Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

A hush hangs over Kiruna. It’s Saturday morning, and yet barely a car passes by. No-one’s out walking their dogs outside our house, or struggling home up the hill with bags of shopping. Kiruna seems almost deserted. It’s the weekend of Rautas Premiere…

Let me explain. Rautas is a river – a big river – which north and west of here forms a wide section more like a lake, in a deep valley between two mountains. It’s rich in fish, but the authorities have decreed that, to preserve the fish stocks, there will be no fishing in Rautas until this particular weekend in March. Rautas Premiere.

This has been the case for so many years that it’s become a strong tradition, and families seem keen to preserve it. Traditionally people didn’t wait until sometime in the week after the first allowed date for fishing to head out for Rautas – they’d be there right from the beginning. That meant driving a couple of hours by snow scooter along a winding and bumpy track, in a slow queue behind all the other people from Kiruna, to spend the weekend at Rautas fishing among a mass of other people. Nowadays the queues are so long, and the track (through overuse) so poor, that, to beat the crowds, many people head out the day before. (This is what is known in Swedish as a ‘Tjuvstart’, or a ‘Thieving start’.)

For their time in Rautas people will come well prepared. This will involve at the very least bringing a tent, equipment for cooking, and some cans of beer. Most people will also have (neatly folded in their trailers) their own home-made ‘arc’ – a small portable shed to sleep in, which conveniently comes with a hole in the floor to fish through.

From this point the particular rituals and experiences that make up ‘Rautas Premiere’ are shrouded in mystery. Every year we see the trails of snow scooters heading out to Rautas, but they leave us behind at the road side. Not owning a snow scooter, we cannot follow.

So what happens beyond the mountain is a well kept local secret. A bit like a freemasonry meeting perhaps. I imagine locals greeting each other with a fish stuck in their ear, muttering secret codes to identify one another – ‘it’s a fishy business’ perhaps, or ‘last one to put a fish on the fire is a cissy’. We may never know.

Spring is a relative thing. In emails from England the traditional signs of spring – daffodils and cherry trees – are dangled, virtually, in front of me. I’m never quite sure if this is out of kindness, sympathy, or mischievousness. It is supposed, by the senders, that spring is not here yet, and that I will be depressed and wishing I was further south. Even though last year at this time I tried to explain.

But let me try again. Spring is a relative thing. Here it isn’t heralded by daffs and crocuses waving in a park. Instead we have bird song, rapidly increasing light, bewildering brightness, fluctuating temperatures and patches of lake turning icy blue. The sun is warm, and in the fjäll, green moss pokes through the snow. Some of the rivers have begun to melt a little and the trickle of water can be heard between the clinking of ice moving between cliffs of frozen snow.

These signs of spring bring me the same feeling of uplift, of hope and life, as a daffodil bobbing in the breeze. It’s hard, it seems, for people to understand that spring here is a beautiful thing, as beautiful as spring further south. Though very different.

Of course we have our off days. Quite a few actually. Today, for instance, it’s blowing a snowstorm out there. But yesterday we were skiing across a lake, blue sky and mountains around us. By the side of the lake great tits dipped and dived in the birch trees.

We had lunch on a rock, digging our feet into the snow, faces turned to the sun. Behind us a large patch of ice on the rock was retreating back into the lake – our coffee cups were resting on a natural ice bar. In between the rocks we even found insects. We saw a small spider perched delicately on the surface of the crusty snow. That small spider knew it was spring.

When children come here during the school terms you wonder how their parents have arranged it. This week I found out – it’s called Home Schooling. It was ‘a Geography Field Trip’, the parents said.

Their trip seemed mainly to involve shopping in town and downhill skiing, but maybe that’s what they teach in Geography these days – how to navigate around the hiking and walking section in ‘Inter Sport’, and the skiing qualities of snow at minus 5 degrees.

However, today our own Geography Field Trip was more traditional. It involved a map. We like maps, and look at them a lot, but we’ve had some trouble connecting the maps with the landscape, so we determined that today we really would Name That Mountain. We stopped at many lay-bys and tried to identify a familiar peak in the distance, and we looked at what the map could tell us about the landscape around.

It was a revelation. Roads are only a fraction of the story – a landscape is really understood through its rivers, valleys, lakes and mountains. In this landscape – parts of which are inaccessible all year round and other parts accessible only for short periods – it’s quite hard to understand how it all links up, until you look at a map.

Being able to name a mountain or a river valley imprints it in the memory, and makes it easier to see what you are looking at when you look out over a wide landscape. Names here can be in Swedish, Finnish, or Sami, or all three. Some of these names are very hard to remember – such as Njuohcamjävri, or Vuohnajokka – and others, like Bergfors, are fortunately much easier. After a while you work out that a ‘jävri’ is a lake, a ‘jokka’ a river, and a ‘varri’ a mountain. We finally got to put the real name on the mountain we’ve always called ‘the cloud stealing mountain’ (for obvious reasons). Now we know it’s Nagirvarri we not only have its name but we also now know that its nearby lake is called Nagirjärvi and its connecting river valley is Nagireatnu. And equally important, we now know where they are.

We had another purpose with the map. This is a road we’ve driven along very many times and travelling along it recalls our history too. I wanted to find a way to record the parts of the journey that have particular memories for us. I was thinking of aboriginal ‘songlines’, which I read about in Bruce Chatwin’s book. I think with all its memories over the years I could ‘sing’ the story of the E10 to Riksgränsen.

Some of the memories are places we set out from walking, or exploring. Others are where we had an encounter, perhaps met and talked to someone memorable. Or where we saw an animal or a bird. Or where we suddenly remembered we hadn’t switched off the coffee machine and had to return home in a hurry. Small insignificant memories, you might say, but together they represent the shared experience we relive every time we drive along the road.

Our field trip was both Geography, and History, Map Reading and Storytelling. We returned home rich in thought and knowledge.

Following my announcement a couple of days ago of warmer temperatures, I haven’t yet caught anyone eating an ice cream on a bench – though to be fair, the benches are all still covered in snow (it’s below freezing again). However I did see a discarded ice cream wrapper in the street yesterday. It isn’t really like the first spring cuckoo, but it’s an indication people are out and about thinking of enjoyment (specifically, ice cream) rather than just struggling to get from a to b. Ice cream is a local favourite, though it might seem surprising given the cold weather here. Cold air, don’t care.

There’s also a healthy queue of people outside ‘Empes’, the local hot dog stall. I learned this week that it’s been in Kiruna since the 1930s. ‘Empes Gatukök’ was started by a young man (nicknamed ‘Empes’ as a boy) who made his own ice cream. He sold it on the streets in boxes packed with the ice he’d collected himself from the lake. He later branched out into hot dogs and hamburgers, and in the 1950s had what was considered the snazziest modern hamburger stall in Sweden. It’s one of my favourite places in town – the giant Coke bottle and lit-up polar bear are iconic. Throughout the economic ups and downs of the town over several decades, Kiruna has always had its ‘Empes’.

As it is the start of a new year the local council has just delivered the first edition of its free quarterly magazine. With the mine hot on the heels of the town, steadily blasting its way down towards it, and many blocks of flats due to be emptied this year, you’d expect there to be plenty in the pipeline for the council to talk about.

Erm no, not really. There’s a new old people’s home planned. The council is talking with IKEA about building some new housing in one of the suburbs. (Just talking mind, and talk is cheap.) And there’s a fanfare of self congratulation that a decision has been made to build an indoor football pitch. So that’s what a town which is about to lose a significant portion of its housing stock needs – an indoor sports hall.

It all feels a bit of a distraction from the chronic housing shortage and problems associated with a town falling into a pit. The phrase ‘bread and circuses’ springs to mind (the phrase from AD 100 describing how the Roman government bought the population’s agreement and approval by providing free food and circus entertainment).

Another magazine delivered to our post box this week – ‘Business in Kiruna’ – focuses on this weekend’s big event: the arrival in Kiruna – by special charter plane (courtesy of Coca Cola) – of the World Football Championship’s trophy. FIFA has chosen Kiruna as the only place it will go to in Sweden. Isn’t that exciting? There will be lots of things happening around it and someone will make a film with it outside the Ice Hotel. Apparently it’s a huge honour for Kiruna which will boost the economy no end.

So much good news in one week – it’s hard to take it all in. Looking at how things are developing it seems we won’t be short of circus entertainment in Kiruna over the coming years. And maybe ‘Empes’ will get a grant to expand its business – I’m sure Kiruna really needs some Sushi Bars.

I know I said yesterday, ‘no more snow’, but really, I didn’t ask for spring, not yet. But here it is – plus 5 and much warmer than that in the sun, people out walking hatless and gloveless, white piles of snow turning limp and brown, and pavements turning to slush.

The tits are singing in the trees, and the neighbour’s dog is out sniffing the air, looking for adventure. Our doors are flung wide for the first time for months, and the rugs are airing on the porch. The ice glasses that were placed carefully on the handrail in December are releasing their water from the Torne river.

Huge layers of snow are sliding off the roofs of houses and sheds. I watched a block slide off the neighbours roof, and off our wood store – you feel really pleased when you actually see it go. Unfortunately the snow on our garage roof refuses to shift, and the snow turning wet makes it heavier, so it’s harder to open the garage doors. Out in town you have to be careful where you walk. In Stockholm, where they are more health and safety conscious, they will rope off an area underneath a roof where snow might fall. Here you just have to look out for yourself, or take the usual approach to dealing with a potential avalanche (as instructed on the road through the fjäll) – limit your risk by walking fast.

It looks like April, but it’s only February. Unsure of the season, we behaved as if it was spring and went out for a walk in town. It wasn’t exactly the carefree feeling you might expect though – the pavements were like ice rinks in places. They’ve gritted them, but too early, so the grit had just sunk into the melting snow. I’m pretty hopeless on icy pavements. Despite having lived in this climate for many years I still look like Bambi on ice. Locals tend to just slide along (in their trainers) instead of walking but I haven’t mastered the technique yet.

Many’s the visitor we’ve had over the winter who has failed to make a snowman because it’s the wrong kind of snow (too dry and cold). Now’s the time for it though – it’s called ‘kram’ snow in Swedish – that’s ‘hugging’ snow. Local children this afternoon were enjoying the novelty of being able to form and carry snowballs, and fortunately hadn’t yet worked out what to do with them.

The forecast is for the warm temperatures to continue. It’s the southerly winds that are to blame, bringing in warm weather from Finland and Russia (not places you usually think of as having warm air, but compared with here, that’s warm). Another couple of days like this and people will be sitting on benches in town eating ice cream. Mark my words.

What I want to write about, again, is snow.

Perhaps you can only read so much about snow. I know I’ve written about it rather a lot already. But for us it’s a feature of our daily life, a pressure, a frustration, a marvel, a burden.

There’s been so much more, and more, and more falling. So much fresh snow at this time of year is a challenge – where to put it all? We’ve been piling it up around the house now since November. If the land behind us didn’t slope downwards we wouldn’t be able to see out the windows anymore. Our garage is deep in a snow igloo, and the path down to it feels like a frozen water chute – high sides of snow curving round and down, and we must be careful to drive the car between them so as to avoid an avalanche.

Every day is defined by the amount of snow that falls, and the temperature. The snow that fell over the last few days was the lightest snow we’ve experienced. This is partly because it was cold when it fell – snow is more common as the temperature rises – but we don’t fully understand how all the different variants of snow are formed. We just know that not all snow is the same, and that is why in other languages there are so many words for it.

This week the forecast is for a periods of plus degrees – a horror for us, and the snow. The top layer will become wet, and then freeze over night. Any snow piles in the garden will become solid and impossible to shift. Water will drip onto our porch steps and form ice, so we’ll have to be out there sanding it every day.

As I said, it’s a challenge. At the start of the season there were always areas to pile it up in so shovelling could be fun. Now we first have to remove snow from the piles before we can shovel to make room for the new stuff. Some of that snow has to go up the steep drive to the snow pile in the street. We aren’t allowed to dump snow in the street, but there is a pile opposite us where the council piles up snow from the streets, so adding ours to it doesn’t seem such a crime. (I seem to remember a similar claim in Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ – ‘we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles’…)

Yesterday a lock broke on one of the guest room doors. We didn’t manage to fix it, so needed to buy a new one before our guests arrived in the afternoon. The driveway was piled high with the snowfall from the night before, and with the problem of having to push it a long way to pile it up, we reckoned it would take a few hours of work before we had access to the garage. Our house used to have a shorter driveway out to the road, not up a hill – but the council closed that exit years before we bought the house, so we had inherited a driveway problem.

Rolf went on foot to the nearest places, but was not able to find a lock that fitted. Meanwhile I had begun shovelling snow. By the time he returned we were only an hour away from reaching the car. When we did, he drove to a shop, bought the lock, and came home to fix it. When our guests arrived it still wasn’t ready. It didn’t look as if we’d worked hard to be ready for their arrival – why hadn’t we done it earlier?

Over a cup of coffee, I proceeded to tell our guests the story of the broken lock, the snow falling overnight, the council closing the garage exit, the driveway problems, the shovelling and there being nowhere to put the snow…

The truth is we’re now hoping and praying that there is No More Snow. Enough, already.

I see this year there are two giant igloos outside the Ice Hotel. They make the ice rooms in the hotel look like five stars. Perhaps that’s the point.

Igloos have become more popular as a tourist ‘activity’. Some are just there to sit in – like the ones at the Ice Hotel – but some people pay for instruction in how to make their own, and then they sleep in it. I think that sounds a bit close to my idea of suggesting people pay us so they can shovel snow from our drive.

Our living room looks out over snow, uphill to a road, and every week the snow piles have grown. This is mainly good news because any traffic sounds disappear into the snow, but it also means you see less and less of what is happening on the road. The feeling is that snow walls are building up around the house, so maybe it’s a bit like an igloo.

We used to enjoy watching the people walking down the road, and the converted old ‘tractor’ cars coming up and down the hill. I knew when the local council had sent out snow clearing machines, and I knew when the mine’s shift had ended when there was a stream of cars going out of town. I recognised people going to work, and spotted lost tourists making their way into town.

Later we could only see the top half of people as they moved up and down the hill. Then I had to deduce from the movement what their mode of transport was – walking, or kick sled, bicycle, or moped. The position of the arms was a clue.

Then about a month ago the snow pile was so high all we could see was heads – like something out of a Samuel Beckett play, heads bouncing up and down above the snow line. Sometimes they would be heads we knew, and usually not. Occasionally groups of children in different coloured fluorescent ski jackets climbed up over the snow piles and fell down the other side.

Now even the heads have disappeared. Sometimes we can see the top of a snow clearing machine gliding past, or a pennant flag at the end of a car aerial. We’re deep in our lair.

In the last few days there has been much more snow, and a wind driving it into even deeper piles. There’s been no sign of snow clearing in the roads, which is unusual because the local council guarantee to keep them free. You can still just about get your car through, provided you don’t drift into the piles at the side. This morning I saw the top of a snow clearing machine speed up the hill – so fast no-one could wave at it to stop. Maybe we should fly a flag of surrender from the top of our snow piles.

Yesterday the driving snow resulted in the closure of the main road between here and Norway. It doesn’t happen very often – it’s not the amount of snow that’s the problem but the combination of snow and wind. We had friends staying with us who had foolishly decided to spend Saturday night in Narvik and so were stuck there longer than they would have liked.

In a hotel they took the opportunity to watch some of the winter Olympics – the men’s cross country skiing relay races. Having listened to Sweden winning the women’s relay the day before, they then watched the men’s relay and Sweden won that too, beating Norway in both races for the first time since 1972. The rivalry between the countries is long-standing. The Norwegian newspapers this morning say ‘Warning – explicit and disturbing content’ and the page is a picture of the Swedish skiers celebrating their victory, and the Norwegian skiers not even in sight. Another headline claims the Norwegian skiers have been reported missing. I guess they’re out there somewhere, hiding in their snow lair.

On Friday we went to Jokkmokk Winter Market. This is traditionally a Sami winter market – it is its 409th year (yes you did read that right) – and is now an event that draws visitors from all over the world. The goods and skills on sale are Sami, but also more common market produce – plastic spoons, liquorice sticks, steamed donuts, woollen socks and hairpieces. There are talks, concerts, theatre – mostly, but not all, on a Sami theme – and there’s reindeer racing. It is a wonderful mix of cultures, in fact, with a strong underlying Sami base – it’s a time that Sami culture and craft is the main feature, rather than a sideline, and it’s a time for Sami people to express their communal and individual identity to the world.

Every year, the same Sami family lead their herd of extremely tame white reindeer through the market streets, to be admired and petted by visitors. It’s hard not to be charmed by the animals, and by the younger members of the Sami family in Sami traditional clothing – the youngest must be around 2 years of age and she sits calmly on a sled surrounded by the crowds.

This year, after the traditional reindeer parade, came another parade – of dark, masked characters, with reindeer pulling sleds of the bones of dead animals. They handed out a description of their vision for the future, where the land was allowed to flourish, providing grazing for the reindeer who had migrated and fed their for generations, where the water was clean and drinkable, and the landscape a thing of beauty.

It was the nearest the Sami were allowed to a protest march – a protest against the proposed new mining activity in the area. There has been mining around the reindeer’s migration and pasture land for a long time, and the two have an uncomfortable co-existence. The intrusion of new mining activity – a new company and a new mining area – is another matter. It is seen as a greedy hunt for profit, unnecessary for the economy, and detrimental to the environment and especially detrimental to the living of the reindeer herders. The local government has so far encouraged the new mining development, and in an area where a large proportion of the population is Sami, this is seen as betrayal. There was talk of boycotting the Winter Market. Without the Sami there is no Winter Market, and the tourism and other business that it feeds would suffer. Unfortunately, many of these businesses are Sami owned, so a boycott would be particularly damaging to their economy.

On the day there were some Sami who protested by being absent, while others found ways to protest at the market itself, as in the black parade of reindeer bones. It’s disappointing that there should be such a threat to the reindeer herders’ way of life when the success of the market is evidence of people’s fascination with it. It’s good to see that people are protesting against this threat and we hope their voices are heard.

We travelled three hours south by car to reach the market. We don’t go to buy spoons or donuts, and although we have sometimes bought some craft it isn’t the main draw for us. We like the atmosphere of cooperation in the market – different nationalities socialising together in the ‘After Market’ tent over a beer, or moving slowly around school classrooms to look at Sami works of art on display, many of them by artists at the start of their careers.

We were lucky to catch a performance by Jörgen Stenberg, a reindeer herder and a singer. He performed with a band of musicians from very different cultural and musical backgrounds. Traditional Swedish fiddle music, American influence blues guitar, and Sami ‘joik’ created an inspiring mix of sounds.

There were songs about reindeer, about family members, and about the destruction of Sami grazing land in the 1960s by the building of power stations. The emotion that was expressed in this concert was honest and very moving, and the blend of musical traditions was an expression of cooperation and tolerance. That’s why we go to Jokkmokk Winter Market, and we come away the richer for it.

Expedition delayed, but finally reaches goal

A hard going we had of it. It was blowing a hard north easterly round the peak of Luossavaara, and the snow lay thick on the ground. We set off from base around 9.00 hrs with the wind in our face, and heavy gusts of snow falling around us. I went first, my companion hooked in from behind. We walked that way for 20 minutes without a break, our fingers pained with cold. We both carried bags – which made progress slower, but was necessary for our journey – mine holding the all-important shopping lists.

As we approached the first stage camp – the trolley park – I turned for a moment to negotiate a trolley out of its hold, and it all happened in an instant: the shopping lists were torn away from my bag, curling down the vortex of the pathway.

I threw myself after, narrowly missing a rubbish bin, finally managing to reach towards one of the pieces of paper. Clutching it fiercely to my chest, and breathing heavily, I looked around for the other list. There was no sign of it. For the next half hour we searched high and low, trying to calculate the wind speed, possible obstacles in the way, working out where it might have fallen. But it was no good. It was not to be found.

We retrenched, hunkering down around our trolleys out of the wind. At times like this you need the determination of a mountain lion to survive. Painstakingly we recreated the shopping list with whatever tools we had to hand. It took many minutes, and a great deal of skill and concentration. We were able to continue our journey.

Yes, there would be eggs for tea.

Sharp fall in Norwegian krone has big effect on the market

With high hopes we launched ourselves into the supermarket yesterday, with the confidence of buyers who know when they have the upper hand.

‘Norway’s krone suffered one of its sharpest falls since the financial crisis of 2008 after the country’s central bank took an unexpectedly dovish stance that caught investors off guard.’

This was the news we’d been waiting for. For over a year now, Norwegian traders have taken the two hour journey by car from the border to enter the market in Kiruna, buying up biscuits and jam while they could. But now the news suggested something rather different.

It was true; there were no long queues at the tills. It was Sunday afternoon but no sign of Norwegians shopping. Just a few locals, picking up the ingredients for a meatball supper.

‘The (super) market remains calm, but traders are watching the value of the krone with keen interest.’ (Reuters).

Giving the people what they really really want

Coca-Cola has extended its reach into the arctic, and says its responsibilities do not end with providing people with a drink. ‘We at Coca-Cola believe that, having already taught the world to sing, we should now teach the world to make art,’ said a spokesperson for the company.

The company’s press release emphasises that Coca Cola is mindful that just like its product, art needs to adapt to express the particular tastes of the local people. ‘It isn’t one art suits all’. Apparently a lot of men in suits sat around in a marketing suite in Los Angeles trying to come up with a theme for the work of art in Kiruna. Then someone had a brain wave.

Today Coca-Cola revealed this work of art. It stands in the local supermarket, and is the size of a whole room. Made entirely of Coca-Cola boxes, it’s a giant reindeer. Just to make it absolutely clear, there is a real (stuffed) reindeer in front of it.

I think that says it all.

We found a book in the local second hand shop – written in 1965 for Swedish tourists coming north for the first time. The book told them about the people and the landscape, what they might find, what kind of things were here for tourists, generally what to expect. There are some similarities to the present day – the book enthuses about the opportunities to explore the mountain areas, learn about Sami culture, see a diversity of natural species, experience ‘the big silence’.

There are noticeable differences though. It’s a photo book so there are lots of pictures of the mountains, the summer light, the lakes, and reindeer. But there was less beating around the bush in 1965. There are some graphic photos of Sami biting off the testicles of reindeer. I’m not sure why they thought this would encourage more tourism. It should have had a warning underneath, ‘don’t try this yourself at home’.

In the 1960s the midnight sun was the big draw for Swedes, and the northern lights were barely mentioned. Swedes have always been sun worshippers, so this isn’t surprising, and a summer holiday was more common. There’s even a chapter on sea and lake bathing, an essential part of any holiday. They were a hardy lot in 1965.

Summer was the holiday season, but the book does try to sell the winter darkness too. Alongside descriptions of how apathetic and depressed people can become in the darkness (a myth, in my view – something experienced more commonly further south where there is less darkness), and how over-active and excitable people can become in the summer in constant daylight (more true), it makes the case for the beauty of the winter landscape, and the welcoming atmosphere, when people in the north ‘come down a few revs’ and ‘enjoy some peace and quiet’.

The image of people as functioning on ‘revs’, like a car’s rpm, was right for the times. It was the time for the car – still a modern luxury, desired but not owned by all and (at least in this part of the world) without any known downside. The only downside up here was the lack of roads. At that time you could only go as far as Kiruna by car – after that into the fjäll and towards Norway you’d have to take the train. There’d been talk of building a road connecting this part of Sweden with the Norwegian coast since the 1940s. The second world war had halted any progress then, but after it ended the talking continued but no clear road plan emerged.

There were discussions about where the road might go. In the early days as later on there would have been voices for and against. For many it was the easier connections to the world beyond that they desired, while others saw the destruction of the landscape. The road would have to go the Norwegian border on one side of the big lake, Torneträsk – either next to the railway track, or on the other side. On both sides there were some small settlements. By the railway track were some Sami settlements, and places that had grown up around early tourism, Abisko for instance. On the other side were a few small villages, mainly but not exclusively Sami. On that side of the lake access to the villages was at that time only by boat in the summer, or skiing or walking over the ice in winter, and no chance of either during the in-between months.

Both sides of the lake hoped the road would come their way but it was the villages on the far side of the lake that were keenest, not having the railway line nearby. These villages decided to be in a state of readiness for the new road, so in 1962 started by building their own road, called Talmavägen, between the villages.

Perhaps they thought this way they would influence the final decision about the main road. If so, they were to be very disappointed. The road to Norway was finally built in the early 1980s, and it went the railway side of the lake, leaving the five small villages on the other side as isolated as ever, only now with a road between them, a road leading only to dead ends.

So the villages still have this road, connecting Salmi with the village of Laimo, at least in the summer months when it isn’t full of snow. There are cars there, brought over the ice and driven on the road until the cars die, when they are left to blend in with the landscape. Driving over the lake isn’t something you’d want to try most days of the winter, and no days of the summer, so the cars there can only be driven 30 kms and then turn round and go back. No MOT tests outside January to March then.

This week the local paper in Kiruna carried an announcement that the association of people who own the road would be having their annual general meeting. You wonder what they have to discuss, or vote on. On the other hand, a pot hole is a big deal in such a short road.

I’ve known for a few years now that Kiruna’s ‘Snow Festival’ isn’t aimed at visitors, but this year it was clearer than ever.

Every year it’s the same – you can’t find a programme until the day before, half of the events aren’t described so you don’t know what they are (and there’s very little in English), and anyway when it comes to the day only some of them actually happen. Also, the things that most visitors would expect at such a festival aren’t there – such as beautiful things involving ice and snow, displays of local culture, activities involving reindeer, and expensive places to consume local food and drink.

To be fair, there was the ‘ice sculpting’ competition again this year. It’s a snow sculpting competition actually, but let’s not split hairs. We usually like this part of the festival. We only saw three sculptures, and only two of these really counted since one had barely seen a chisel. The snow blocks this year seem to have been picked up off the roadside and instead of pure white they were sort of dalmation-flecked. It rather detracted from the beauty of the sculptures. But fair enough, a couple of them were worth looking at.

Also, there were no reindeer but there were sled dog rides. For ‘culture’ you’d have to look at some stalls selling handicrafts in ‘Folket Hus’. This included someone selling toilet roll holders decorated with elk, if that counts as local culture. And there was a hot dog kiosk, and that’s very local.

It was around minus 30 degrees which wasn’t ideal, but there were enough people in town to make a small festival. Still, very few of them were around the activities described above. Instead they were all crowded round a small area of the main square. Someone was speaking into a loudspeaker system – some kind of competition was taking place, though we couldn’t see what it was through the crowds.

After seeing the cascade of snow falling above the crowd, and listening to the commentary, we worked out that it was a competition between three different makes of snow blower. What else would you have at a snow festival than a snow blowing competition?

A snow blower clears a path by sucking up the snow and shooting it over your neighbour’s fence (or if you’re more careful, shooting it into a neat pile next to your own fence). This is the modern day alternative to snow shovelling. We have considered it many times, but rejected it on the basis that it’s expensive, uses petrol, and would rob us of the opportunity for lots of good exercise and equal amounts of complaining about all the exercise. It’s considered a must-have item for locals, but we don’t have one.

So, what they did was, they cleared the main town square of snow. Then they built up three large piles of snow in the middle of square. Then they set three men to work (not that you have to work much using a snow blower – you just have to stand there and press the button) very slowly moving the neat compact pile of snow, spraying snow into the air in the process. The crowds stood there for over an hour in minus 30 degrees, watching three men move three metres through a pile of snow, allowing the snow blowers to spray a constant stream of very cold snow down their necks the whole time.

You can see my point – this isn’t a festival that’s going to appeal to visitors is it?

It’s not difficult to take a good photo in this part of the world. The light is fantastic, the landscape captivating, the colours seducing. There’s only one real difficulty; how to take a picture without a cable in it.

This is more difficult than you might imagine. Even where there’s no sign of civilisation, if you’re within ten minutes walk of a road, path, or railway, there will be cables, lots of them. Part of the road to Abisko was cable-free last year, but someone must have spotted that oversight, so now there’s a comforting fat cable that goes all the way along the road.

I’ve been known to perform acrobatic contortions trying to avoid getting cables into the picture. This has included hanging dangerously over bridge railings, leaning perilously at an angle from a viewing point, and limbo dancing by the roadside. It usually fails. Even if I think I’ve managed to avoid the cable when I look at the picture, there it is.

So I’ve decided to take a different approach. I’ve been trying to take good photos of cables. This is definitely much more relaxing (and rewarding) than trying to avoid them. And I’ve decided that there’s nothing wrong with a deep frozen cable, and, what’s more, a cable tells you something about a place. Kiruna’s no chocolate box picture – we don’t do charming, pretty or twee. If you want your winter wonderland with a cherry on top you need to head for Austria. Here in Kiruna the winter landscape is a functional place and no-one takes the trouble to make it look pretty. It’s not that people leave rubbish and scrap lying around (well, there are some exceptions) it’s just that if you run a truck business up here you think an old truck by the roadside is a beautiful sight, not something that spoils the view.

But I digress. Cables. A cable tells you something about the landscape – that people live either end of it, or that a business is going on through it. Cables are the lifeline of people living in isolated and challenging conditions, as some do outside Kiruna.

A cable can be adorned with icicles, frost or snow, can hang in big deep folds, or zip horizontally across the landscape. It can droop decorously from snow white posts, or stretch tightly between iron bars. Sometimes there’s a single lone cable, going we-know-not-where, and other times there’s a whole chorus of them strung high and low, like measuring lines for the landscape behind.

And when I tire of cables, I’m going to start taking photos of plastic bags. I’m not ashamed to tell you that our winter wonderland is decorated with carefully positioned black plastic bags.

You might think that the black plastic bag is an unmentionably offensive object in this pristine white landscape, something to be avoided at all costs. But you’d be wrong. You see, the thing a reindeer is most scared of is a waving black plastic bag (they’re not that bright, reindeer). So to keep reindeer off the roads, the Sami herders put bags up on poles to scare them away.

Plastic bags, and cables – it’s part of what makes Kiruna wonderful.