Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

This Sunday is ‘skyltsöndag’ (‘display Sunday’) all over Sweden. It’s the day when Christmas advertising goes up in shop windows (yes, they’ve agreed a day for it, which isn’t August, isn’t that wonderful?) That means the festive season is ‘open’, and, it being the northern part of the world, Father Christmas doesn’t have very far to travel so he manages to appear at all the local events. He’ll be busy this weekend, handing out presents to children at markets and keeping his hands warm over a log fire.

I’m generally very traditional, refusing to put up a single decoration in the house until Christmas Eve, but in Kiruna I’ve come to feel that anything goes. That’s because no-one’s pushing Christmas down my throat. I’m not having to listen to ‘Jingle Bells’ wherever I go so somehow I don’t feel I have to put up such a fight.

Besides, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s very dark already, and thinking about some sparkling coloured lights around the window is a very cheering thought. Some of our neighbours have already put them up, and good luck to them I say.

In other places I’ve lived it’s been hard to avoid, with everyone wanting to sell you a bit of it, long before it’s time. Weirdly, up here in the land of flying reindeer, Christmas is a lot harder to get hold of. I’ll give you an example.

The other day we were in our favourite local shop – ‘Boomerang’ (you guessed it, it’s a second hand shop). This week – it being ‘skyltsöndag’ and all – they’d got out all the Christmas stuff they’d acquired during the year and made a big display of it in the middle of the shop. I felt a bit queasy at the sight of so much red and green, and marvelled at the number of electric advent candles that could be assembled in one place and in such a remote part of the world.

The ‘mini-me’ Father Christmases looked rather menacing.

I was doing my very best to get in the mood, and was just wondering if our guests might appreciate a holly-wreathed Christmas toothpick holder, when I heard music. It was familiar, I could even join in with it, sing along to it. A woman nearby swayed to and fro while she examined a cutesy china reindeer standing in a china snow scene. Yes, my ears were not deceiving me, it really was ‘E Viva Espana’.

‘If you’d like to chat to a matador, in some cool cabana …and meet señoritas by the score…Espana por favor!’

It killed the mood, it really did. I couldn’t even think of buying the toothpick holder. But it didn’t affect the woman nearby, who was clearly set on buying the china reindeer.

You’d think in Sweden that a ‘real’ Christmas tree would be easy to come by, wouldn’t you? And yet last year we had to make do with draping tinsel around a bit of old wood, which really didn’t have the same feel. The landscape around town is more arctic tundra than forest so – not many Christmas trees. Someone does sell them in the shopping centre each year, but just for a day, and if you’re not there, that’s it, you’ve missed it. There’s no rushing off to ‘Homebase’ to get one at half price that looks droopy and has already lost its needles but ‘at least it’s a tree’. There’s no Christmas tree to be had, not anywhere…

A few days earlier I spotted a pink EPA tractor (converted old car with small engine, driven legally by teenagers) shooting up the hill, with two small artificial Christmas trees fastened on the back, illuminated with tasteful blue lights. If you want to ‘Pimp My Ride’ in these parts, you don’t go for the pearl-studded back seat covers or the souped-up engine, you get a Christmas tree fitted. When I saw it whizz past I got no warm glow of anticipation. I couldn’t say the experience of seeing it was ‘Christmassy’. Just bizarre.

On the other hand in Kiruna one can be sure that the essential ingredient, snow, is in abundant supply. There’s lots of the lovely fluffy stuff, everywhere, so the town looks like a Christmas card wherever you go. The only trouble is, by the time Christmas comes, the snow’s been around for quite some time, so when you see it falling gently outside your (candlelit) window, you don’t think ‘ooh how lovely how Christmassy…’, but ‘oh no, that’s another hour shovelling snow’.

I’m not sure locals even know that snow is meant to be Christmassy. If it was, it really could be Christmas here every day (well almost). Nonetheless, they are fearless in their pursuit of all things Christmassy, and if the real thing is too easy to come by, then they’ll go for the make-believe. Today we saw a balcony in block of flats in town where someone had put out a large, person-sized, plastic snowman. It had two black plastic eyes, a plastic tartan scarf, and (of course) a cheery plastic smile. Its two-dimensional shape looked strangely out of place, set next to the snow-covered town.

Knowing how things are, I guess it’ll be there until the snow melts. Which will probably be sometime next May. You see, it really can be Christmas here every day.

There’s no denying, Kiruna is limited. It’s a small town in a big landscape, and of the four roads out of town, two of them are dead ends.

Sometimes I feel a bit uninspired when I think of the options. You can turn right, or left. If you keep driving for an hour you won’t get anywhere, to speak of, in either direction. And yet, time and time again, when we go out with no expectations something surprising or memorable happens.

Yesterday we went to the site of the Ice Hotel and we went with zero expectation. It was dark, windy and snowing, and we knew it’s not yet built. When we drove up to the site we saw fencing, stopping us getting any closer. Undeterred we walked around the side and down by the river, and seeing someone working there, asked if we could walk a bit closer to get a view of the bare structure on the ice. Tractors were whizzing around without any apparent purpose, but it was good to see the hotel in it’s starting blocks, bare metal semi-circles soon to be covered in ‘snice’ (snow and ice).

Returning to the main entrance we couldn’t help noticing a block of ice like a bar in the pathway, and, if our eyes didn’t deceive us, a load of ice glasses with cheery red liquid inside. We approached. They asked us if we were from the mining company. No, we said. The group from the mining company then arrived and were offered the drinks in the ice glass, but they soon moved on inside, so we were invited over to the bar for the leftovers.

They’d also put out a block of ice on the bar to invite the party to try their hand at sculpting ice – but the beer inside had seemed more enticing so no-one had stayed to try it. We were invited to have a go instead. Chiselling at ice is a much nicer experience than you’d imagine. It’s easy to make an impact – too easy – and makes a lovely ringing sound as you do it.

We stayed for a while, drinking juice from ice glasses and chipping away at the ice block. We certainly hadn’t expected that when we set out from home in the snow and dark.

Today we wanted an outing, so we drove down one of the dead end roads out of town – it’s not a dead end for over an hour, and the views of river and mountains always impress. It’s early in the winter season and some of the good stopping places hadn’t been cleared of snow, so we couldn’t stop. We reached the car park where in winter there’s a road across the frozen river. We’d thought it would be too early for the road to be there, but someone had just cleared the ice of snow to make it, so we stepped out onto the ice with confidence.

Coming back to the car I walked around the corner of a boat house to admire the view. A man came by on a snow scooter, and seeing the camera round my neck asked me if I was taking photos. We got chatting. He lived on the land the other side of the river, and was the one who had just ‘made’ the road. I asked how he got to and fro in the seasons when there was no ice, or ice not strong enough to drive on, and he said there was another route by boat, and anyway, he had lots of food. He said he liked taking photos of the area too. He had a reindeer herd on the land opposite, where his house was. We talked about what I did, where he lived, when the river usually froze, how old the boat houses were. Unexpected, and all the more wonderful for that.

Visitors to 68 degrees bed and breakfast this week had booked to go on a sled dog tour. Unlike most other evening sled dog tours, this one didn’t mention the northern lights. No enticing promises made – just the dogs and the sled ride and a dark snowy landscape. Later that evening our guests returned home and showed us all the photos they’d taken of the northern lights. That’s how it goes.

While the northern lights glide and wave across the skies – hidden by clouds, or suddenly, after hours of us looking and seeing nothing, silently appearing for a short while we’re asleep – while they act out their slow secretive part, the aurora circus on the ground is in full swing. Advertising for ‘Northern Lights Holidays – The Trip of a Lifetime’, for ‘Your Once in a Lifetime Experience’, or for the ‘Northern Lights Tour in the Magical Landscape of Lapland’ is spread wide across the internet and newspapers, and, unlike the aurora, is visible at all times and all places.

For those of us who live in the part of the world where the northern lights are often visible, this marketing is disturbing and unreal. On the one hand, we agree they are an amazing sight and we never tire of wanting to see them ourselves. On the other hand, the ‘spirit’ of the lights, if you can call it that, is unpredictability, mysteriousness, a natural force with none of the limitations of the world as we know it. And yet, we try to incorporate it into our timescales, set expectations on it, want it to perform, be predictable, and be presented to the world in after dinner anecdotes and time lapse photography. It’s a mismatch of reality and expectation, and I wonder if it does anyone any good, other than the tour operators.

It’s a dilemma for us. We want people to see them, and to be excited to do so, but we also want them to understand the reality – not only so that they aren’t too disappointed if they don’t see them, but also so that they can appreciate the real value of a force of nature which refuses to do anything to order. Our wish to communicate this is constantly undermined by companies appearing to promise sightings of the northern lights, while in the small print protecting themselves from any formal complaint if they aren’t seen.

Unfortunately, people read what they want to read, see what they want to see. What they see are fabulous images of the northern lights, a range of colours filling the sky like a spectacular firework display. If they were lucky enough to see the lights themselves, they would be unlikely to look anything like that.

(Above: Not seeing the northern lights on the Kiruna All Sky Camera)

Apart from the obvious – that the lights aren’t always dramatic and colourful, and a photographer is only going to show the time they were really dramatic – the northern lights are an example of where, contrary to common belief, the camera really does lie. Even if you can trust a photographer not to have ‘touched up’ or altered the photo – and currently there are assertions that locally published photos have not been edited ‘in any way’ – it is not at all the case that what the camera sees is what we see. The human eye picks up the instantaneous show of light, whereas any camera operating in that low light level will pick up several seconds of light, making the image brighter and more dramatic. And it must be hard to resist extending the exposure time to make that even more dramatic. This is the case even with ‘real time’ images on the internet, where a camera is conveying the image and picking up a lot more aurora than we actually see.

We’ve even expressed sympathy, sometimes, to guests, that the aurora haven’t been visible, and then they have shown us photographs of what they have seen. Some guests have told us that they managed to see the aurora because someone near them showed them the image visible on their camera – and they were really happy about that.

The photographs can be impressive, but maybe they’re a bit of a distraction. The real beauty of the lights, in my opinion, is the way they move across the sky and appear and disappear. When you’ve really seen them, the feeling you’re left with is not of a spectacular display, but of contact with a presence from beyond this world. It’s uplifting, but hard to describe.

Now the ultimate ‘Northern Lights Tour’ is being advertised. As a part of Virgin’s people’s rocket project (‘Spaceport Sweden’, Kiruna) a plane will be taking people on a ‘Northern Lights Flight’, viewing the aurora from a high wide angle and avoiding any risk of cloud over spoiling the view. You can take this flight on 13th January, 3rd February, or 3rd March next year. You avoid the disappointment of clouds getting in the way, but it doesn’t mean the northern lights will actually appear during the hour’s flight. At a price of 7375 SEK this seems a bit of a risk.

But this tour operator isn’t taking a chance and hiding behind the small print. The flights will only happen, they say, ‘if the northern lights prognosis from the Institute of Space Physics is positive’. So they intend to use what science is available, good start. Even then, they point out that ‘there is always a chance the northern lights will not be visible,’ adding that ‘this is also part of the thrill of the experience!’

It seems that not even Richard Branson can make the northern lights appear when he wants them to. For this we must be eternally grateful.

I try not to be negative. People do their best, they mean well, our lives are enriched by all human effort.

But still, it’s hard to appreciate some of the ‘art’ projects that have emerged in town over the last few months. Funded from a county-wide project, they appear to be self-conscious and, well, ‘arty’, if you know what I mean. I like a lot of contemporary art, and I can take a bit of wierdness, but (there’s a wonderful Swedish word which says it for me) I’d have to describe them as basically ‘flummig’. That’s kind of floaty, new-agey, a lot of words that don’t amount to very much.

Take for instance, ‘Hypaethral’, by Nadine Byrne. It’s a sculpture, that was put up in a park in town, in the shape of a geodesic dome (a building shape popular in alternative communities in the US, we’re told). ‘It’s a room’, says the artist, and in this room you can experience ‘the sounds of Kiruna’. The sound of the mine, the sound of the city hall clock, the sound of the railway.

I’m trying, I really am, but tell me: if I live here and hear these sounds every day, how does it enrich my life to go into a dome shape out in the park and hear them again? It’s a puzzle.

On the other hand, over the last few months I’ve taken enormous pleasure in the mysterious appearance of some reindeer. Wandering around town you can unexpectedly find yourself face to face with reindeer that weren’t there yesterday, in outline or fully shaped, usually in bright colours (pink, blue, green, red). You turn a corner and may not see it, but then, out the corner of your eye, there, up on the wall, a blue reindeer. If you look down there may be reindeer outlines on the pavement in front of you. Reindeer locking antlers in battle in the street. Reindeer running in a line along a roof. A reindeer half buried underground so only the bottom half shows, and elsewhere a reindeer half buried in the underground, looking up at the sky.

I don’t know what they ‘mean’, if anything, or where they come from – nor do I much care. Their creator(s) have remained anonymous, though the rumour is that they’re a group of local companies. The reindeer sculptures make me look twice at a street, and they remind me of the value of doing things for their own sake. And they make me smile. It’s art that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you don’t need to be part of ‘a culturally-minded community’ to enjoy it.

Better still, as the snow has come, the reindeer have begun to disappear. I’m not pleased if you can’t see them, but I like that they’ll blend into our natural world, like the real thing, and may even become invisible. If we’ve noticed them, we’ll know they’re there and we’ll imagine the parts we can’t see. That’s art.

If you were looking for the northern lights last night you would have seen two giant snowballs chasing each other around the sky. It took a few seconds before I was able to dismiss the idea of a UFO and realised they must be lasers. They were, in fact, two streams of light coming from ‘Folkets Hus’, the arts/community centre in the main square. Searching the sky like giant projection rays, they advertise Kiruna’s own ‘Arctic Film Festival’.

It’s an annual event, and a very local one, naturally. Over the coming week there will be several screenings each day. ‘Folkets Hus’ will be alive with people coming and going, catching up with friends and family, and watching a selection of this year’s new films. It’s so local you can offer to be there selling entrance tickets and get yourself free entry to the films.

The programme is what they call ‘an eclectic mix’ from independent and mainstream film makers. There are thrillers, drama, comedy and documentaries. There are films relating to Kiruna and its environment, both historic and current. This year the languages you can hear include Swedish, Finnish, English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Indonesian, Flemish, Thai, and the most universal language of all, silence. The selection reflects Kiruna’s largely outward-looking attitude, while also reflecting a sense of it’s place in the world.

Last night we saw ‘Ingen Riktig Finne’ (or ‘Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart’ in the English distribution), a documentary/drama about a Finnish man and his father who go on a road trip back to Sweden where they lived in the ’70s. It highlights the stereotypes of Finnish and Swedish cultures, and expresses how hard it is, particularly for children and young people, to be moved from one culture to another, never really settling. It includes musical interludes of songs from that time, delivered with a keen sense of longing and the mood of dark tango that characterises some Finnish music. It kept us talking long afterwards about the issues it raised.

Seeing films at the festival is like having a cinema in your own living room. The atmosphere is relaxed, the audience are your neighbours, and after the film ends you can sit there and discuss it for half an hour without being hurried out by the usherette. When you come out, the person who checked your ticket when you went in wants to hear what you thought about the film, and you stand there discussing it with him for five minutes.

We’ll be going back for more this week. It’s a treat, especially for us, who don’t have a television.

Our neighbour smiled at me sweetly this morning from across the way. ‘All this lovely soft snow!’ she called out. Her smile was a particularly knowing one. I smiled back, weakly, snow shovel in hand.

I do love this gentle falling snow. There’s a soft luminous outline to life, every branch on every tree is like an elegant silk white-gloved finger, the road has become almost noiseless, and the world is a whiter, brighter place.

But – enough already! All that work yesterday, and now we have a driveway deep in snow and the prospect of many more hours of shovelling to get back to where we were before we went to bed. It’s not how it is now that is the concern – it’s how it will become shortly if we don’t tackle it as we go along.

Our neighbour has lived here all her life, and we’ve been here only a few years. The main coping strategy appears to be resignation, managing as best you can, not expecting too much, or expecting the worst so you’re never disappointed. We moved in on a wave of optimism, energised by an outsider’s enthusiasm for all things wintry, so we had no need for resignation. She knew this enthusiasm would wane.

The increasing cold of winter has also been a thrill, and a challenge. However, our recent calculation of a typical winter month’s heating costs soon turned that wonder to gloom.

Unfortunately our house has none of the advantages of the main system used in Sweden for heating – hot water provided direct from a communal system powered mainly by burning waste. All new housing is connected to this system, but older houses such as ours have to have money invested in equipment to connect to it. Many people haven’t wanted to make that investment, and have continued to rely on wood burning as their main source of heat. This can work well if you live mainly in one room, but it’s no good for a bed and breakfast. The supplementary heating we have is electric radiators, and with recent electricity price hikes this is not an economic source of heat.

A dripping tap became tortuous and we were unable to fix it, so it was on a Monday morning that a plumber came to call. We remembered him from last year, when we managed to break our toilet (but that’s another story). A young man recently wed, he wasn’t tempted by the offer of some extra work at the time because he was already planning on building a house for them to live in. So, how was he getting on? (we asked), expecting to hear a tale of woe about builders’ schedules and bad weather. They’d moved in at midsummer, he said. We were impressed.

But I digress. His eyes flicked around the walls and took in the details of the building. What were our heating costs like? We grimaced. Had we considered installing a ground heating system? And then he was away, moving quickly from room to room, explaining how it would work and where all the new radiators would be. He was a good salesman, and we’re now considering it. It will be a long term investment though, and in a town that is falling into a pit one wonders if it’s wise. On the other hand, the thought of drawing up readymade heat from the ground underneath your own house could make minus 30 degrees a pleasure again.

In the meantime I am determined not to let these adult responsibilities destroy the wonder. I shall still be glad when it’s snowing and enjoy the thrill of the cold. At least, after we’ve finished clearing this damn driveway.

The day before we returned to Kiruna we were watching aurora on my laptop, images sent ‘real time’ from the local Institute of Space Physics.

Watching this you don’t get the movement of the lights, so it doesn’t feel like the real thing – but you can imagine how beautiful it must have been, as the picture updates with another soft green shape spread across the sky.

For reasons that scientists haven’t yet fathomed, the aurora is more active in early winter and late spring. Since the beginning of October, ‘aurora alerts’ have been jumping into my mailbox daily – ‘in the past 15 mins there was a major solar flare on the sun with a class of M6.34’ – the kind of alerts that in winter would have me rushing for the door, if it was dark enough, and in winter it usually is.

Before you start thinking this is a guide to that mythical thing, The Best Time To See The Northern Lights, I must disappoint you. Early winter and late spring it’s warmer, and the prevailing weather is more humid, more cloudy. Since returning to Kiruna we have not seen the northern lights at all because have been sitting in a low snow mist. ‘It’s a cheese!’ I complain, after checking up on the image on the internet.

A low snow mist also means snow on the ground, which means the winter’s shovelling exercise has now begun.

Already on our return, after only three weeks away, it took us a day to clear enough snow away to reach our car in the garage. I have described before the meditative exercise that is shovelling snow – it really is enjoyable, if you can relax, not be in a hurry, and work with nature not against it. It has the same quality as gardening – that is, it’s a task that never ends, so if you enjoy it you can experience it again, and again, and again. (As I commented with childish enthusiasm when we first moved in looking out over our large snowy backyard, ‘all this snow – it’s all ours!’ How very true that was.)

I’ve been used to snowfall in England that you would be lucky to be able shovel at all, its melting rate being equal to its falling rate. Snow in Kiruna, on the other hand, will probably not melt tomorrow, or next week, or next month, in fact not for six months. That means that the snow is given to you, for a time, to look after, before nature takes it back. So the snow really is ours. Nice, but where do you put it all?

At first you can push it to the side, in small heaps. Pushing snow is no problem, at first. Then more snow falls, and the heaps get bigger, and it becomes harder to deposit snow on top of the heap. By this time your heap has frozen solid, so there’s no way you can push the heap further away to give you more space to dump snow. If you take the short term view when snow shovelling, by December you’re defeated and will need to call (and pay) the big boys (or girls) to come in (snow tractor to lift up your heaps and push them further away).

Last winter the ‘flu got us in January, and suddenly there was far too much snow to deal with. We couldn’t leave the car in the garage, so the winter involved long painful sessions removing ice from the windscreen and windows, inside and out. This year, we decided, we would keep the car in the garage.

So, at the start of the season – now – we must make paths to the outer reaches of our backyard and make sure all the snow is deposited as far away from the driveway as possible. We need a strategy – agreed with our snow shovelling partner – as to how and when we will open up and fill up various areas. (How annoying is it to open up an area for future snow storage, only to find that your partner has used it as a short term fix and already filled it up with snow?).

It’s a team exercise, and it feels good this year. We have our strategy, we’ve begun well, we’re on top of the current snowfall and we’re determined to keep it that way over the winter. Watch This Space.

Before we bought this house we lived in a flat that looked out directly at the wetlands to one side of town, the side where the airport is. Seeing the planes coming in at scheduled hours twice a day felt like seeing the ferry come into port on an island. It’s a reassuring connection to the outside world.

It was our boast there that we could (and did) walk to the airport. The walk is along the imaginatively named ‘Airport Road’. No-one else walks there, and cars speeding past sometimes took pity on us and stopped to offer us a lift – but we weren’t tempted.

We see the planes from the house here too, though walking to the airport is less of an option. For most of the season there’s an airport bus service, but it only runs when the powers-that-be in Kiruna decide there will be tourists, and not before. We, and some tourists, often travel during those ‘no tourists in Kiruna’ periods, and then the only option is a taxi (efficient, but pricey). Earlier this year when our flight was later in the day and the weather not too challenging we decided to relive our walking to the airport experience, so we took a public bus to the bottom of Airport Road. We were the last people on the bus and asked the driver to drop us as near the road as possible. He looked at us through his rear view mirror. ‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you’. It was disappointing, but we could hardly explain that walking was the point.

An alternative way out of town is the train. It takes a minimum of 17 hours from Stockholm. So that’s an experience, more than a mode of transport. I know we should all be supporting the rail services, and in theory I do, but running at a similar price to the plane (for an adult over 25 without a InterRail pass), or more, if you expect a sleeper, for more than a one-off trip it doesn’t really compete.

It’s a shame, as it’s an important part of Kiruna’s history, running on the same track that has taken the iron ore to Narvik for over a hundred years. The navvies who built the track in extremely difficult conditions are commemorated in a life size sculpture, four men carrying a piece of rail track. When the station was recently moved further out of town to a temporary hut by the track, the sculpture was moved with it. There were next to no passenger facilities, but having the sculpture in the right place was a priority.

Planes can feel very anonymous, but here, when one flies low over the hill, you know where it’s come from. There used to be two companies flying in and out of Kiruna – Scandinavian Airlines, and Norwegian Airlines. Then a few years ago Norwegian pulled out of the market. It was a blow, maybe even the first blow of many, we feared, as Kiruna became a town too exclusive (in price) to appeal to visitors, and closed in on itself, handing its business over to some rival Finnish or Norwegian town with better air links. Many far-flung communities have experienced this gradual erosion of their links to the rest of the world, eventually leading to the shrinking of those communities to the few whose work can only be done in that one place.

However, it appears that the trend here is rather different. On Thursday we flew here on the first flight by Norwegian Airlines for three years. To celebrate, there was a free blueberry smoothie for all the passengers. The airline representative said that the company had reinstated the link because it was clear that Kiruna was an ‘increasingly important destination in Scandinavia’. ‘Lonely Planet’, she told us, have announced that Sweden came fourth in its top ten destination list for 2014.

We joked about expecting some celebratory bubbly on arrival, but as we stumbled off the plane into the cold air in Kiruna, there it was waiting for us, and a deep red rose for every passenger. No no, I wanted to say, no, thank you.

You can tell a lot about a place by the things it chooses to celebrate. Kiruna has its snow festival, Nordic Light film festival, ice fishing competition days, a winter market (a celebration of local knick-knacks, reindeer products, and snow scooters) and the annual Kiruna festival (a celebration of music and late night drinking). This week is another ritual marker in the local calendar – it’s Castration Day.

In case you have visions of vigilante groups hunting down local criminals, the poster shows a picture of a particularly compliant-looking Alsatian dog.

Kiruna is a very dog-centred place. I learnt that on my first visit to the supermarket where the bargain of the week was a special offer on pigs’ ears. All the dogs are well controlled, for which I am grateful. There are probably as many dogs as people in town, and they come in all shapes and sizes. We can testify to that, since many of them go past our living room window. As we are on a dead-end street there’s very little traffic, and we are the route to the edge of town where there are good places for dogs to exercise their humans with lots of space and good views.

Indeed, right by our house, in a small area of birch scrub and grass, is the social hub for dogs this side of town. Here they come to leave their calling cards (scents, fortunately – anything else is cleared up by their responsible owners) and catch up on news (more scents).

We have plenty of opportunity, then, to get to know our neighbours. I don’t think people look like their dogs, but people do seem to choose animals which reflect aspects of their own character, so by watching the dogs I feel I learn something more about them. This may not be true, but it’s a tempting theory. Sometimes dog and owner don’t seem to match, and then it is no surprise to learn the person is looking after a dog for someone else.

Some of them become famous. There’s a huge St Bernard that lumbers up and down the street, and it looks bored with life, as if it’s waiting to be useful in an alpine rescue. In the local paper there was a photo of it with its owner, and it turns out the dog had rescued him by waking him from a smoke-filled summer house on fire. That’s the kind of dog you want to have around.

Dogs in Kiruna are not only, or even mainly, just pets. The majority of them are at least used for hunting, or are used in a controlled way to manage reindeer herds. Some of them are adapted to pull sleds and are a useful adjunct to a long distance cross country skier. Very many of them are bred as sled dogs (some of these are the traditional-looking ‘husky’ dogs) and trained to work in teams of fourteen or more. They live in packs on the edges of town, which is good news, since a pack can make quite a noise.

Sled dog activities are popular and the people involved in these activities devote a good deal of their time and resources to training and looking after their dogs. Some of them operate tour companies to provide experiences with sled dogs for tourists. The dogs have to be trained all year round, so when there is no snow their owners get them to pull huge estate cars, with the brakes on.

Last week we had some visitors who came to Kiruna for the bi-annual sled dog symposium. They also came to purchase two puppies to add to their sled dog pack further south. We got to have a peak at them in the car before they left – they were such tiny bundles of peace it was hard to imagine them as they will be in a year, yelping and leaping, desperate to start running. We were heading down to Stockholm for a few days, so they, and we, got out of town long before the annual Castration Day.

They came back, those men with the digger. They first came one day when we were out, and our neighbour told us about it when we returned. Something to do with the telegraph pole in the garden at the bottom of ours. There were problems with our neighbours’ phone lines, so as it was in a good cause we tried not to be too bothered by the churned up grass we’d been left with.

Then two days later two white vans swished passed our kitchen window and parked on our driveway at the bottom of the garden. Two men got out and didn’t even look in our direction. It was a surprising invasion – we at least expected someone to ask us if it was ok.

When challenged they acknowledged that perhaps they should have done that. There was no machinery access to the telegraph pole in the neighbour’s garden, they said, so ours was the only route. They muttered darkly about the possible need to dig up our garden to install a new cable. Then they brought in their digger again.

It glided down our driveway like a Dalek with evil intent. There didn’t seem to be much we could do.

Later in the day we noticed the Dalek was still there but the men weren’t. They’d gone home for the day and abandoned the Dalek. So we rang and demanded they remove it, which, reluctantly, they did, threatening to return with it the following day.

That night it occurred to us that no-one should have the right to dig up your land without your permission, unless that permission has been granted with the deeds of the house. A quick check on the internet showed that no such permission had been granted. We needed to find out what was supposed to happen, according to the law, and then we’d be willing to try and help them find a solution, but before then we didn’t want them in our garden.

So began the resistance. We shut the gate to our driveway, put on our black berets and waited. We slept badly, imagining an early morning incursion to catch us unprepared. As it happened we were ready and waiting at 8am when they appeared. They concealed their arrival by parking their vehicle out of sight, and began their approach from the other neighbour’s garden to one side. We watched from the window. Then, they nipped over into the garden where the pole was and started digging, with spades. So, no Dalek required then.

But our victory was shortlived. Of course – now our phone doesn’t work.

Our neighbour opposite was changing the tyres on his car to winter tyres, a sure sign of the turn of the season. He wasn’t going to be fooled by a slight increase in temperature. It isn’t compulsory to have winter tyres until the conditions demand, or, if by any chance they don’t, the first of December. However, winter tyres on cars are permitted from October 1st, so today he was changing his tyres. Sensing the warmth in the air, though, it seemed a bit premature.

I was preparing the garden for winter and I wondered if my preparations were also rather premature. Cutting back the remaining green plants always seems sad and I like to leave it until the last possible moment. I told myself that, this probably was the last possible moment, and steeled myself to hack them back.

Clearing leaves makes me thoughtful, because I’m not sure why I’m doing it. A neighbour says it looks tidier, but that’s no reason to do it since the snow will cover everything soon. So I’m not sure what the benefit is, but it feels wrong to leave huge piles of wet leaves lying to rot on top of roughly cut grass. I hope that clearing some of them away will give the ground more of a chance to recover next season, but I really don’t know. I clear them anyway, thinking, it’s quite pleasant, raking them into piles and then watching the wind whistle half of them away again.

It wasn’t warm enough for a ‘pina colada’ by the swimming pool, but I’d been persuaded by a friend to visit the town swimming baths that evening. Generally I’d rather do something more appropriate for the climate, like walk or ski, but this was a social occasion, so I agreed, and I was really glad I had.

Visiting the swimming baths wasn’t all plain sailing though. There was a minefield of instructions and rules to get through before I reached the pool (no shoes here, no pedicures there, leave your towels here, and wash your armpits before going any further) but at least that had the benefit of creating a clean and ordered environment. I also had to brave the Swedish no-nonsense attitude to nudity and boldly go from instruction point to instruction point with as little self-consciousness as I could muster.

However, the actual swimming was a wonderfully relaxing experience. Unlike swimming pools in England (where one is either fighting off huge inflatables, or trying to keep out of the way of competitive lane hogs) this pool was calm and empty. As I was swimming up and down I watched the sun set behind the dark silhouette of Kiruna church.Then there was the hot bubble bath, followed by the sauna. Afterwards I felt I’d had a good day on the beach and was reluctant to swing open the main doors, uncertain what season would greet me.

I began my walk back down the hill in the dark, noticing that the air had none of the damp chill in it of late. Something shot past me to the right. Looking down into the grass I saw it was an arctic hare, easily identified by its long back legs and the ears. I’ve watched a few in our garden recently, sitting among all the leaves, but they’ve been very hard to spot. They’re so good at blending into the background, adjusting the colour of their coat for the season. If I saw one this summer I usually thought a brown plant had moved in the wind, before I was able to make out the tell tale ears.

I shouldn’t have been able to see this one, but I could, because now it’s coat was brilliant white. Set against the dark background it glowed. I watched it bound down the hill and then settle, ears pricked, perfectly still. Its white coat made it very vulnerable to prey (foxes and lynx mainly). Why had it changed its coat so early when there was no snow on the ground? It’s a tricky time for all of us, autumn.

It isn’t always pretty here. The autumn colours have gone, and the wet cold weather has arrived. The landscape has taken on a grey-brown tone, unrelieved by white. It snows, off and on, but the snow doesn’t settle, it just adds to the sludge. Driving out of Kiruna, though, there is one point of bright colour on the horizon, a glowing yellow blob standing tall against the sky. As you approach this blob it begins to look less blob-like, more spaceship-from-the-60s-like. However hard you try (and after the first few sightings, believe me, you try) you can’t stop your eyes gliding in its direction, and wondering, why?

I had to Google it. It was paid for out of the local council’s art fund, and with funds from the mine, and it was placed where it is as part of plans for the new railway line. In other words, when all is falling down around you (see, mine’s underground activities), those with the power (the council, and the mining company) and the money (the mining company) look for things to distract us from the bad news. So here it is, Oskar Aglert’s ‘Totem’, put up in August on a small hill out of town.

It looks like a kid’s toy abandoned in the landscape, not a serious work of art at all – hard to see that it has any point. However, according to the inscription beneath it represents ‘the meeting between mechanistic industry and the natural world’. One side is grey so it looks like a boulder, and the other side is bright yellow. The yellow side is a mass of pipes and grills and knobs, straight out of the rocket-building shed in Nick Park’s ‘A Grand Day Out’, or from a setting for a children’s science fiction drama.

On second thoughts, no – children’s imagination is far too sophisticated for this. Instead I should say it’s machinery straight out of ‘Esrange’, the nearby rocket-launching site, where everything was built in the ’60s and is still used, ‘because it works’. (‘Do you know why the Russians achieved so much in space?’ our guide asked us when we visited. ‘Because when the Americans were inventing a pen that could work in zero gravity, the Russians just used a pencil’.) So I suppose, in a way, it’s appropriate. There’s plenty of advanced technology in Kiruna (you do know, don’t you, that very few people actually work down the mine these days?), but mainly this is a place where people use things because they work.

Among all the pipes and knobs, when you get up close, there’s what looks like an open mouth, that still has tonsils, and deep within it is a light. Like the inside of a temple, or sacred burial place, it’s an inner sanctum, an area which can contain you, possibly swallow you up. This representation of industry isn’t a comforting one. It looks harmless on the surface, but as you get closer, it’s a bit alarming, and you don’t really know what’s inside.

At night ‘Totem’ lights up. That’s yet more light pollution to deal with. So you’re out at night, you’ve got out of town and you want to see the northern lights, and what you get on the horizon is an illuminated ‘Totem’. That’s how it is with industry; it distracts from nature.

I seem to be talking myself into this one…