Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

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.

Kiruna is renowned as a ‘Can Do’ culture. It’s said that the reason there’s a rocket launching site (Esrange) nearby is the combination of empty land (handy when you don’t know where the rocket will land – and yes, it happens) and people around who can make things work.

Esrange is like a model from a ‘Wallace and Grommit’ cartoon, all shiny red buttons and formica surfaces, nothing technologically flashy in sight. This, we were told, is because space activity is so expensive that you don’t try anything new and fancy unless you have to. And when things stall, you need people with a positive, practical, can-do attitude. The launching shed (and yes, it is a shed) looks like a fairground helter skelter, with a trapdoor roof that opens (think, ‘A Grand Day Out’), and some rail tracks to push the rocket into place. They needed a system to get the rocket into place, and Kiruna is a town that famously built a railway track to the Norwegian coast in 1903, through extremely difficult terrain. People here know a thing or two about rail tracks, so it was obvious that the engineers would think of using them to solve the problem of how to move the heavyweight rocket. Can Do, it’s what makes the town tick.

Until now, when we must officially declare that a Can Not Do culture has crept into town. Or at least, even worse, a Will Not Do culture. And shamefully this culture has come to Kiruna through, of all people, the railway company.

This week, all rail services have been suspended between Boden (350 km south of Kiruna) and Narvik (Norwegian coast). That famous railway, built in very tough conditions by contracted ‘rallare’ (navvies) in the early 1900s, which has carried iron ore from the mine to the coast for over a hundred years, and passengers since 1910 – that railway, it now appears, cannot function when the temperature drops below minus 30 degrees celsius.

This means that our French guests, who left us for a few days in Abisko (a magnet for tourists, because of the national park, and the sky station) have been stranded there, and this morning had to pay for a taxi to come and collect them. Some Chinese tourists they met there had missed their flight to Stockholm, and a connecting flight to China. They’d bought a return ticket to Abisko in good faith, believing that a company that sold you such a ticket would have some kind of responsibility to bring them back. Apparently not.

‘Ah,’ you say, ‘but these things happen.’ Indeed this is just what our guests said when they arrived this morning, a good deal poorer for the experience. After all, who knows what happens to mechanisms at minus 30 degrees? Well let me tell you, we know, because it was minus 30 degrees last winter and the trains continued to run.

So – you’re thinking – a train broke down, ice on the tracks, points failing to work, something like that – it happens. But on this occasion it hadn’t happened; the rail company just decided to stop running the trains. Not only that, they also chose not to provide an alternative bus service, which they would normally do if a train broke down. The reason for this was the possible danger to passengers or their staff if a train or bus did break down.

Excuse me?

You’re thinking, well – minus 35 degrees must be tough for vehicles too, and perhaps the road was, um, very cold, so hard to drive on? As it happens, we drove down the very same road yesterday, on a day when all the trains and buses were cancelled, and all we noticed was that the inside of the car took a while to warm up. Our other guests were also out driving in a hire car – unprofessional drivers with no experience of ‘arctic conditions’ – and they had no trouble at all with driving in minus 35 degrees.

No, the truth is that at this time of year the trains and buses are only half full, and the company (Sweden’s national rail company, SJ) saw a get-out clause (in a contract to provide services all year round) which allowed them to suspend services and save themselves a bit of money.

So Kiruna is now the town that can’t provide a rail or bus service in cold conditions. No Can Do – it’s very sad.

The end of the ‘polar night’ was officially a few days ago, but it’s hard to know exactly because if there’s a hill in the way you won’t see the sun above the horizon. Then there have been many days of heavy snow and clouds, so no chance of seeing the horizon at all. Today for the first time the clouds had cleared and we actually saw the sun. You don’t realise how much you’ve missed it until it comes back. I got a lift like on a warm spring day, a feeling that life had just become a lot fuller and happier.

The sun was around for maybe an hour today, and then we were back to the winter twilight. For the last month twilight has felt quite light, but now we’ve seen the real thing twilight suddenly feels rather dark.

Coming at the same time as the reappearance of the sun are the more reliably cold temperatures of winter. December was unusually warm, with the temperatures often hovering around zero and bringing the threat of melting snow layers and then ice. The higher temperatures also mean higher humidity, and lots and lots of snow. I’ve never seen so much snow. How can I indicate just how much snow there is? I’ve droned on long enough about the hours spent shovelling, and as the snow increased I ran out of adjectives to describe the increasing amounts of snow and time spent dealing with it.

It struck us yesterday that the route down to our car now looks like the entrance to a cavern. The sides of the driveway are sharply piled up with snow walls, as if the driveway has been carved deep into the snow. There is so much snow frozen to the birch trees that their branches are pulled down by the weight so they hang almost vertically.

Last night we were out looking for the aurora. There had been one of the strongest predictions of a good show we’ve ever seen, and the colder temperatures meant clear skies. An event on the sun’s surface was predicted to result in solar storming at a level that might even be seen in the UK. We had good warning for it – at least a day ahead – and when reports from Colorado said the storming had been delayed we cheered, because that meant it would coincide with the darkest hours here.

I had instructed our guests to look at the Kiruna sky camera, which wasn’t working, so we were all relying on the magnetometer graph to indicate when the show would begin. At about 21.00 hrs we were all in the hallway putting on our boots because the coloured lines on the magnetometer had just started to leap about. We got ourselves out as fast as possible – Rolf and I heading for a new spot we wanted to try in a forest area out of town.

We were sitting in the car at the end of a narrow dark track, waiting. The sky was really clear – it hadn’t been like this for weeks. Masses of stars visible, and cold temperatures (minus 17). But no sign of the northern lights. That can happen – they do something, then disappear, and then come back later. We were in no hurry. At that temperature you have to turn the car engine on now and again to warm it up, and when you do that all the lights come on and you lose your night vision. We tried to sit in the dark as much as possible. Looking out at the snow-heavy birches under the stars was a calm experience, just waiting. Sometimes I got out the car to have a better look at the sky. Fantastic. Then I saw a falling star – large and near the horizon, like a glittering boulder hurled up out of the forest by a troll.

The northern lights didn’t appear. Colorado’s space research centre did its best, but the aurora remain elusive, unpredictable. We had great time though, just waiting.

You can take your country with you, to some extent (in my case, keep Marmite in the cupboard and listen to ‘The Archers’) but at some point you have to admit that the world outside is humming a different tune, however feint. Things you took for granted can look surprisingly odd, and things you never even thought of before become an important part of your life. It’s a rug being pulled out from under your feet. Uncomfortable sometimes (prejudices are so comforting) but life-enriching.

There’s an additional thing about running a bed and breakfast. Just as you begin to get used to the Canadian approach to Kiruna, you need to find room for the Singaporean way of seeing it. We try to adapt, remember not to assume anything, but we often get it wrong.

In the early days of running the be and b we apologised a lot to Swiss guests about the landscape around Kiruna, assuming they’d come here by accident not knowing our ‘mountains’ are rather less impressive than theirs. Mountains are matter of fact for the Swiss – but what does impress them, we’ve learnt, is open landscape and not many people – basically, the absence of the aprés ski set – which they find here in abundance. So no need for apologies, as it turns out.

Some people find Kiruna alarmingly bigger than they’d expected – they’re looking for that log cabin in the snow, wolves howling at the door and northern lights dancing across the sky. Others are surprised and disappointed to find the whole places shuts on a Sunday and you can’t find a decent cappuccino any day of the week. It’s hard to know which it is, when you first meet someone.

All these differences are good, I decided. The danger comes when we expect everyone to have the same assumptions as ourselves, seeing only what is already familiar – what we call ‘the garden shed’ approach to travel. We once sat in the cafe in Jukkasjärvi listening to some English people have a very long conversation about their garden sheds. They’d been whisked up here to the ice hotel, barely had time to put on the gear and take a walk, and top of their agenda was not a world of difference (minus temperatures, a frozen river, reindeer herding culture, long hours of darkness, explorers who came here thinking it was the end of the world, etc) but the world they’d brought with them. They needed longer, to see the differences.

Some differences are much harder to see. Arriving suddenly there can be an air of the playground about some visitors’ approach to their holiday. As if Kiruna is a giant theme park which has laid on snow and ice and fast snow scooters purely for their entertainment. One can forgive people feeling like this, since this is sometimes how it’s presented. It’s one fun activity after another, not rooted in any reality, and the fairground manager has arranged it all to look a bit challenging and scary just to increase the excitement, just like they would back home.

Meanwhile, the culture in this neck of the woods is that you have respect for the wilderness and learn to take responsibility for yourself. Not much sign of ‘health and safety’ regulations here. Tour operators give visitors what they want (fun and thrills) but they haven’t made it all easy for them. This mismatch can result in visitors feeling hard done by (we had to harness the sled dogs ourselves!), and alarmed. Some discover, too late, that snow scooters aren’t a toy.

I’m rather charmed that the space research site in Colorado (NOAA), that provides up to date reports of space weather and aurora, is paid for by the US government. It tells us what’s going on out in space and when it’s good to look for the northern lights. Their objective is to warn scientists and air traffic controllers of possible interference to radio communication. When they forecast solar storming, NOAA expresses this as ‘a threat of significant activity’. What’s a threat to some may be a gift to others.