Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

The other day I was reading about people who’ve volunteered for a one-way trip to Mars.

‘Hannah Earnshaw, 23, a PhD student in astronomy at Durham University, said: ‘My family is pretty thrilled. They’re really happy for me. Obviously it’s going to be challenging, leaving Earth and not coming back.’

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2956829/Meet-five-Britons-live-MARS-Mission-reveals-final-longlist-manned-journey-red-planet-2025.html)

Apparently there have been thousands of applicants for this journey of a lifetime (literally), their numbers have been whittled down to hundreds, and Hannah is one of the chosen few. They’ve applied to live in pods in a totally inhospitable atmosphere, with insufficient oxygen and a surface temperature of minus 60 degrees. No-one is planning to bring them back. In fact, Hannah is looking forward to being the first mother on the planet.

You can’t help but wonder – do they have maternity units on Mars?

Such self confidence at such a young age – such supreme indifference to the dangers ahead, to the sad realities of suffering and death in a cold climate.

(You can see where this is going can’t you?)

But Hannah knows everything will be just fine on Mars because her friends and family support her decision, and whatever happens – death by suffocation, starvation, or massacre at the hands of green-eyed Martians – ‘we can still communicate via the internet’.

We used to think that Love was All You Need, but now, obviously, love has been replaced by an iPhone. Life without it is unimaginable, but life with it makes every kind of situation manageable – even life on Mars.

They stay here sometimes, the Hannahs, and their male counterparts, the Harrys. They are students, or in their first job. They arrive in urban streetwear, unaware of the climate, or, rather, indifferent to it, having added a scarf to their outfit just before rushing off to the airport. When they arrive they’re not sure where they are, and are often surprised to find it’s cold and full of snow and that their plimsolls with the Aztec prints aren’t so warm. But they don’t need any help from anyone because with their iPhone they can easily find the way to the nearest Starbucks, if there is one.

They do everything at the tap of a screen. To find their way to the centre of town (tap tap), or the times of buses to the Ice Hotel (tap tap). They need some tours (tap tap), some northern lights information (tap tap), and where to find a caffe latte (tap tap).

Companies line up to help them fulfil their fantasies about being here – sled dog tours, snowmobiling, northern lights tours, Sami experiences. You want to experience reindeer? (tap tap) ‘Reindeer Farm Experience’ tomorrow, pick-up 10.00hrs. See wild animals? (tap tap) ‘Moose Safari’, pick-up 15.00hrs. See the northern lights? (tap tap) ‘Guided Tour to the Sky Station’, tomorrow, 21.00hrs.

They tweet where they are, and take selfies in front of huge piles of snow, on top of huge piles of snow, falling into huge piles of snow, making angel shapes on their backs in huge piles of snow. Their photos wing their way across the world and bring back plenty of ‘Wow! Omygod! Shit!’ replies. They post pictures on Facebook of themselves on the dog sled tour, just to keep their parents happy. And the trip was so awesome they tap out a quick review and post it online.

They’re incredibly polite and well-behaved, and always say thankyou for breakfast. They stay for a maximum of three nights, usually two, and head home totally fulfilled and happy.

I admire their confidence, self-assurance, and ability to get themselves around the world. But sometimes I wish they would just stop and think about where they are. But maybe, if you’re on Mars, it’s best not to.

I wouldn’t recommend it to a visitor. It isn’t a high point in the tourist world calendar, but it’s a treat for those of us who live here. We met someone there who was staying with us. ‘It’s party time!’ he said, slightly perplexed at how so many people could be there celebrating something so unimpressive – Kiruna’s annual winter market.

Indeed, it was party time. We don’t know many people living here but we had several conversations in the town square – like you might at a party, standing idly by with a drink, wondering who everyone is and what they’re doing there. Only at this party, people approach you and talk. I was chatting to a woman who was campaigning to stop NATO air force exercises over this part of northern Sweden. She was articulate, charming, reasonable, convincing and interested in who she was talking to. Rolf had a conversation with a man with a walking stick, about nothing in particular. The sunny weather had turned to snow, which wasn’t at all what was forecast. ‘What do they know? Nothing!’

It was companionable. ‘It’s sort of quirky,’ I said, to someone who had just arrived at our bed and breakfast and wanted to know if the market was worth going to. Then I added, rather quickly, ‘not quirky in a cool way though – more in a bad taste kind of way…’

How do you describe a market of stalls selling pink wigs, garishly-coloured animal faces on knitted hats, Ninja games and Ninja balloons, Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss t-shirts, twenty varieties of wool socks, a hundred and one things made from reindeer, and many many sizes of plastic storage bags?

Kiruna people flock to it. The most popular item on sale are ‘Drömbollar’ – ‘Dream balls’ – a marshmallow and chocolate dome-shaped folly, with a delicate pinnacle on top. ‘Drömbollar’ are so easily squashed they’re packed in giant protective cardboard boxes, which just adds to their charm.

‘Milling about’ best describes people’s behaviour at the market. Ambling back and forward, stopping to talk, looking at the items for sale. People with pushchairs, pulling sleds with their youngsters on board, pushing wheelchairs with their aunt on board, walking with their kick sled, walking in groups, walking alone, walking with walking sticks, walking with skiing poles. Children jumping to and fro, running around the backs of the stalls, chasing each other round the corners, stopping to look at the Ninja games. Children playing with dogs. Dogs in all directions – following their owners, leading their owners, ignoring their owners, sitting next to their owners.

And none of this would be remarkable, were it not that all these people, children and dogs were at the same time manoeuvring around very many obstacles in their path. Over the snow-covered ground, in all directions, were coiling trails of thick black cables. Stepping over, around, and between snaking trip wires, heel to toe, people danced their way around the market. Anywhere else these wires would have been regarded as a health and safety hazard. Here they just resulted in a communal two-step shuffle.

I like that. When in England children aren’t even allowed to play in the snow in case they hurt themselves, here you can rely on people to look out for themselves. I watched someone pushing an elderly relative along the pavement, crossing some rather rough patches of snow on the way. The wheelchair dipped and dived, jolted and leaned, but neither passenger or driver looked the least bit concerned. They just seemed intent on getting their ‘Drömbollar’.

We’ve run out of superlatives for the amount of snow that has fallen. Snow has fallen, snow on snow, and the winds have blown merry havoc for a few days. Weather doesn’t usually defeat us up here, but the recent combination of heavy snowfall and high winds has been a challenge.

Part of the road out into the fjäll, the main road to Narvik, is closed in these conditions. Snow blowing heavily across the road makes it impossible to see, and it usually blows worst when a huge lorry is bearing down on you from the opposite direction. Beyond Abisko the barrier comes down to shut the road and if you’re the wrong side of it all you can do is spend the hours in Björkliden or Katterjåkk, where there’s a restaurant and a bed for the night.

In town, though, everything goes on as usual. The roads and pavements are cleared. There’s no staying home here for the day if it snows. The only real problem with the snow in town, and in our garden, is storage. The piles tower around us, and the tractors build them higher and higher. Sometimes lorries come to the snow pile opposite our house, fill up with snow, and drive it all away somewhere, making room for the next week’s snow.

We don’t have that service for the garden, and we’re reaching our limits in terms of storage space.

Snow shifts have recently been shortened to a mere 40 minutes but are worked more frequently. Boots and overalls are gathered by the front door, ‘his’ and ‘hers’ on hooks, boots stacked with two pairs of socks hanging out to warm. Rugs are spread all over the hallway floor to soak up the encroaching snow.

Picking up and distributing snow can result in a fair amount appearing in places you wouldn’t choose to have it, so the right protective clothing is essential. Over trousers with braces, heavy boots, hats and hoods, and two layers of gloves. All that’s missing is a yellow sou’wester and a packet of fish fingers. It looks like we’re off on a long dangerous expedition, not a trip out into our own back yard.

Rolf and I pass by the front door between shifts, one of us rising wearily from the sofa as the other appears in the hallway, red-faced and breathing heavily from the exertion.

‘Be careful out there,’ I say, passing the baton – or, rather, the shovel. He looks tired, and so do I. We need to focus on the future, coming back into the warmth, taking a break. ‘What do you want for your tea?’ I ask. My humour falls flat. Stony-faced and determined, Rolf pushes open the door and stands outside the door, the commander of his ship, viewing what lies ahead. The deck outside the front door is called a ‘bridge’ here, linking the house to the rest of the world. Now it’s more like the bridge of a ship, tossing on the high seas. Rolf strides off down the steps and disappears into the whiteness.

I pull the door shut behind him and go back to the sofa to check the forecast. The wind rattles insistently in the fireplace.

‘Rensjön, Tarfala, Ritsem…. north, north westerly 7 to 8, occasionally severe gale 9. Heavy snow. Poor.’ We’ll just have to sit this one out.

These blizzard conditions are grim. It’s relentless. Hour after hour more and more blowing snow. Yesterday there were knee-high drifts of snow in the driveway and as fast as I shovelled the piles reappeared.

It’s ironic because this week we’re faced with public recognition of our own, you might say relentless, enthusiasm. The daily newspaper for northern Sweden has written about our placing as Sweden’s number four bed and breakfast (according to Trip Advisor). They report that our guests like our enthusiasm for all things in and around Kiruna.

We really appreciate that our guests have taken the trouble to write such good reviews about us, but we have to admit that we aren’t happy and enthusiastic every day.

Right now for instance – the forecast is for three days of blowing snow. We’re into the second day. I’m not the least bit enthusiastic about it, and while it’s going on I’m finding it hard to be enthusiastic about anything else in Kiruna either. Why do we live where everything is such hard work? I’m tired, bored of shovelling and getting nowhere, and dispirited that we have guests from India and nowhere reasonable to suggest for them to go.

I read in an English paper that a new drama has begun on TV, set in a mining town called ‘Fortitude’, somewhere north of the arctic circle. According to today’s review the drama is set in a ‘fashionably chilly environment’. Fashionably chilly? Just reading it makes me feel grumpy.

So yesterday I was trying to keep on top of the build up of snow drifts in our driveway, and removing the piles in front of where our car is stored.

On the third time of going out to shovel, I could have thrown myself into a pile of snow and just cried. The driveway never seemed to get cleared. I’ve plenty of experience of snow shovelling and know you have to have a method, and I was following my method. But there was no progress at all. The piles of snow just blew back where I’d removed them. I was concentrating on clearing just a bit wider than a car-sized path, not wanting to waste my energies on anything more ambitious. I ran the sled up the sides of the driveway, then down the middle, back up the middle, down the sides. I had to work hard to keep paths free to take the snow away.

Then when I came back to the driveway it was full of snow again. The piles of snow on the sides were collapsing into the areas I’d cleared. Only very slightly at first, so I didn’t notice it was happening. All I saw was that I didn’t seem to be making progress.

I decided I must have been knocking the sides as I pushed the sled. I did the area again. I turned back to admire my work and could see that not only was the snow falling back onto the driveway, but it now it wasn’t wide enough to drive car through. In the desperation of my struggle with the snow I’d lost all sense of scale.

I calmed a rising sense of panic. I can only do what I can do, I reminded myself, and apparently I can’t clear the driveway. I looked around at the snow drifts. The snow blew in my face and wind whipped up trails of snow from the pile I had just created away from the driveway. The snow was dancing in the air. I was enjoying watching it, no longer feeling it was my enemy. Snow can be meditative.

I needed to change the method, so I abandoned the goal of keeping the driveway clear and decided I would just try to reduce the height of the snow drifts. With that goal in the long run it might still be possible to reclaim the driveway.

I looked at how the snow was building up. It was flying across the land and hitting the high snow sides of the now very narrow driveway. It took only seconds for me to realise what I ought to do was drive my sled into those piles.

I pulled out huge piles of snow from the sides and saw space around the driveway opening up. I experienced a tremendous sense of relief. Not only was I no longer trying to achieve the impossible (clear the driveway), it now looked as if my work was having some effect. As I continued to attack the sides, it occurred to me that now it might, after all, be worth trying to clear some of the driveway.

The answer was blowin’ in the wind. I can’t say I’m enthusiastic again, but at least we now live in hope…

Recently the local council has been very proud to present its involvement with a building project which it hopes will be a blueprint for the new Kiruna. It’s a building to house two families, and it’s totally ‘climate friendly’ and energy efficient. There is a slight drawback though – it’s three or four times the cost of a usual new-build house. So when the mining company offers you compensation for moving – market value of your house plus 25% – you aren’t going to be able to afford to buy one of these.

But never mind that. Nothing wrong with developing energy efficient houses, in a climate where energy costs are high. The house has been nominated for the ‘Building of the Year 2015 Award’ and the council are keen for us to know about this. Energy efficiency and being ‘climate smart’ is an admirable goal after all.

I think about it quite often in Kiruna, the need to remember the environment and not use energy sources unnecessarily. When I see the empty downhill ski slope, for instance, with its mass of electric lighting, and no-one skiing there. Or the street lighting in Kiruna – you won’t easily find a dark corner here (and that’s a pity when you’re looking for the northern lights). I think about it when a petrol-guzzling snowmobile roars past out in the fjäll. I think about it when 15 year olds chug past in their EPA tractors, exhaust fumes pouring from the roof of the car.

I look to see what else the newspaper reports think is good about this house. I read they are all very impressed that it has a system that recycles the shower water, reducing water consumption by 90%.

Water shortages can be a big problem. In California for instance. But a house which recycles shower water, in Kiruna?

That’s Kiruna, the town that’s surrounded by a landscape of ice and snow and lakes, where the land is so sodden you can’t walk on it most of the year, and there’s a year-round supply of melting snow. Kiruna, where six cubic metres of water are used a minute, for hours on end, day after day, to make the ski slope in town nice and slippery.

Has anyone else noticed this is a problem we don’t actually have?

I know some people come here rather unprepared. It’s understandable – who has time these days to do research about a place before they go away? – but the first day here can be difficult.

First there’s the clothing. You may not have brought sufficient, or more likely haven’t brought the right kind of clothes. You bring layers (good) but sometimes layers with cotton (bad), you bring boots (good) but boots with warm legs but thin soles (bad), you bring a coat (good) but it’s a waterproof and windproof coat (pretty useless).

There’s the snow – a lot of it – which can look daunting, especially if it’s falling heavily in front of you. Piles of snow spell ice and danger to you, although you’re told it’s cold and powdery and harmless.

There’s the light. Or rather, the absence of it. Darkness signifies sleeping to you – at least after the first few hours of it. The depth of the darkness here in the afternoon feels like the middle of the night. A midday nap is hard to resist, and uses up a lot of the day.

There’s the emptiness of the landscape. There aren’t handy stopping-off points and coffee shops every twenty minutes. You have to plan everything if you go out into it. It can feel inconvenient. If you’re also cold (clothing problem), alarmed by the quantity of snow, and tired (darkness problem), then you can feel tense, irritated, even miserable. These emotions may appear in the first two hours after arriving, or sneak up on you during the first day.

You’ve only got a couple of days so you make a list of all the things you should do tomorrow: go shopping in town for some more thermals, drive out to Abisko, go skiing in Björkliden, have lunch at Riksgränsen, drive back to town, go to the ice hotel, dog sledding in the early evening, then have a meal in town before going out to see the northern lights over a lake somewhere. There’s also the mine tour, the snowmobile experience, reindeer (reindeer sled tour, or ‘Sami experience’?) and you think you should maybe go to the sky station one evening. Is there too much to do – or not enough?

Then there are those tricksy northern lights. You’ve come all this way and paid all this money, but you can’t work out how to see them. Your hosts tell you that ‘northern lights tours’ don’t help. They discourage you from wasting your money on the Abisko sky station, but don’t tell you what to do instead. They can’t tell you when the lights will appear, or the perfect place to view them (apparently it depends whether they appear in the northerly or the southerly sky). Then when you decide just to hope for the best, the sky clouds over so there’s no chance anyway. It’s so disappointing.

Then, at some unspecified time, all this changes. You let go, stop fighting the cold, stop trying to plan everything. The landscape brings a calm smile to your face. The sky sparkles for you. Maybe even the northern lights appear, and then it is impossible to feel sorry for yourself. You take everything in your stride, struggle against nothing, appreciate everything around you, and you feel mellow.

I took a walk a few days ago up onto a hill nearby. It was cold, about minus 25 degrees, and the sky was a deep pink over the snow-covered hills. A man walked towards me.

We smiled at one another. ‘You’re wrapped up warm,’ he said. I felt rather proud of my sensible gear. I looked at his clothing, which was thin. ‘You aren’t though, are you?’ I said. ‘Ah, no,’ he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘my warmth comes from the inside.’

Now that’s mellow. In this kind of cold I feel the need for a warm down coat, so clearly I’ve still a long way to go to get to mellow.

Now we are in what Swedes call the ‘ox weeks’. The ox was the beast of burden before the horse, and in the times of the ox, life was hard – at least for the ox.

The local newspaper asked people in the street how they were coping during the weeks of the ox. They go out as much as possible, they said, drink berry juice, look forward to the summer.

I don’t feel the time of year is especially hard. I’m not thinking forward – I’m digging in. Around the house the snow is piling high. Hare footprints show acrobatic leaping through the snow piles. Cars and people are no longer visible on the road to one side, only the occasional head bobbing up and down. Yesterday I saw a car driving backwards down the hill. Then I realised if I could see it, it must have been on top of a lorry.

I have plenty of books to read, and there’s still a small amount of chocolate, and an even smaller amount of goodwill, left over from Christmas. A few decorations have survived the clear-up and hang defiantly from the curtain rails, glowing in a way I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a time for using up the half burned-down candles around the house, and for lighting the fire – splitting wood, poking into the furnace, watching the flames lick against the glass.

The sun returned last week – a fiery red presence on the horizon, far more colourful than one could hope for, as if making up for its weeks of absence. Appearing due south, a ball rolling sideways along the horizon, it appears next to the rubbish burning chimneys, turning the grey funnels of smoke a swirling celestial pink before sinking back down.

In the first weeks of January it isn’t unusual for the temperature to plummet, as it has this year, to minus 30. The snow crunches satisfyingly underfoot when we step out to collect the morning paper. Of necessity we spend a lot of time indoors, but slender white fingers on the snow-smothered tree wave at us through the window.

From the kitchen window I look out at the coloured electric lights I put up on the birch trees before Christmas. Over the last few weeks they’ve sunk into layers of snow, forming winding caverns of coloured light, soft and mysterious. Swathes of reds and green spread gently round the trunks, some lights only hinting at where they are, far beneath the surface. Their twinkling was bright and loud at Christmas, but in the weeks of the ox they, and I, have found new, muted depths.

We sat back on the wooden chairs, two rows facing each other and a thermos flask in the middle. A woman smiled at us. ‘Help yourself to coffee,’ she said, heading back out the door. There were plastic cups and a container of biscuits. The magazines were old. From the 1960s. I flicked through the car ads, and read an article about the health of Prince Bertil.

Someone else joined us. He looked worried, just like us. We were all waiting. In the distance we could hear a man’s voice rising and falling, coming from the open door of a small office. Occasionally a face appeared through the doorway as the man collected the next person in line.

I poured myself a coffee. Rolf was wondering what we were going to say. We’d talked about it, but you never know until you get there.

‘Usch. So cold.’ The man opposite me was warming his hands round the plastic cup. ‘It’s harder when you’re older. It feels colder. When I was young I didn’t care.’

I smiled sympathetically, and noticed his shirt wasn’t buttoned up and there was bare flesh revealed in the opening of his down jacket.

‘We don’t move around as much as we used to,’ I suggested. The man nodded.

The woman who had offered the coffee came back sat herself down next to us and poured herself a cup.

‘Did you get away last weekend then?’ she asked the man. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Björn came. We went out on the ice, fishing.’ ‘Oh,’ she replied. They sat in companionable silence.

I wondered what the man’s particular problem was, though it was none of my business. We were all here to get some help. Then someone whisked him away.

A couple more people arrived and sat down opposite, eyeing us up, then looking nervously towards the man in the office in the distance. We all had problems or we wouldn’t have been here..

Finally it was our turn. We followed the man into his office, where he sat down, and we stood. He listened patiently while we described the symptoms – when they’d first appeared, how frequent they were, and finally, when everything had finally broken down. The prognosis was not good. Repairs could perhaps lengthen our fridge-freezer’s life, but it might be kinder just to let it die. The fridge doctor assured us it was a reasonable lifespan for a fridge and we shouldn’t blame ourselves.

After writing us out a prescription for a new fridge he offered us the loan of a life support machine in the form of a chest freezer. It was no trouble, he said. It turned out to be too big for our car. The surgery was just closing, so he said he could drive it to our house in his van.

We started to discuss where he should park when he arrived, but he said he’d be there before us. We were getting straight into our car to drive home so we knew we would be there first. Wrong. We never saw him en-route but when we drove up outside the house, a mere five minutes later, he was already down our driveway and had unloaded the chest freezer.

A troll fridge doctor – it was the only explanation. Unsettling, since you never know quite where you are with a troll, but at least it meant we could pay him in raspberry toffees….

(see, ‘DIY tail’ http://blog.68degrees.se/#post36 ).

New year, new strategies. I’ve been thinking of changing some of the ways we respond to people enquiring about staying with us. Understandably people want to know what they’re getting when they come, not some wish-washy description which means they’re booking into something unknown, into something which frankly might not be worth the money.

This year’s conversations might go like this:

‘You want to know whether you’ll be able to see the northern lights when you come, between the 18th and 21st February? Let me see – I’ll look it up for you….

‘Ah. Here it is. 18th February, no northern lights at all, that’s a pity. Now let’s see – ah – but on the 19th and 20th February there will be northern lights! That’s lucky isn’t it? What time were you wanting to see them? Did you have a preference?

‘After 8pm? That might be possible on the 19th, but it looks like on the 20th they’ll only be appearing around 6pm, sorry about that. Could you possibly re-schedule your restaurant trip so you could go out to look for them a bit earlier?

‘No? Ok, it’ll have to be the 19th then. Now, what kind of northern lights did you want to see? Pink or green?

‘Pink, oh. Sorry, only greenish ones forecast. But a little bit of yellow on the 20th, how would that be?

‘Green and yellow it is then. And would that be curtains, you were wanting, or wavy lines?

‘Curtains, swishing sideways. Yes, I think we can do curtains on the 19th. No, hang on – damn – these are curtains with strong vertical movements, and you wanted sideways swishing, blast.

‘…..It’s quite nice, though, the vertical. Quite popular these days. I think you might like it. What do you think – would vertical curtains be ok for you?

‘You wanted them with the pink mixed in? I’d like to help you out but I really don’t think we can do that. I tell you what though – how about we throw in some shooting stars instead? I see there will be some around 8pm that night. Green curtains with a touch of yellow and strong vertical movement, and shooting stars – very tasteful.

‘Oh good, that’s fixed then. We look forward to seeing you on the 18th.’

I had the idea we might just go and sit in one of the ‘resting huts’ which provide shelter for walkers and passers-by in bad conditions. I was hoping no-one else would have the same idea, since the one I had in mind wasn’t far from town – but then who else would choose to go and sit in a hut with no electricity or water in the middle of nowhere on New Year’s Eve?

On the way there we spotted three moose by the roadside. The snow was deep and they waded through it towards us, their legs barely visible. They stopped and looked at us. We stopped and looked at them. Then we all moved on.

At the hut all was quiet – the moonlight led the way up the snow path to the dark little wooden building, and the door creaked as we pulled it open and peered around with a torch.

We were in the hut a couple of hours, watching the fire we’d made, eating crisps, drinking glögg, peering out of the chocolate box windows at the moonlit frozen river outside. Standing outside we could also hear the rushing water which refused to lie down and freeze.

We could have sat at home in the dark and been a lot warmer, but you can’t beat the feeling of bringing candlelight and fire into a cold, dark hut – it’s the contrast that brings the glow. The three bears could have had their breakfast porridge here, and think they’d sneaked into someone’s house. For us, too, being here is like playing house – it feels like it must belong to someone but we don’t know who. Any moment the bear that owns it could storm through it’s door waving its black paws and baring its teeth. All there is to do is look out the windows, or at the fire, and huddle together in the dark, waiting to see who comes. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no-one does.

It was hard to tear ourselves away from the hut’s mysterious quietness, but we had a plan to head out to the Ice Hotel for midnight. There we would find hammy dramatics, people clutching cell phones and bottles of bubby, fireworks, and a sense of being at a party. We were loathe to leave the hut, and this feeling of being at home in a strange place, for the mayhem of a New Year’s Eve celebration.

We packed up, blew out the candles and carried everything back out to the car.

Ten minutes up the road we saw the three moose we’d seen on the way out. Now they’d settled down for the night – spreading out in hollows in the snow, lying on their sides, their heads sunk deep into their necks, their bodies pressed against crusty white pillows. The moonlight was bright enough for them to read by. Clearly they were very much at home.

I’ve been reading about all the commercial ‘Winter Wonderlands’ in the UK – ‘Santa’s Special Grotto’ and ‘Christmas Forest with Elves’ sort of arrangements. I’m rather impressed that up this way, where Father Christmas actually lives (in Jukkasjärvi), there isn’t even a sign pointing to his house, let alone an entrance fee. In fact, you wouldn’t notice he’s there really.

He sits on his front porch and watches people. Inmates from the Ice Hotel, for example, having their physical recreation, walking to the church and back in their prisoner outfits. He doesn’t invite anyone in for a chat, or encourage children to come and collect presents. He doesn’t do anything in particular. He’ll wink at you, though, if you catch his eye. It seems to be his temporary home, in the run-up to Christmas. We never see him there after Christmas Eve. But is he Father Christmas or just another ‘Tomte’?

It’s confusing in Sweden, one never knows. It’s ‘Tomte’ who delivers the presents, and although he looks like Father Christmas there are thousands of ‘Tomtar’ (plural form) all over Sweden, making an appearance at the same time (Christmas Eve afternoon). I looked up an explanation of why there are so many of them and learnt that they’re thought to be the spirit of the farmer who first cleared the land and built a house there. That’s what ‘tomte’ actually means – ‘a plot of land’. So it’s a kind of ancestor worship I suppose. And you need to keep your house Tomte happy, especially at Christmas time.

That explained it then. Just before Christmas our fridge-freezer had an identity crisis and started beeping crazily when the outdoor temperature hit minus 18. The downstairs shower drain got blocked and flooded the shower. Then the fuse went in the mains electricity. Clearly our Tomte wasn’t happy.

I didn’t know what to do. I had to look it up. Apparently Tomtar don’t like their habits disturbed and can get into a terrible rage if you re-organise things around the house. You also have to take good care of your land and animals, and not allow buildings to deteriorate. And finally, at Christmas, your house Tomte likes a bowl of porridge, with butter. Butter in the porridge, mind, not next to it – they’re very particular about that.

After repairing the creaking downstairs door, doing a bit of clearing up in the basement, and talking loudly in the house about porridge with butter, things seem to have returned to normal.

This year the present of choice in Kiruna seems to have been a circular saw – at least if our local papers ads are anything to go by. With a present like that lying around, I dread to think what might happen in a typical family household in southern England, when family tensions have reached their peak during a long boring, Boxing Day. However, here in Kiruna, a circular saw is obviously the Perfect Gift.

It’s both hard and easy to have romantic notions here. On the one hand – silky white snow, orange horizons, dancing green lights, distant snowy peaks – it’s the stuff that winter dreams are made of. On the other hand – frequent noisy tractor activity in the street (clearing snow – we’re grateful, of course), the iron ore mine churning out vast plumes of steam into the night, gardens with vast collections of rusty machinery and old vehicles – these are reminders this is a town of practical purpose, not a Disney wonderland.

It’s the charm of the place of course, that it is both one thing and another. I remember this as our neighbour’s garden (and the view from ours) fills up with more vehicles for each passing day. I penned this Christmas ode, set to a famous tune, to come to terms with it.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

On the first day of Christmas my neighbour left for me

a TV beside a birch tree.

On the second day of Christmas my neighbour left for me

Two EPA tractors,

and a TV beside a birch tree.

On the third day of Christmas my neighbour left for me

Three brand new ski-doos,

Two EPA tractors,

and a TV beside a birch tree.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my neighbour left for me

Twelve rusty spare parts,

Eleven battery chargers,

Ten Chevvy engines,

Nine windscreen wipers,

Eight summer tyres,

Seven tractor snow ploughs,

Six ski-doo trailers,

– Five Escort Vans –

Four Ford Cortinas,

Three brand new ski-doos,

Two EPA tractors,

and a TV beside a birch tree.