Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

It’s Christmas Eve. The snow lies thick and crisp, crunching satisfyingly under my feet.The sky is black velvet, with sparkles. Nothing stirs, not even a mouse.

Then there’s a choking, rattling rasp of an engine. In the distance, a blue sparkling light and a trail of smoke moves towards me. A small farm vehicle, with a Christmas tree strapped on the back, decorated front and back with fairy lights. As it wheezes heavily by I can make out three youngsters squashed into the two-person seats. Then it disappears over the hill.

From our sofa in the living room all we can see over the snow pile is a tree, gliding slowly up the hill. Earlier in the week it was just the tree, passing by the house a few times a day. Then the tree got lights. Then the vehicle got lights.

‘EPA tractors’ are farm vehicles licensed for 15 year olds. The only thing that makes them safer than a car to drive is their maximum speed (30 km/h). Everything else about them is more annoying – more noise, more pollution, and more likely to cause an obstruction. Call me a spoilsport but I’ve tended to think that 15 year olds should be walking into town, on their bikes, or sitting at home behaving themselves until they’re old enough to have a driving licence.

But a slow car with a Christmas tree attached – it’s hardly for the Kings of Cool. Kiruna is a town of Big Vehicles, and youngsters aspire to sit up high in a hefty tractor rather than speed along the highway in a Lotus Elan. Chugging along in their EPA tractor with the fairy lights flashing, I get the feeling they really don’t give a damn.

And hurrah for that. Happy Christmas!

I’m always impressed by the potential in Swedish to turn nouns into verbs.

Take the famous ‘fika’ for example. It describes a kind of food which is of dubious nutritional value but all-important as a symbol of social cohesion. It’s cake with coffee, in-between meals, and as part of a social occasion. And in Sweden it isn’t just cake and coffee, it’s also the process of eating the cake and drinking the coffee. To ‘fika’ is to spend time doing what you like best, and slowly. Using the same word as noun and verb means you don’t have to describe how you feel about a thing, in this case, cake with coffee; you become a part of it.

There was a new one for me this week: to ‘lussa’. Not a word I’d ever come across before. It accompanied lots of pictures in the newspaper of girls with candles in their hair. It’s the celebration of ‘Lucia’, or ‘St Lucia’, on 13th December – a mix of pagan and Christian myth and legend, on what used to be (in the old calendar) the longest night of the year. St Lucia – a girl dressed in white, with candles on her head – arrives in the morning darkness bringing saffron buns and wine or coffee. Almost every organisation celebrates it – every school, company, institution has its own ‘Lucia’. Even ’68 degrees bed and breakfast’ had one this year. And now I learn that what I did, when I dressed up and surprised the guests in a dark breakfast room, was to ‘lussa’.

You wonder what other nouns might work as verbs. It’s Christmas, so could anyone ‘christmassa’ do you think? What would that entail exactly? I suppose that’s the limitation. It needs to be clear what the thing is, and everyone has to agree what that is, before you can enact it as a verb. When I ‘christmassa’, I cook buckwheat roast and sing carols, but someone else might eat Christmas cake and watch repeats of ‘The Snowman’ on TV. No, it wouldn’t work, using it as a verb.

This week the local council has made a valiant attempt at stretching the use of the Swedish language to help us all feel things are moving along nicely. They say that children are ‘dancing’ the relocation of the town.

There we were, thinking that moving Kiruna was all about bringing in interested building companies and reliable financial backers, and the council showing the way with a well thought out town plan. But no, apparently the relocation can be ‘danced’.

Confused? So were we, so we turned to the relevant page of this month’s information brochure about the moving of the town. ‘How does one dance the moving of a town?’ the article asks.

How indeed. We read on.

The children are showing the way, it says, and they begin with ‘their own part in the process’. You can ‘dance’ your living room, or you can ‘dance’ your way to school. Then you can ‘dance’ the town’s architecture, what’s currently here, and ‘dance’ what you would like to have there in the future. Well who’d have thought it?

This could make town planning committees all over the country a lot fitter. And instead of us all sitting around waiting for something to happen in Kiruna, we can now all take our part in ‘dancing’ the new town into existence.

I’m for it, I need the exercise. But perhaps instead of ‘dancing’ the town to its new location, they ought just to say that this is how you ‘Kiruna’.

This year we bought a Christmas tree – we managed to find one, having learned that you have to look for private ads, and look at least a month before Christmas. Last year we’d had to go out looking for dead branches to put up in place of a whole tree, and although the ‘tree’ was unimpressive, the experience of collecting the branches has stayed with me. So we thought we would do the same this year. But we made a number of mistakes.

You get into a bit of a double bluff here, not being a local. We know you aren’t allowed to go into the forest and cut down a tree – we were only looking for dead bits. But if someone sees you saunter into the forest with a saw and a large bag they’re going to think, ‘cutting up body parts and burying them’, or ‘tree stealers’. So how do we make ourselves look as innocent as we really are? For some reason we decided it would be easier to go unnoticed if we went branch hunting, with a torch, in the dark. Only we failed to work out that not only would we be less visible, so would the tree branches. Mistake number one.

The next day we set out again, in the twilight (because we have no daylight), having decided to go somewhere different to last year, for the adventure. We had lots of ideas of places we could go, and drove off down some minor roads on the forested side of town. There had been so much snow that the trees are heavily weighted, hanging deeply by the sides of the road, every twig and branch covered in white. When we reached our first spot there was a huge pile of snow blocking the path, and although I have long boots on this wasn’t sufficient – I’d have gone in up to my waist. Mistake number two.

So we tried another spot. We managed to get onto the path and staggered into the forest, looking hopefully from side to side for dead branches. No chance. The snow was so deep it was impossible to tell whether branches were rooted or not, alive or dead. All the branches lying horizontal would have been covered in snow. There was no way we would find dead branches. Mistake number three.

Later that evening, reflecting on our failed mission, we realised that completely abiding by the law was no longer an option. We’d have to find a small sick-looking tree, deep into the forest, and just remove some small branches or twigs so no-one would notice. We didn’t need them to be tree size – just a bit of greenery to decorate the verandah. Only enough to fill a small plastic bag. Nothing anyone could object to, we thought. And we’d have to go where we’d gone the first year, because then we would know where to look under the snow.

It’s surprising how easy it is to see in twilight. Your eyes adjust easily to the light at this time of year. There never is any daylight, so your eyes don’t expect it. It’s like learning to see in the dark – it just takes time to acclimatise. So setting off deep into the forest in the twilight is no problem. You see the gap between the trees ahead of you, you see the trees, you see the snow under your feet, you see the gaps between the trees behind you, you see the footprints in the snow from the hares, or the foxes, you see the gaps between the trees beside you. Or was it ahead of you? It’s easy to lose your sense of direction in a snowy forest in the twilight.

Rolf told me where he comes from, a village in western Sweden, his neighbours – mother and daughter – went out one year to cut down a tree for Christmas. Their bodies weren’t found for five years. It’s easy to lose your sense of direction in a snowy forest in the twilight. Mistake number four.

We pulled a few twigs from a tree, pushed them deep into a carrier bag and hurried back to the car in the fading light.

Our last guests for a few days had just left, and we’d gone out of town for a Christmas Market experience.

Last year at this time of year we’d headed out to a nearby village for the market, thinking it would be more ‘mysig’ (that’s sort of cosy, but more so) than one in town. It was minus 17 when we left, and as is often the case it got colder as we drove down the hill. It was minus 38 when we arrived to discover they’d cancelled the market, because of the cold. It was memorable though.

This year it was only minus four when we left, and a very reasonable minus eight when we arrived. We were pleased that on a second attempt we’d finally made it. We pushed our way through the old wooden door into the small rooms of this preserved old house. There were some handicrafts for sale, but it seemed this market was mainly an opportunity to eat cake (see my previous post, ‘Let them eat cake’). I must say we were a bit disappointed. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but after two years of build-up coming to this particular Christmas Market, we were thinking of something more exciting than a pair of knitted socks and a piece of cake. We didn’t even find any homemade saffron buns to buy, which are always on the list at this time of year (as I’m rather partial to saffron and homemade means plenty of it). And while I’m delighted not to be subjected to endless rounds of Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’, in my opinion this occasion lacked a bit of yuletide atmosphere. There were plenty more Christmas Markets in Kiruna today, so we headed back to town.

We found another one, at a local school. We immediately found saffron buns to buy, so I was happy. There wasn’t a lot else though. More opportunities to drink and eat cake and sausages. Rolf had a sausage, and we warmed ourselves by the fire. I thought we were standing in front of some kind of giant school stage set, until I realised it wasn’t a theatrical backdrop at all, but a real burned down building with a jagged edged side wall, a collapsed front porch and no roof. It had been hit by lightning a few months ago. A timely reminder that there’s more to life than Christmas Markets.

We decided to give the third Christmas Market a miss. We walked back to the car and on the way there we noticed an amazingly full, bright moon hanging low in the sky. Getting in the car and driving up a bit higher we found ourselves looking out over the street lights of Kiruna, and the broad pink face of the moon smiling benignly down at the town.

Two hours earlier we’d been looking at another face – the top half of a round orange face – the sun, just rolling slightly above the horizon like a humped whale and then sinking down below it again.

It’s the time of year we lose the sun. In a few more days it will be gone for weeks – but there are compensations. The moon hung like a giant pink bauble in the sky. We couldn’t take our eyes off it.

Then someone threw a wide green ribbon across the blackness above. The ribbon flickered and wriggled across the sky, and then spread, becoming wider, sweeping over the buildings behind us. Threads of mauve and green dropped down towards the moon and moved to the side of it, waving small curtains over the town as if it was all some kind of giant stage.

When the show was over we went home. An hour or so later the sky over our garden was full of leaping green ribbons too. There’d been no ‘aurora alert’ today. As often happens, when visitors come here wanting to see the northern lights, they hide, but when no-one is looking, they appear. They’d crept up on us when we’d been focussing on Christmas Markets. You can’t help feeling they have human characteristics – they’re proud, independent, unpredictable, mysterious.

And yes, just a tiny bit sneaky.

(Photo below: The northern lights over 68 degrees bed and breakfast…..)

You know you live somewhere a bit different when a political party throws a party to thank local voters for not electing it. Or perhaps, just when a political party throws a party. It’s Kiruna, and a ‘kalas’ is nothing special.

‘Kalas’ translates roughly as ‘party’, only you have to let go of any adult associations you have with the word. This isn’t something you need a cocktail dress for, and you won’t find a finger buffet and a glass of chilled white wine here.

A ‘kalas’ has more of the feeling of a bean feast, a good old-fashioned having-a-bit-of-fun sort of party. A ‘kalas’ is what children like to go to, and in Kiruna adults like to go to one too. Dress code is come as you are (ski pants), and the main attraction is cake. Ideally cream cake, but there will be other varieties. And coffee (everything in Sweden comes with coffee – even coffee comes with coffee).

This Saturday there will be a ‘Tårtkalas’ in Folkets Hus, the community centre in town. That roughly translates as a ‘cream cake party’. The host of the party is Kiruna’s ‘centre party’, who increased their percentage of votes in a recent election but failed to gain the majority. As it’s a party thrown by a political party you’d be forgiven for thinking Boston Tea Party here, likely to involve some kind of political protest, possibly involving throwing cream cakes at the political winners. But no. This will be a most civilised affair, where all sorts of people (regardless of who they voted for) will indulge in free coffee and cake while chatting to friends and neighbours.

It’s not uncommon. In fact, we went to one last week. That one was thrown by the local water/energy/rubbish company, Tekniska Verket. There was a good turn out – Folkets Hus cafe was full, and there were at least three different kinds of cake. And the reason for the party? It was the first of advent, people were out in town anyway, so Tekniska Verket saw an opportunity to make themselves loved. Good on them. They were loved, and disgruntlement about rubbish collection (why are their systems so inflexible they refuse to collect our bins when they’re turned the wrong way), energy (we can’t afford to pay to be connected to the communal system), and roads (why have they removed the hump to slow down traffic at the bottom of our road) is forgotten, at least for a day.

The public ‘kalas’ is part of Kiruna culture. It’s a free-for-all, a welcome all-comers event that I think reflects the best of society here. In general I experience Kiruna as a more equal kind of society than most. No community ever has total equality, of course, but there are degrees of equality, and here I must say I feel I’m as equal as I’ve ever been.

Kiruna was established as a mining town at the turn of the last century, and the owners of the mine and the workers did not live in an equal society. But compared with other industrial societies in Sweden, or elsewhere in the world at the time, Kiruna was in many ways a more equal society. Being so far away from other towns, and in the beginning extremely isolated (no roads, no railway), the town was designed to attract workers and keep them. It was a ‘model’ town, built to face the sun, with facilities for workers and their families unheard of elsewhere. The town even had a tram to take workers straight to the mine, and had electricity as early as 1907.

The first director of the mining company (LKAB, the same company here today) was Hjalmar Lundbohm, and he is still regarded as a sort of father of the town. He took an interest in the lives of the his workers, and provided education, sports facilities, and more importantly, a decent wage.

Elsewhere in Sweden, industrial towns were built on a plan where top management lived in big houses on one side of town, and the workers in small flats on the other. You don’t see this pattern in Kiruna. Large and small houses are mixed together. Houses for workers were specially designed to have the same feel around them as the ‘grand’ houses. Lundbohm himself refused to move into a grand house, and the relatively modest house he lived in is still in the same place, and possible to visit. All the old part of Kiruna, where the mining company provided housing, is soon to be emptied, because of the need to move the town.

But we were talking ‘kalas’ and free-for-all. Lundbohm was partial to a good ‘kalas’, although I have to admit that they weren’t always free-for-all. Sometimes they were just for the royals and the great and the good from Stockholm, because he was very good at PR for the company and knew how to get them on his side. Sometimes they were for artists, because he liked art and didn’t think that just because Kiruna was so far north it meant it shouldn’t be the subject of paintings, or a place where art flourished.

But alongside these other parties, Lundbohm also liked to throw a ‘kalas’ for locals. His most famous ‘kalas’ were at Christmas, for the children of the mine workers. For many years Lundbohm liked to begin his ‘kalas’ with a reindeer ride and the sled that was used to bring the children to the ‘kalas’ still lies outside his house. Then there were games, and a Christmas tree, and more kinds of cake than you could eat. There are still people living in Kiruna who went to these parties as children.

Last week the mining company, LKAB, didn’t throw a ‘kalas’, but it did invite us all to a ‘glöggmingel’ in town. Ah yes, a ‘mingel’…. well it’s a social event where you, er, mingle. And now you know what a ‘tårtkalas’ is, you can work out that a ‘glöggmingel’ is an occasion where you socialise and drink mulled wine (‘glögg’).

So we went. Only when we got there there was no ‘glögg’, just some cold bottled fizzy drink. And no cake. So we went upstairs to Tekniska Verken’s ‘kalas’ instead. LKAB seem to have lost their knack with ‘kalas’.

The snow falls, and what doesn’t move soon disappears. Bushes disappear. The division between grass and driveway no longer visible. Unused tools, garden waste bins, old vehicles – you’re no longer sure quite where they are. The winter makes a still life of anything not in use, and after a while it’s hard to work out what’s beneath the snow hills. Like ancient burial mounds, all you see is a shape, and then it’s down to imagination.

A new neighbour has moved vehicles and trailers into a nearby garden. Oh, and a TV. They seem willing victims, waiting patiently to disappear into the snow. It’s a calm feeling. All the things around us that usually feel as if they’re making demands – the spade that reminds you of the ground that needs digging, the bin that reminds you of the old grass that needs dumping, the old car that reminds you of an engine that needs fixing. Now they’re all calm, just giving themselves up to the snow. We breathe a sigh of relief.

When things are still, they seem to have a different meaning. I’m not keen on old cars, but an old car covered in snow looks like an ghost, with a very different kind of spirit, one that has abandoned all hope of being impressive – in fact a much more friendly sort of car, the sort of car I could love. Not a very useful one, though, admittedly.

The snow also covers all sorts of activities we may not be so proud of – broken branches, paper packaging, plastic bags, old cans, dog poo (yes, we get it here too). It’s a magic white marker pen, sweeping over the ugly and dirty world with a cleansing sweep of sparkle. It feels like a friend.

Last year I lost a shopping list in the snow. At the time it was annoying, since I ‘d forgotten what was on it and came home without the all important bread. But a couple of days later I found a shopping list. Not mine, but someone else’s. That person wanted cleaning liquid, and biscuits, and, for a magical moment, so did I.

A few days ago we were wandering outside the skeleton of this year’s Ice Hotel. It opens in a couple of weeks, and outside they’re still blowing wet snow onto metal frames. Inside there will be lots of elves carving ice blocks into reindeer and tube trains.

But at the moment there are no guests. The Torne river is a quiet expanse of white, as yet not filled with the excited whoops of people on sled dog tours, or roaring past on snow scooters in a wave of petrol fumes. It’s the time before the curtain opens on the stage of the magical winter wonderland on ice.

Round the corner, lined up like an army of terracotta warriors, we found a store of currently unused snow scooters. They looked strangely out of place. Whatever were they for? In ten thousand years archaeologists might dig them up. They might wonder if they were objects buried to honour the Ice King who lived in an ice palace here on the river.

Placed like this they don’t really look like snow scooters. They look like an art installation.

This work of art might carry the title, ‘The pointlessness of travel’. ‘Toys in a winter landscape.’ ‘How we destroyed the planet with carbon monoxide and methanol.’ Or, ‘How could we ever have thought this was fun?’

It makes you think.

I was moving snow in the ‘garden’ (called a ‘gård’ in Swedish, which is a better description than ‘garden’ for here because it’s more like a ‘backyard’). It’s very different from gardening in England, where I was digging and turning the soil, pruning bushes, and watching my garden grow.

Gardening in Kiruna, on the other hand, requires enormous optimism and a better knowledge of arctic vegetation than I possess. (I know what does really well here though – rhubarb.) Most of the year the ground is covered in snow, and the rest of the time it’s overrun with grass, growing uncontrollably in the 24 hour daylight. To garden here means focussing on just the two or three months of the year you see the ground, limiting yourself to the hardiest of hardy plants, and working in the face of midge and mosquito battalions who see your face and hands as their vegetable patch. I just don’t have what it takes.

Instead of gardening I am engaged with snow. Snow must be cleared away or else we can’t reach the garage. It doesn’t melt until April, so now it must be piled up very carefully or else later in the season there will be nowhere to put it.

Over the last two years we have perfected our technique. We know where the bottlenecks are, the areas we need to keep clear for when it’s been snowing all day and the snow must be moved quickly. Many small paths leading away from the driveway are required, and many places to move the snow to. Those piles have to be as far back as possible from the driveway, right from the beginning of the season.

We have excelled ourselves this year. We’ve created twice as many snow-piling opportunities as last year. We’ve smoothed the paths to make the sledge slide easily. Like all good gardeners, we’ve worked to create some kind of order in the creative chaos of nature. We’ve endeavoured to make the snow piles not look too out of place next to nature’s own wind-driven piles. Leaning on the snow shovel looking down on our handiwork brings a feeling of enormous satisfaction.

It occurred to me that gardening is only partly about making greenery grow – it’s at least as much about achieving a sense of temporary mastery over nature. Just as with plants, we need to learn how snow behaves, how it changes with the seasons, when it grows harder or softer, releases water or absorbs it, when it is possible to move a snow pile, and when it isn’t.

After an hour of organising my snow piles I feel my white garden is also one of nature’s miracles. And when the snow melts, there’s always the rhubarb.

Driving back into Kiruna from an afternoon out in the fjäll we watched as vivid orange and red spread along the horizon, edging out towards the distant humped shape of the mine. On the other side, a bright white full moon was balanced on the edge of the pepper white landscape, looking as if it might topple over and roll off into the hills.

As the local paper expressed it this week, ‘At last! Minus degrees!’

The landscape and town is snow-covered, and no icy grey patches are there to spoil the impression of pure white. More importantly, we can walk out without falling over. Last week’s ice is still underneath, but the layer of snow on top is now sufficient to give your boots some grip.

This means that a short walk up into the fjäll was possible again, having been off limit for the last few weeks, unless you’d wanted to negotiate most of the path on your backside (easier going down).

The last time we walked this way was autumn, with brown, orange and red scrub at our feet and bright low sunshine. It was quicker to walk then than now. This time the snow requires some careful placing of the feet, and it is no longer always clear where the path is. We think we know the path well, but there are frequent stops to discuss which is the right way.

Our clumsy wide boots disturb the smooth effect of the snow. Smooth, that is, apart from where animals or birds have left their traces.

‘Possibly a ski-pole?’ I suggest, seeing a large swirling mark in the snow, ending in a sharp dot. ‘Without a ski-er?’ Mmm, unless the skier had taken off and flown down the hill.

We continue trudging up the hill. Never a noisy place, this, but once the snow has fallen the hush seems heavier. We pick our way between the snow covered birch scrub, as carefully as we can in heavy boots. Looking behind us we have left clear tracks wriggling right to left having often veered off track before finding the path again.

The view out over Lake Torneträsk and the mountains beyond is more beautiful than ever. I have the feeling that when the snow settles, nature pulls a protective cape over the landscape for the winter and gathers it back to herself. No longer open for people to rampage about on her slopes and valleys, no longer free for people to pick berries or hunt birds, no longer open for exploration by campers and long distance walkers.

So we feel especially privileged to be allowed in today. As if we’ve sneaked in the back door after all the visitors have left for the day and there’s no longer an entrance fee. Or have pulled open the curtain backstage and peered in at the actors removing their make up and pulling off their clown costumes. It’s peaceful, unshowy, wrapped up and hidden.

Coming up here makes one breath deeper, more calmly. Not a place to linger though, at minus 13 degrees with a wind, so we begin our descent. This time we use a different technique, walking diagonally to avoid slipping, stepping either side of our previous tracks to ensure we are walking into fresh snow, better for the grip.

Our tracks have made a mess of the smooth snow paths, but it’s reassuring to see them there. Unlike a walk in town where you’re one of a crowd, your presence unnoticed or soon forgotten, here in the fjäll, in the winter time, there are traces of us left behind. Perhaps a fox will come across them, and wonder what or who was here.

It’s been unusually slippery the last few weeks.

Most of the winter you don’t have to worry about ice on the roads or pavements. It’s only when temperatures hover around zero that you get slide-y pavements – the last few weeks have been just that. It’s the opposite feeling of spring – we feel we’re digging in our heels, resisting the pull to winter, reluctant to be dragged back into below freezing temperatures and snow shovelling duties. So the temperatures are bobbing up and down, and last week someone staying with us from Spain had a tumble.

The locals have developed a ‘walk’ to deal with these conditions. It’s not as graceful as the Moon Walk, but it does the job (and with any luck you’ll move forwards instead of backwards). You pick up each foot and put it down very carefully, completely flat. There’s no rolling from one foot to another.

It’s the only way not to fall over. Apart from walking on grit, that is, which also does the job. At some point a machine comes along the pavement, depositing a swathe of grit. Then you can walk normally – if you can see the grit. But if it’s been snowing again it’s hard to say if just under the snow there’s still a tricky layer of ice. Best do the Ice Walk again.

Tonight is Halloween Party Night and there are quite a few witches out with broomsticks doing the Ice Walk. Some of them are doing the Ice Slide in the middle of the road, and good luck to them because being dressed in black, no motorist will ever see them.

Kiruna is organised for winter so you won’t be surprised to learn about the communal Grit Trough. The rule is you’re allowed to take as much as you like if you come on foot, but you’re not allowed to drive up there. You meet your neighbours at the Grit Trough and talk about tough times ahead.

The neighbour who has it right outside his house is lucky. He can take as much as he likes – though ironically, having a flat piece of land around his house, his needs are not great. He’s not territorial about it – all are welcome. He keeps an eye on grit levels, and at the end of the season, when the snow finally melts, he sweeps up last year’s grit and puts it all back. Recycling grit; it’s a Kiruna thing.

So to collect our grit, legally, one of us does the Ice Walk over the main road to the trough, fills up a bucket, and comes back throwing grit ahead of us, like strewing a path with roses, or confetti. Only tougher.

A bit more snow, and the grit will disappear. A bit more snow still and there’s no need for the grit. Then a bit more snow still and the ski season will begin, and then we’ll want tracks to ski in that are slippery, though preferably not icy. There’s no pleasing some people.

I don’t know how many people are with me here, reading this blog. I’m pretty sure we’re a very small, self-selecting group. I wouldn’t want to spread this next information too wide, but I do appreciate the few readers I have, so I’ve decided to let you into a secret.

It’s about ‘the new Kiruna’.

There’s been quite a bit of publicity lately about the new town – the first spade of building has been dug in for the photographers several times over the last few months. Word is spreading fast. I was in Stockholm last week and there I could have attended a lecture on how the new Kiruna will look and how exciting it all is. I even found the story on the front page of an English newspaper, complete with the architect’s glittering illustration – town hall, rows of shops and businesses, nearby flats and houses, all glowing under the northern lights, while local people go shopping on skis, as we do. (Well actually we don’t, but it’s a nice idea.) Apparently the architects who won the design competition have taken on the services of a social anthropologist to analyse how local people feel about losing their town, which is very reassuring for us all, don’t you think?

The site of this architect-planned wonder, ‘the new Kiruna’, is east of town, alongside the E10 road. Driving past the large billboard by the roadside you can see that shrubbery has been cleared, revealing early excavations, and that the remnants of some industrial buildings have been demolished. Something, of sorts, is happening then.

Now, forgive me for a short digression. I’ve learnt there’s nothing new on this earth, just repetitions of something someone has done somewhere else. I was in Bali, Indonesia, long ago, where I saw that local people had solved the problem of tourists wanting to witness their local rituals and culture when they themselves preferred to keep it private. The answer they’d come up with was creating two versions of everything. There was a funeral for the tourists, and then there was a secret, real funeral for locals. There was the advertised celebration of the rice harvest for the tourists, and elsewhere, the secret real celebration for them. Clever.

There’s been lots of talk about what ‘the new Kiruna’ will look like. However, at the moment there’s nothing there. There will be though, soon, our politicians assure us, and first they’re going to build a new town hall. There’s been a competition for its design (of course) and the winning design is – well, rather space-y, way over budget, and called ‘The Crystal’. It’s a start, certainly, but a new town hall does not make a new town and so far they haven’t persuaded any local shops or businesses to build or move to join it, and that’s a problem. Everyone’s been invited to the party, but no-one’s showed up on the doorstep. You can understand the hesitation. Why would anyone want to move their business to an empty site where no-one goes and no-one lives? And yet, in all discussions or reports of the new town, the spotlight is all on this empty, muddy tract of land.

Meanwhile, just down the road from us there’s a lot of new development going on around an existing ‘out of town’ supermarket. Business units, warehouses and new shops and cafes are springing up there every month. It’s a handy place. It’s not too far from the existing town, and there’s a supermarket, Coop Forum, that people go to already. Since the current town is going to be emptied over the next 10 – 20 years, shops there are looking to relocate, and down here by Coop Forum looks like a good bet.

It’s an unassuming sort of area, off a roundabout out of town, with no proclaiming billboard or architect-designed spaces. It’s not especially attractive, or unusual, for an edge of town shopping centre. There are no cable car fantasies or buildings looking like spaceships. Just a huge car park, and lots of people going about their business, as they always have done, but in a new place.

You won’t find it written about in the newspapers, featured in academic reports, or discussed in architects’ workshops. People won’t come to the Coop Forum site to study how the town is being relocated. As new buildings spring up every month around the Coop Forum shopping centre there won’t be photos taken there of ‘the first spade’, and it won’t be the focus for analysis of how the process of moving the town is being managed. You won’t even find local politicians admitting to knowing the new shopping area exists – though you’ll certainly find them shopping there.

But don’t let on that you know. It’s a secret.

It’s election time in Kiruna and it’s a shock to encounter so many public statements about the town’s future – in local papers, on bill boards, in broadsheets spread around the town. Whereas there is usually an eerie silence on the subject, now we can’t move for falling over a politician that wants to tell us what the town’s future will be, or should be, and how they are the person to take us there.

It’s good to hear all the politicians hopes and dreams for the future, but no amount of spin alters the fact that right now Kiruna is facing a pit, and we must face losing our town and homes.

So, with the notable exception of the Green Party (which campaigns to stop the mine expansion), political campaigning in Kiruna right now is all about making the best of a bad situation. We have to try and see the destruction of our environment as a positive, an opportunity to clear the decks and start again.

Walking to the town hall today to vote we pass one of the mine’s measuring points. This tells the mine how much the ground is moving so they can calculate when the area will collapse. We see that this particular measuring point has been rather charmingly decorated with flowers. Well, the local council are making the best of things.

And so are we, as we march purposefully into the town hall. Guaranteed to lower our spirits, the first thing we encounter in the town hall is an art installation.

It’s a travelling art show (we read) except that there’s no art there, just a little caravan – like hundreds in use out in the fjäll – and some text saying it welcomes people to come and exchange some objects with them, and there are a few paintings inside. This is another offering from ‘Art in the north’. We quickly edge our way around it to the voting booth, force a grin, and post the bit of paper. Done, and we’re out the building as fast as we can to face our bright new future.

Round the corner from the town hall is the road bridge that used to lead to the mine office. Now there’s a pit ahead of it instead of a road, so they’ve decided to demolish it for safety reasons. I remember that road. Beyond the fence, men in hard hats are dismantling it like a Lego toy.

But what’s this? They’re repairing a road that leads to the defunct, soon-to-be-gone-and-forgotten bridge. That leads to a pit? An idea comes to me to add to the pile of crazy ideas put forward for ‘the new Kiruna’.

I don’t think we need (as has been suggested) a giant greenhouse space in the centre, a sort of tropical theme park. I don’t think we need an overhead tram to link the airport with the town. And I don’t think we need a town hall that looks like a giant spaceship. But I do think it would be just brilliant if Kiruna made good use of the growing pit.

I think about using it as a ‘Pit 101’. If you aren’t familiar with the idea, ‘Room 101’ is a metaphorical place where you put your pet hates so you don’t have to deal with them. In Kiruna, you could literally drive things (or people) up the perfectly well repaired road and then at the end, just tip them in to ‘Pit 101’.

Kiruna could be the town for Getting Rid. People would flock to the town – to ditch other people’s mobile phones, McDonalds, surströmming, fitted carpets, instant coffee, reclining plane seats. Any number of things we don’t like could be got rid of in the pit. A few politicians currently annoying the hell out of all of us all could be discretely added to the pile. Then all those patronising art installations could go tumbling to the bottom. Yes, I’m immensely cheered already.

Reindeer seem to fly. You only have to watch a moving group of reindeer to understand how the idea of them flying came about. They move forward in a straight line, their bodies perfectly still, with no up and down movement at all and their heads shot forward in line with their bodies. It looks just like the movement of a low flying bird.

This is especially extraordinary when you realise that in the fjäll they run on the most uneven terrain imaginable, rocky and slanting and often covered in ice and snow. Their legs are adapted by being double-jointed and seem to function on automatic, ensuring a smooth movement for the body with seemingly little effort. They’re perfectly adapted to their environment. Which is more than can be said for us this week, when we were out in the fjäll testing a new tent.

We’ve done a lot of day walking, and a few of short overnight trips in huts, but we’d never camped. Camping can take you further away, and give you an experience of being close up with nature, but it brings a lot of new challenges. We like to work it out for ourselves, testing how things are, and then building up that knowledge piece by piece. We have a lot to learn. It’s useful now and again to get some advice from someone with the experience, but there’s only so much you can take in before you have to work it out for yourself. Now was the time to get over our fear of tents.

It was a clear autumn day and the fjäll was glowing red and yellow in warm sunshine. Despite the strain of heavy backpacks – all those things you feel you need for an overnight stay – the trek there was a joy. The wonder of seeing reindeer is that they’re quite large animals, but encountering them is totally without fear on either side. They’re called ‘semi-domesticated’, but they’re wild really, in the sense that they’re nervous of people, and look after themselves in a natural setting. Human intervention is only to count and slaughter them, and when necessary to guide them over to better grazing if the weather, or human activities, have destroyed what’s usually there.

Reindeer keep a safe distance, but frequently stop to look you over, sometimes on the brow of a hill, antlers silhouetted against the sky. It’s an encounter, no doubt about that. Then they start to run, flying down into the valley. It makes you feel a part of their world, just watching them.

But putting up our tent, as the temperature sank rapidly, I knew what an alien I was. We were about to have our first night out in a landscape where we would be totally alone, no-one likely to pass by, and beyond reach of the phone network. We should have started this camping lark in the summer, when there was no darkness. We were a little apprehensive about our ability even to erect the tent (we’d tried it out in the sitting room) and get the gas stove going. But we’d decided that all would be well.

Confidence can take you a long way, and so we got the tent up, and had a hot meal before the cold drove us into our sleeping bags for the night. We were tired but satisfied we’d managed everything fairly well, and the tent looked good for the night.

I was awake quite a while, listening to the silence. I left the tent of necessity at one point and faced the mountains, the stars, and pale white northern lights spread out across the sky, billowing gently in the solar winds. It was cold though, so I was driven back into the sleeping bag.

I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard something outside the tent.

‘Schnigglegrroomph.’ What was a wild pig doing out here in the fjäll? And why was it outside our tent?

I shook Rolf awake. There were a couple more ‘Grmph’ noises from outside and few protests from inside while Rolf came back into consciousness and saw my alarmed face.

‘Schnigglegrroomph.’

‘What is that?’ I demanded. Rolf tried to look unimpressed. In fact he tried to look as if he wasn’t really lying in a sleeping bag in a lonely place with an animal outside the tent.

‘Schnigglegrroomph. Grmph.’ Now the beast in the night was stamping the ground around us. I had visions of a wild boar charging through the tent, trampling us in a frenzied attack.

‘Must be a reindeer,’ said Rolf.

‘What, sounding like a PIG?’ I protested.

‘Schnigglegrroomph’. This time it was Rolf making the noise.

‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Are you mad?’ But I couldn’t stop him.

‘Schnigglegrroomph’. He seemed to think that replying to the beast might scare it off.

‘Schnigglegrroomph’. It didn’t. Now we’d encouraged it – the beast in the night – and I knew in my bones it was coming through. I knew there were no wild boar in the fjäll so it had to be a reindeer, and I knew that reindeer aren’t aggressive – but I was sat bolt upright in my sleeping bag, frozen by a kind of fearful imagining. Why didn’t we go out and challenge it, whatever it was?

‘Schnigglegrroomph’.

Then, completely out of context, or so it seemed to us, we heard the tinkling of a bell. What was this, the Austrian Alps?

It took a few seconds to re-imagine the scenario, and replace the beast in the night with an image of reindeer. The dominant female in a herd may have a bell round her neck so herders can find her when they want to encourage the herd to move.

This tinkling matriarch is an experienced old reindeer. She’s seen it all, and knows what the herd should do. And when she comes across a young inexperienced reindeer, having his first encounter with a tent, wondering what it is and making ‘Grmph’ noises, she can give him a good bit of advice.

So she did, and the beast in the night, the dominant female reindeer and the rest of her small herd moved on and all was quiet again.

It was a memorable night, and we, and one young reindeer, learnt a thing or two about tents.