisations just to wander where they can, on circular day trips. It’s a lesson, surely.

If the seasons of Kiruna are like a giant rollercoaster – gathering speed, unexpected turns, lots of ups and downs – then after the vertical loops, interlocking pretzel turns, and zero-gravity rolls of the winter, in April we’ve finally reached The Brake Run.

The seasons have gone in a flash. Just as we understood what the conditions were, what clothes were needed, and what activities were possible, each season roared out of reach leaving us panting to catch up.

Spring-winter, the last season, we all love – ice lakes, warm sunshine in cold air, and lots of opportunities for skiing and picnicking on the lakes. Then around the start of April the temperatures begin to rise, the skies fill with humidity, and the big melt begins.

When the drip drip starts you can only sit indoors and watch the snow piles shrink. Cycling is possible, if you look out for ice on the path. There isn’t much to see – the days can be misty, the clouds hang low and grey, the snow is slushy or icy, depending on last night’s temperatures. You clear up the winter debris around the veranda. The outdoor Christmas lights are still trapped under the snow and you wait for the cables to reappear, their secret trails revealed beneath bushes along the house wall. You start thinking about the garden, wondering where you left the flower beds.

But spring isn’t a season to be hurried. The rollercoaster has temporarily lost its kinetic energy and is just trundling along the track. Its occupants are looking around them, taking stock, noticing nothing much is happening on this stretch, while still remembering the thrills behind. It’s The Brake Run.

The speed won’t pick up again until it’s reliably plus degrees 24 hours a day. When that happens it will also be light 24 hours a day and the season of spring-summer will do a hammerhead turn, a double dip and double up, and we’ll be hanging on again, breathless.

In the meantime it’s frustrating, watching the temperatures hover here, the wet snow fall, the grass refuse to peep through green.

We were a small audience in a village hall on the banks of the Lainio river, watching a performance of ‘Tosca’. At the close of the opera, Mario steps outside the prison to be shot. His lover has reassured him the executioner will use blanks and he just has to pretend to die.

It was ‘Tosca’ without the trimmings. The singers (who were really good) were accompanied by a piano – there was no orchestra. There was also no elaborate scenery. Instead, at the end of each act our chairs were moved so we faced a different direction and view. For the last act that view was the frozen river, white snow glimmering in both directions, with small dark fir trees lined up along the horizon and a mid-blue sky as a back drop.

Mario opened the door from the village hall to the river bank, and a cold wind blew around our legs in the third row. There was a gunshot, and Mario slumped through the doorway. Tosca was unable to rouse him, and, realising he really was dead, turned towards the river and shot herself. It couldn’t have been a more dramatic setting, and we didn’t miss the expensive extras people usually expect at the opera.

On the way home we had plenty of time to talk about what a good experience it had been. The road from the small village of Lainio is a very long one, a straight route through low pine and fir forest in a flat snow-covered landscape. You have plenty of time to think about ‘Tosca’ – you have space, as Thoreau has written, for your thoughts ‘to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they get into port’.

You also have time to wonder why there’s a village in such an out of the way place.

It doesn’t take long to realise it wouldn’t have been thought of as out of the way when people first settled there (in the 17th century). What fools us is the road system. The current roads aren’t following ancient tracks – they’re much later additions. Finding your way through what was then ‘Lappland’ meant paddling a small boat up rivers, carrying it through rapids, and letting it drift through wide lakes. In the winter the route was passable on the ice, where the snow would be blown away and you could pull a sled behind you, or if you were Sami you would ski. Settlers in Lainio would have come in the summer by boat, and the reason they lived there was because it was a rich fishing river, and it was on a good route.

The day before we’d decided to go skiing and take a picnic out on the Torne river at Kurravaara, an area of houses which was a settlement long before Kiruna existed as a town. For the same reasons as Lainio, it was on a good route (the river) and provided fish all year round, and there was land there to live off. Now it’s a mixture of permanent housing – some people living there work in Kiruna – and what is called ‘summer’ housing, though this kind of temporary housing is used all year round.

It was the Thursday before the long Easter weekend and Kiruna had already started to empty. The Torne river is thick ice by this time of year and snow covered. Snow had fallen recently and hadn’t had time to harden, so we had to ski on the snowscooter tracks. I’m not a fan of snowscooters, but they do provide the service of pressing down the snow so it’s possible to walk or ski on it.

After an hour’s skiing we saw a rock to one side which we reckoned we could use to sit on and have some lunch. Making our way there through the trackless snow was heavy going, and removing the skis was a challenge because without them you sank deep into the snow. But we managed, and were feeling very hot sitting in the sun. The view of the river was spectacular, the sky so blue, and the air so still.

Still, that is, except for snowscooters whizzing by. We seemed to be at the junction of a major snowscooter highway. The noise and the smell carries quite a distance, and seems at odds with the tranquil setting. About every five minutes one went past us, most of them pulling substantial sleds carrying provisions for the coming weekend. It was entertaining to watch their dogs, tearing along the path beside them, or in most cases running far ahead, impatient with the slow progress of the snowscooter behind.

They were all heading the same way up river, where there are no roads but many small houses and huts. These would have been traditional settlements, long before Kiruna was built. The only way to reach them is snowscooter, or boat in the summer. At holiday times the old transport routes become alive again, and the new ones are abandoned.

Not all the traffic was disturbing. We saw, at a distance, other ski-ers, moving noiselessly and slowly along the river. We met one woman coming on skis towards us. We stopped to talk. We agreed it was hotter than expected, and we were wearing too many clothes. She described where she was staying – her ‘summer’ house by the river. It was always lovely to be here, she said. She used the skis to visit her daughter who had a house further down the river. Of course it had no electricity or running water, but she’d just bought a device for charging her mobile phone which made life easier.

Minus degrees, no water, and no indoor toilet. But, as we discovered in Lainio, worse things can happen to you by a frozen river.

At the end of March the winter tourist season officially comes to an end. It’s the last snowmobile tour, the last ‘Sami experience with reindeer’, the last ski lift up to the sky station to see the northern lights.

We wonder why. The snow is still on the ground, the ice thick enough on the lakes for ten ton truck, and the days are light and (can be) warm with sunshine. Weather permitting, the northern lights are usually active and easy to see. But the tourist companies have shut up shop and the town is empty of visitors.

In fact, the town is empty generally because the locals have gone to the fjäll. It’s the fishing season, the time for being out on the frozen lake in your ‘Ark’, spending days in your ‘summer’ house, or skiing in the long, light days. Let no-one say it too loud, but Kiruna is taking a holiday.

It’s taken us several years to work out that now is the secret, winter season for locals. There’s another life beneath the surface, somewhere out of sight, somewhere only the locals know about.

Take Kiruna’s big fishing competition, ‘Kiruna Hugget’ (the snap bite of a fish), which was this weekend. We saw the ads inviting people to register for the competition by paying a small fee. We saw the date. We saw the time. We wanted to go and watch. But nowhere in the ads did it say where the competition would take place because we were supposed to know already.

It wasn’t hard to find though. From the main road out of Kiruna we saw a mass of dark figures huddled out on the lake. People in pairs, alone, in family groups. People sitting on beach chairs, standing with their backs to the wind, fishing with one hand and pushing a pram with the other. People lying flat on the ice, their head in the hole working out how to lure a passing fish.

Contrary to people’s hopes and expectations, it was not a warm spring day but a cold, windy, snowy one. Still, hundreds of people, had decided to go and sit or stand there, like King Penquins hatching eggs in Antarctica. Curious really.

Even more curious when you learn that the biggest fish caught that day could have fitted into my coat pocket. And my coat pockets aren’t big. So, you’re wondering, why? Why put yourself through this, for the chance of a very small fish?

The answer is, because it isn’t really a fishing competition at all. It looks like a fishing competition. It feels like a fishing competition. It even smells like a fishing competition. But it’s not really about fishing. It’s about prizes. Lots of prizes – in fact, 287 prizes (we checked). That’s maybe more prizes than there are people entering the competition.

In my family, where gambling is frowned on, the idea of a lottery is not popular. But a lottery where first you have to hand drill a hole in the ice that’s a metre thick, then sit or stand in minus temperatures slowly raising your arm up and down for a couple of hours? That’s working for your good fortune, and we’d say, good luck to you.

If you’re the lucky winner and have actually caught a fish worth weighing, you claim your 30,000 SEK, or your electric ice driller (makes fishing very easy the rest of the season), or your special tool for attaching your snowscooter trailer to your car. You might be lucky enough to get an electric saw, or a compressor. Or a waffle-maker, an electric toothbrush or a battery recharger. Or a coffee percolator, a rucksack, or gift voucher from the DIY shop.

Yes folks, it’s the luck of the draw, but Everyone’s a Winner.

We usually like to remember our guests, though in the height of the winter season with people coming and going all the time that can be a challenge. Sometimes, though, you remember people for the wrong reasons.

A few weeks ago some guests put some food from the supermarket in the fridge for cold suppers while they were here. Only they never touched the jar of herring.

I can understand that. Most Swedes like it though, at least if there’s some schnapps available to wash it down with. Perhaps that was the problem for our guests – no schnapps.

Anyhow, there was the jar, found in the fridge just after they ‘d gone to town to catch the bus to the airport. It was a virgin jar of herring. If I’d had any sense I’d have chased the guests up the hill and given it back to them. ‘No, no,’ they’d have protested, ‘you have it!’ ‘No, no,’ I’d have replied, ‘it’s yours, please!’ And they’d have taken it, very reluctantly, and stuffed it in their bag – planning to leave it by a rubbish bin in the airport.

But unfortunately I didn’t do this. I just stared at the jar in my hands, knowing it was a ticking bomb.

If people leave food behind we usually throw it away – unless it’s clearly unopened and is something we normally eat. The jar was sealed, but we wouldn’t have eaten it in a million years. Only we couldn’t throw it away either. The glass jar was recyclable, and you aren’t supposed to put recyclable materials in the ordinary bins. So the herring would have to be removed from the jar first.

Only, what to do with the herring? You can imagine the smell. (Or perhaps you can’t – lucky you.) You can’t just throw it in a bin. Our rubbish is collected every fortnight, and even at these temperatures I wouldn’t be too happy about herring in the bin.

For as long as the jar was sealed, it was ok. Like a bomb, ready to go off, but not yet triggered into activity. It sat in our kitchen, waiting for a decision. All that congealed raw fish, daring us to do something. We tried not to look at it. Even looking at herring is an experience to be avoided. There it was, day after day. We tried not to think of the guests who’d left it for us – the association in our minds between them, and the herring, was hard to forget though.

Then we had an idea – perhaps the neighbour might like it. We didn’t want to insult her by giving her a cheap jar of herring, but it would solve our problem. Only every time she was out in her garden, we forgot to mention the herring.

By now the jar had been moved into the hallway, to try and remind us to speak to her about it. Only then we thought perhaps it didn’t look too good for our guests, so each time someone came to the door we had to take the jar back into the kitchen – and then it was forgotten again.

In desperation one day I put the jar outside the front door. It got left there, like some strange talisman, perhaps warning guests not to stay here. The next morning we found it, deep frozen. Now what would happen to the herring? Perhaps frozen pickled herring really is inedible. We might have to live with this jar of herring for the rest of our lives.

And so the days passed, the jar coming in and out of the hallway, in and out of the kitchen.

Finally, the neighbour was asked. No, she couldn’t eat anything in vinegar – but her son would take it. When next he was visiting. The jar continued to be moved around the house, always where it shouldn’t be.

Then one day the conjunction of the planets was just right, the son and the neighbour and the jar came together, and the jar of herring disappeared from our lives. But the guests who left the jar we will always remember…

There’s chaos in our supermarket. I don’t like shopping so I have a list, and a plan, and want to be in and out the shop as fast as possible. Now it’s having a dramatic makeover – shelves taken down and the goods left stacked in boxes in one place, aisles completely dismantled in another, some items stacked in one part of the shop and the same items stacked elsewhere. Parts of the shop are empty and other parts are under construction. Shopping is now a very lengthy process. It’s as if they’ve set up an elaborate treasure hunt, leaving us searching the aisles desperately for clues.

Feeling confused and insecure because I didn’t know where to find the frozen peas, I wondered if this is a practice run for the relocation of the town.

The new town centre is still a sketchy thing, with reindeer playing on the steps of the town hall and children making snowballs in the square in the architects’ imaginations, but not yet in any kind of reality. In the meantime we think businesses will probably move to the area where this supermarket is – a shopping centre currently on the edge of town, and the site of a very large car park. Or if they don’t move there they’ll stay put for as long as they can, daring the mine to evict them. Or they’ll move somewhere else temporarily, half way between the old and the new. Or they may just pull out of town altogether – who knows? When all this happens and we need an optician, or to find somewhere that sells, say, camping equipment, it might feel a bit like walking up and down the aisles of the supermarket, wondering which end of town they ended up in.

And that’s not the only similarity. Once you’ve found the right aisle for the item you’re looking for, the problem isn’t over. Take my search for red lentils. I thought I’d finally tracked them down, only to discover they’d been repackaged and re-priced and were hard even to recognise as red lentils. I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay more for a fancy packet, but I needed the lentils so I took them anyway. Later I found my favourite red lentils in a side aisle, in a familiar packet, much cheaper. So I did a swap, picking up the old favourites and leaving the new packet behind.

It’s not just red lentils that are in two places. The cereals are on shelves on both sides of the store, the cheese is spread out among different chill cabinets, the cleaning fluid is stacked both with the washing powder and elsewhere with the dishcloths. Don’t they know – we didn’t want the supermarket split into two shops!

The chaos continues. Like in the new town, it’s taking an age to get those aisles sorted. To stem the tide of impatience among its customers, the supermarket is inviting us to take part in choosing which Kiruna streets should appear as the names of the newly constructed aisles. We may not have been consulted about whether we wanted the reorganisation in the first place, but we do get to choose which street the biscuits section is named after.

I’m listening to the sound of silence. Not unusual in these parts, but unusual on a Saturday morning outside our house next to Adolf Hedinsvägen.

The silence tells me a lot of things. It tells me that it’s a Saturday in the middle of March. It tells me that Kiruna is a society where traditions are strong. It also tells me that most people who live here own a snow scooter – or six.

Whereas most days of the year you would make the short five minute journey out of Kiruna into the landscape to experience silence, this is the day when everything is turned on its head. You want peace and quiet, stay at home this weekend.

About 25 kilometres out of town is an area and a lake called Rautas, the name of the river flowing through it. An area of outstanding beauty, today it will be alive with petrol fumes, the roar of engines, and the hum of hundreds of people looking for fish.

A long traffic jam of snow scooters will be snaking their way along the bumpy snow scooter track from the E10 road out to the Rautas lake, another 20 kilometres or so away from the road. It’s the start of the fishing season in this particular lake, and by tradition, a ‘Kirunabo’ will want to be there at the very beginning, at the very first hour that fishing is allowed. Along with hundreds of others. Just because they always have, and their parents always have.

It’s also, perhaps, for young men of a certain age, an initiation rite, riding for the first time on their very own snow scooter. By law you’re only allowed to do that when you’re 16, and if you have a special licence, though most children have been driving scooters under parental supervision long before that. But as a teenager, at least as a young male, the feeling of having your own snow scooter must feel like the moment of adulthood.

(You see these coming-of-age youngsters wandering around town, baggy trousers fashionably falling to their knees, peaked cap turned rebelliously in the wrong direction. They walk by swinging their legs forward from the hip, leaving a wide gap between. It looks as if they’ve just leapt off a horse, or perhaps the horse has just run away from underneath them and they haven’t noticed. Only in Kiruna it isn’t a horse – it’s a snow scooter.)

However Rautas ‘Premiär’, as it is known, is not just for young men. It’s for young women, for families, for children hunched up on scooters behind their parents. It’s a family event, a journey, a hunt for food, and then a meal – fish cooked over a smoky fire and eaten under the stars – Kiruna’s version of a Thanksgiving dinner.

The journey out to Rautas is no walk in the park. It’s a long uncomfortable ride along a bumpy snow-packed path. When you arrive it’s glorious nature, nothing else. So you need to bring everything with you – a tent, cooking equipment, warm clothing, firewood or gas, and something to eat and drink with the fish, (which you assume you will catch), something to sit on, something to sleep on, something to sleep in… Only this will be no communing with nature because the rest of Kiruna has come with you.

As someone who doesn’t own a snow scooter I’m excluded from this event. I’m not complaining though. If I had a snow scooter I wouldn’t go – travelling to one small area with so many others doesn’t appeal, but mainly it’s because I’ve not grown up with the tradition. I see it as an outsider, and like so many traditions (mine included) it looks strange from where I am. I think of Kiruna rushing, lemming-like, along a river to a lake, the mass following of a primal instinct, to celebrate the First Killing of the Fish.

Viewed from above, the gathering of black-coated scooter riders, tents and campfires must look like some secret satanic ritual. Why this out-of-the-way place? Why so many people? And all for a fish?

It was Harvest Festival here yesterday. The harvest is ice, and all will (soon) be safely gathered in, and stored in warehouses over the summer in preparation for building next season’s Ice Hotel.

Most harvest festivals involve participants consuming some of the produce that has been harvested, but I didn’t see anyone popping ice cubes in their drinks yesterday. But we did see some Ice Hotel waitresses apparently tied together and forced out to collect them, or maybe this was just the ritual of releasing the ice with dancers in floaty clothing – it was hard to tell.

There was a party down on the frozen river to celebrate the start of the harvesting season, with music, games, performances, and, of course, lots and lots of tractors.

I hadn’t thought of ice as a crop that winter gives you. I’d felt it though – ice is both beautiful and practical, connecting stretches of land and communities in inaccessible places. It’s a stage for winter walking, exhilarating journeys by dog sled or snow scooter, or just for standing in the emptiness and listening to the silence. It’s a safe platform for ice fishing, and it’s a road across the river (please don’t fish in the road). Like the snow, its positives far outweigh its negatives, and when others elsewhere are longing for spring, in the north here we are looking sadly at the rising temperatures, wishing that nature would not take all the beautiful stuff away.

The thaw is what takes it all away, and I read this week that a dialect word in eastern England for it is ‘to ungive’. Yes, ice is a gift.

Harvesting the ice doesn’t take it away though – only in the area marked out over the winter as an ice field. This area has been kept free of snow so that the ice is kept clear right through. By March the ice crop has grown about 80 cms deep and is ripe for the picking.

First comes Excalibur (given to the Ice King, according to ancient myth and legend, by the Lady of the River), attached to a tractor. With the help of a man on the ice, Excalibur carves out a block weighing two tons. Then comes another tractor – lets call it Lancelot – which picks the block out of the water with its forklift, turns, and places it on the surface of the ice. Then comes another tractor – let’s call it Guinevere – which positions itself opposite Lancelot. Guinevere stretches out her forklift in greeting. Lancelot bows in response, picks up the block with his forks and waits, respectfully, while Guinevere deftly positions her forks between his. There is a moment of perfect union, then Guinevere slowly withdraws with the ice block, turns, drives off the river and disappears deep into the dark entrance of a nearby warehouse, leaving Lancelot alone on the ice.

Lancelot and Guinevere – we could have watched their courtly dance for hours. So we did, until the workers called time and went off for their coffee break.

Driving out of town I’m heading for the sea. It’s far away but I’m sure – so sure – that it’s just over there, just round the corner. The sky is huge, the clouds fast and scudding, the sunlight shimmering into a distant glow. I feel the joy of a child setting out for the treat of a day trip to the seaside.

Out on the frozen river or lake there’s a wide sun soaked beach. The hard winter has formed tiny grains of snow that drift like sand, settling in dunes and patterns, shifting beneath your feet, blowing ahead of you. Other people are far away, dark silhouettes walking on the lake’s pale surface, flat and glistening like wet sand after the tide has drawn the sea away. A dog plays ahead of the walkers as they throw a stick, and then the dog hurtles after it. You hear their voices distantly, and laughter as they chase the dog. You get out the deckchairs and enjoy a picnic, face turned to the sun.

Along the beach edge are a long line of beach huts. All different shapes and colours, some with windows and some without, made of steel, or wood, or plastic. There are buckets and fishing equipment stacked outside them, though you can’t see a soul. Further out to sea, towards the middle of the lake, there are other huts dotted around, in splendid isolation.

These are Kiruna’s ‘arkar’ – shelters from the wind for ice fishers. They line up along the shore when not in use, and are pulled out to a prime position for fishing. There are some figures by the huts, far out on the ice, sitting or standing, lying down even, and sometimes you see an arm slowly, repetitively, moving up and down over the ice, trying to attract a very cold fish.

Accidents can happen, though there aren’t many life guards on duty on Kiruna’s beaches.

Back in Kiruna, waves crash against the roadside, white surf riding on the crest of the wave.

Beach volley anyone?

A low mist sits below the town, and, rising from the mist, small hills appear as islands.

A wide harbour curls around the foot of the town, and resting there is the largest, most majestic cruise ship you’ve ever seen. Queen of the Northern Seas, HMS ‘Kirunavaara Mine’.

The passengers have left the ship and are roaming round the bars and restaurants on shore. This ship never leaves the harbour – perhaps it can’t navigate its way out again from such an inland sea, or perhaps everyone’s just too happy to be landlocked in Kiruna. It’s part of the town now and when the ship sinks we’ll all know it’s time to leave.

We’ve been living in the shadow of the threat of the town moving for years now – we’ve been waiting, watching, and waiting. It feels like nothing much has happened.

Yesterday I took a walk to some blocks of flats spread out in a line along the main road, almost at the foot of town, looking out to the mine and inward to small rectangular play areas. Built as part of Sweden’s ‘A million homes’ programme in the late 1960s, they’re owned by the mining company and have by all accounts provided very comfortable homes for many families over the years. Photographs of the area show children playing outside the flats, with the backdrop of a wide open landscape, leading down and out to the horizon, and the imposing sight of Kirunavaara, the mountain become a mine.

We’ve known these would be the first buildings to go, but the snail’s pace of the town moving process, and the recent fall in iron ore prices (and the mine deciding that perhaps they weren’t in such a tearing rush after all) has lulled us into a feeling it might not even happen in our lifetimes.

The area around these flats (known as ‘Ullspiran’) was marked out at an early stage as part of a (so-called) ‘moving oasis’, where buildings would be emptied, demolished, and the land left as a park. Because they’ve long been earmarked for demolition there’s been a succession of short term tenants living there. I hadn’t even noticed they’d moved out, and now, suddenly, it’s a ghost town. You could hear the metaphorical saloon door swinging in the wind.

It was just a small advertisement in this week’s freebie newspaper, so insignificant-looking you could have missed it. An announcement by the mining company that demolition work in Bromsgatan would start on Monday.

It’s a jolt to realise it’s really happening: the start of the process that will see Kiruna town come tumbling down. I had to go and have a long last lingering look.

I was expecting to find the roads blocked with snow but there had been some kind of activity there so it was still possible to push my kick sled down to the flats, manoeuvring it around the rectangle playgrounds that the buildings all face.

I was expecting to find neglect, desolation, poverty even – but this is Kiruna, so the flats looked in really good condition. It’s hard to accept that such sturdy buildings really need to be knocked down. Through windows I could see smart venetian blinds, good quality shelving, modern light fittings. The balconies still looked inviting in the sunshine.

How long had they been empty, I wondered, and aren’t they rather inviting for anyone without a home, or for groups of disaffected youth (if Kiruna has any)? I found a door lock broken, and was nervous about pushing my way in. I had an irrational fear that the door might slam shut and no-one find me, until much later when someone would notice an arm sticking out from deep within the rubble. The thought kept me on the right side of the doorway.

A little further away, in a square not due for demolition for a few more weeks, I found evidence of people still living here. Someone’s personal belongings lined up on a curtain-draped window – a vase of artificial flowers, a clock and useful blue and white striped jug. The path to the front door had been kept free of snow, and a snow shovel was leaning against the doorway. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like living here. Eerie, I guess – as much because of knowing everything will soon disappear, as because it’s so very very quiet.

Outside this block of flats someone, or some child, has carved out an exquisite igloo, complete with a curving discrete entrance, ice carving decorations, and light vents on all sides. That small home won’t last forever either. Life on the edge is not without its creative side apparently.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the truth of a situation. In this case, a man staying with us, from western Australia, looking at a map of Kiruna. To the right of the town he sees there’s a small red circle marked, ‘Kiruna’s new town centre’. The area is hemmed in on all sides by parts of the old town, industrial areas and small lakes. Pointing at the existing town of Kiruna he says, ‘Isn’t it a bit of a small area to relocate all of that in?’

So I proceeded to tell him the tortuous process by which the siting of the new town had been decided, none of which was able to explain away this, one of the basic problems.

Just recently the long awaited plans for a new Sami parliament have been thrown out, because it turns out that the land allocated for the building encroaches on an old industrial area of dubious (from a health and safety point of view) origin, so the site isn’t large enough.

Could this explain the delay in coming up with a town plan? The one building destined to be built here is the new town hall, which looks suspiciously like a space ship – perhaps designed to levitate above the town when things feel crowded down there. Other than a plan for a town hall there is nothing yet on paper about what will be built on the designated site for the new Kiruna.

We had a little whiff of the future a couple of weeks ago when entrepreneurs and architects were invited to suggest schemes for new buildings there. One of these proposals appeared in the local paper, boasting a downhill ski slope in the centre of the town. The architect thought it would be a good idea to have some steep steps there. Realising it might be a problem in the winter (we don’t currently have steps in town, for good reasons..) they’d proposed that it could be a feature to leave the snow on the steps in winter and let the children use it as a downhill sled slope.

As if children wouldn’t find anywhere else to play on downhill snow slopes. As if it’s suitable for children to play on snow lying on top of hard stone steps…..

I was puzzled, but then, when I saw there were reindeer in the picture of the proposed town square, I realised it was all a dream – what a relief! Not sure, though, if the town council have woken up yet.

But it got us thinking. There’s a need for some plans for the new town, and plans that will work given the limitations of the site. We think some of the locals have been working on this but it seems their plans have been overlooked.

……………. Aurora viewed over our house in Kiruna

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that people are competitive about their auroras. You’d think they’d just be happy that they’d seen something – many come here and don’t – but apparently just seeing them isn’t enough.

They ask – ‘was it a particularly good aurora last night?’ Or say their guide told them it was ‘the best aurora this season’. When I look at them in a disbelieving kind of way they look hurt. They want to be able to go home and tell friends and family that they saw the best aurora ever. And they want the pictures to prove it.

I’m a bit puzzled by this. I mean, it’s a matter of luck isn’t it? There’s no skill involved in seeing a ‘good aurora’ (whatever that is). Do people want to be seen as people who have good fortune? Or is it that they don’t want to look stupid for paying a lot of money to come to an uncomfortably cold place if they don’t, at least, see ‘the best aurora ever’?

Maybe it’s because I’m English. Where I’m from you’d just annoy people by boasting about your auroras. What people back home want to hear is that you had a rough time and it wasn’t worth the money (then they don’t have to bother to come themselves). If you did see good northern lights you might play it down a bit – ‘there was only a bit, you know, but it was lovely to see anyway’, and you’d smile apologetically, not wanting to rub their nose in your good fortune.

So this is something else, this my-aurora-is-better-than-your-aurora phenomenon. But because it’s all about telling others about it afterwards, you do need the photos to prove it.

We’ve been living here over three winters and we’ve never managed to take a good photo of the northern lights. We get so distracted by seeing them that we don’t want to fiddle around with the technology, and besides, we’re rubbish photographers. But mainly, it’s really hard to take good photos of the northern lights. On the one hand this is an area where the camera does lie – long exposure times make things look much brighter than they appear to the naked eye – but even when you see clear aurora it’s hard to get a decent photo. It does generally tend to be like the fisherman’s story of ‘the one that got away’.

Enter ‘Aurora Photography’ courses. Last winter they were suddenly rated as the most popular activity here and people were willingly parting with a lot of cash for them. I had no idea there were so many keen amateur photographers out there. That is, I knew there were lots of people taking photographs, but if you wanted to study photography wouldn’t it be easier (and cheaper), I reasoned, to do that in your home town, rather than travel to the arctic and pay someone there? I couldn’t understand what people thought they would learn, standing out in unfamiliar freezing conditions with a photography expert, that they couldn’t learn back at home in the warmth and comfort of a classroom in their local education institute. But I’ve always admired people keen to learn, and felt it was a more worthwhile way to spend your time than polluting the atmosphere with a snowscooter.

People started showing (off) their photos to me when they returned from the trip. Wow, their auroras were really big!

I asked them what sort of camera they had. Ah, the picture wasn’t taken with their camera – it was taken on the camera provided by the person running the course. Who had already adjusted all the settings. Who had all the gizmos prepared for taking pictures of the northern lights. Who, basically, did everything to take the photograph except actually push the button.

Then the penny dropped. Going on a three hour ‘aurora photography’ course doesn’t mean you learn about photography, but it does mean you bring back that all important evidence about the size of your auroras.

This season there are also people now taking money just to drive you out to Abisko so you can take photos – they don’t pretend to offer any photography tips, they just take you to a dark place. How does that work, given that even if their customers have good cameras and tripods, they don’t necessarily know how to take a good aurora photo (see above)?

And what about those poor people who part with all their cash on a night when the clouds hang heavily in the sky, draping the aurora displays with a dull thick grey? How are these people to be satisfied? It must be very stressful, for the tour guides. I don’t know how they manage.

We had such a night recently. There was the faintest glimmer of northern lights – probably not possible to see here, but maybe possible to see very very faintly if you were out on a dark lake. I could see it on the ‘Magnetogram’ (the graph that records activity, visible on the internet) though not in the sky. We looked sympathetically at our guests when they appeared for breakfast the following day. They were all beams – they’d seen the northern lights! Did we want to see the photos? They pulled out their iPhone and flipped through images of bright green spread across a clear starry sky. ‘You took the photos with that?’ I asked, a little jealous that visitors could achieve such amazing results on a phone when I hadn’t managed a decent image on a larger camera. ‘No,’ they replied, ‘the guide took them and gave them to us’.

Ah, that would be the guide that had been to exactly that spot many times before, on previous tours, and looked for aurora with his camera.

Maybe these images were what they saw that night, or nearly saw, through the cloud. Maybe they were images their camera could have recorded, if it had been a better one. Or maybe they came from another, clearer night, and were actually someone else’s auroras.

But who would ever know – or care? Most importantly, they were BIG.