Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

The fog had cleared, so we went out into the garden to clear leaves and tidy up a bit. Our neighbour commented there were no berries on the rowan trees this year. The rowan berry is valuable bird food because it sweetens at below freezing temperatures, providing food when it is most needed. She always puts out food for the birds, so she notices these things.

‘It means there’ll be lots of snow this winter’, she said, about the lack of berries. People say that the rowan can’t carry the weight of the berries and the snow, so if there’s going to be lots of snow it doesn’t produce berries. I thought I’d read that rowan trees this far north are a different kind of tree that save energy by only producing berries every two years, so I tended more to that as the explanation, but in a way I guess that both may be true.

Yesterday we came home and our neighbour told us she’d watched a tractor with a working digger drive down into our back garden, over what we laughingly call ‘the lawn’. She couldn’t see what it was doing (she has a bad leg so can’t rush down to see). It was working over our fence in another neighbour’s garden she said, and then it drove away. We went to look at the broad track in the mud left by the mysterious digger. Workmen had been here when we were out, for a reason we didn’t know and without us even calling for them.

Yet persuading people to do building, electrics or plumbing work when you want it done isn’t easy. The skilled people exist here, but they’re all well employed – and paid for – by the mine, and little jobs at a house don’t register for them as real work. People who live here learn to DIY, or know someone who can help them out. We’d already worked out that finding someone to help us would be a lengthy process of befriending someone with a builder in the family, establishing trust, and over a period of years earning sufficient respect to be allowed to employ them.

But some things can’t wait. The radiator in our kitchen wasn’t working, and the connections to the light outside the front door had failed. A contact someone had given us for electric work never answered their phone. Eventually one of the companies answered. Yes he could do it – he’d come sometime next week. He wouldn’t give a time, or a day even – he’d ring sometime and let us know.

Then this morning two vans turned up at the same time, both with the magic word ‘electric’ on the side. One parked in our neighbour’s drive and one in ours. It was the man come to fix the radiator (who hadn’t run to let us know), and by a coincidence our neighbour’s electric supply line was being fixed by another company at the same time. Suddenly our world was bursting with electricians – what happiness. We know, though, that, like the rowan tree, this will be followed by two years of no electricians at all.

September can be a wonderful autumn month, when the trees are on fire with colour and the ground has finally dried out a bit from last winter’s snow. This year, however, we’ve been sitting in a dense fog for weeks, and when the fog moved on, it rained. Our plans for walking, fishing, picnicking in the hills, all gone. I don’t like to be scared off by weather, but I do think that cold wetness can be endured if necessary, but otherwise is to be avoided. I learnt this from our neighbour’s hunting dog who refuses to go out in the rain.

So one’s thoughts turn to a fire in the woodburner, and a good book. I’m a bit short on these at the moment, so I picked up ‘Tales of Gnomes and Trolls’, a bargain from the charity shop from last Christmas. A Swedish troll is a bit of a mystery. They can look just like a person and live alongside the rest of us, hiding their telltale tail under baggy clothing. Some trolls are sneaky and unpleasant, but some can be rather charming. In one story in the book a troll demands 1,000 in payment for a special cure. ‘1000 what?’ the boy asks, ‘1000 raspberry toffees’ says the troll.

The other thing that bad weather brings is remembrance of DIY jobs that have needed doing for a very long time. A ceiling needing re-painting, a blind replacing, a shelf re-fixing. It was day five before we ran out of excuses for doing the DIY. The ceiling is about to receive its second coat, though the shelf is still lingering on the floor. Last week I googled ‘blinds, Kiruna’ and found there was a Kiruna company selling blinds, and not only that but it was within walking distance. Opening hours were 9-5, with, of course, an hour for lunch. So we walked round to the address, which appeared to be just a house, and round the back, in a small outbuilding, saw signs of the blind trade – there were packages of blinds stacked outside. But the door was locked.

So back we walked, in the rain, and Rolf rang the number. A man replied, and in response to our mild accusation that the shop had been shut, said, ‘We’re open on Mondays. Come next Monday.’ Obviously anyone who would normally have bought a blind from this shop would know it was only open on Mondays, and now we knew too.

So back we went this Monday, and walked straight in. Many houses in Kiruna have these large wooden outbuildings which would have been stables, or stores of some kind, or toilets. Now they’re used in other ways, and this one, we supposed, was a blind shop. The space looked like a large garden shed, with tools and workbenches,though it was hard to work out exactly what business was being run in here. There was a man perched on a stool at the end with a laptop computer at his side.

Clearly there couldn’t have been much of a stock of blinds (so little space), and there was no display either. Tentatively we made our request, for a particular size of blind. ‘Aha,’ said the blind man, ‘colour?’. We only wanted white, but the man showed us five different shades of white. So we chose the whitest, by now wondering how long it was going to take to order this one small blind from his supplier. ‘Aha,’ said the blind man, ‘tomorrow then? about midday?’ This man, who was only a seller of blinds on Mondays, could make one to size and provide it the next day.

When we collected our blind, the man didn’t ask for any money, so Rolf asked him how we should pay. He didn’t want paying then he said – he’d send us an invoice, sometime next week. The smiling blind-maker peered at us over his glasses. And the price? 950 raspberry toffees of course.

We do live next to a road. I don’t want to put off any future bed and breakfast guests, but I might as well be honest. It’s quiet at night, but in the daytime there’s a fair amount of traffic that puffs up and down the hill, and that includes lorries, buses, and tractors. I get to watch them all go by when I’m in the kitchen, and I find it quite entertaining. A cul-de-sac wouldn’t be a good place for me, with nothing passing by.

Most of the time I don’t really notice the sound of the traffic. We have triple glazing so it’s no big deal. But now and again something thunders by, and you’d think it would be a bus or lorry. But invariably, when the noise draws my attention to the window, it’s a little old car struggling up the hill, a red triangle stuck on the back and a queue of cars behind it waiting to overtake. It’s known as an ‘EPA tractor’ and it looks like something from the 1950s that hails from the deep west.

Which, in a way, it is. During the second world war there was a shortage of tractors in Sweden, so a local discount shop – called ‘EPA’ – started making cheap tractors out of cars. They pulled out the passenger seats and added two gearboxes and called the car an agricultural vehicle. Nowadays these tractors are limited to a speed of 30 km/h, but they are extremely popular with the local youth because they are allowed to drive them when they are too young to have an ordinary licence. They make a lot of a noise, and you’d think they’d madden the hell out of cars around them because they’re so slow, but they’re just part of the road scene and no-one seems especially bothered.

Of course any vehicle that can be driven on the road without a licence is going to be popular, but in these parts it’s almost a religion and one that holds many people’s interest way beyond their teenage years. Vehicles that in some way are out of the ordinary, cobbled together from nothing, adapted and improved or individualised – hold a fascination for people. The ‘EPA tractors’ grinding up the road today have all been created from broken down old cars. They’ve ripped out the passenger seats and added a restriction to the gearbox to make them slow (and consequently noisy). They are labours of love.

There’s also a thriving market (as elsewhere in the Swedish countryside) for classic American cars. So when the 17 year old gets his driving licence, he graduates from an ‘EPA tractor’ to an imported American car. Classic car owners cruise around town in the summer months, chugging round and round the main square as slowly as possible. After a while they pull up on the kerb somewhere, so they can ‘hang’ in town in their own bit of heaven. There’s a club of course, and being Kiruna, the land of the midnight sun, it’s called ‘The Midnight Cruisers’.

The classic cars aren’t as noisy as the tractors, but they aren’t very quiet either. At the weekends they thunder up this road into town early evening, and back down again, usually in the early hours of the morning.

But their days are numbered. As it turns colder, the tractors, and the cadillacs, will be secreted away to buildings in backyards, left to sleep for the winter, hidden deep in dark garages, under a layer of pure white snow. Over the winter their owners will forget them. They will become distracted by the joys of their snow scooters (mercifully not driven on the roads) and will roar around the snowy landscape in them, phutting and spluttering and producing lots of black exhaust fumes. We will all forget about the pink cadillacs and chevrolet deuce coupes, the American dream sleeping under the snow. Until sometime in May, when all over Kiruna garage doors will be flung open to reveal these sleeping beauties and bring them back to life.

…

We’d been away for a few weeks at the end of the summer (late August). We came back to a landscape that had just lost most of its vivid autumn colours – a cold, windy place with orange leaves blowing around the streets and rain dripping from the bare birch trees.

But Kiruna never leaves you long with a frown on your face. The airport bus takes visitors to their hotel (it’s such a small town) but the driver was a bit challenged by the idea of a bed and breakfast. There are relatively few visitors here, after all, compared with a hotel, and we’ve been here less than two years, so you can understand him not knowing it. After we’d sat down further back in the bus he got out the map and asked people around him where the street was. No problem, he called back to us, he’d drive us to the doorstep. No, we said, it’s hard to turn round in the street so dropping us at the main street would be fine. ‘I’ll take you there,’ he insisted, ‘it’s only a small bus’.

Reaching the end of Airport Road the bus stopped suddenly and the driver got out. He shut the doors to the luggage hold and got back in. We noted that we hadn’t driven round any sharp corners so all the luggage was probably still there. And off we went.

A few minutes up the main road, instead of turning right we turned left and pulled up outside the supermarket. The woman in the front row needed a cash machine. We watched as she ambled over the road to the cash machine, and then back. ‘Now, let’s be off!’ the driver declared with a cheery wave. It was more of a magical mystery tour than an airport bus service.

The bus turned round and drove back up towards our street. The driver didn’t manage to turn his bus into the street, which was a great relief, as I had visions of him reversing into our fence in an effort to turn round and get back down again. But he got out, unloaded our luggage, and wished us a very good holiday. So despite the dripping weather, we arrived at our front door with a smile on our faces.

Later we went off on our own magical mystery tour, a quick spin round the town that will one day be King – or fall into a pit.

Some changes here happen very slowly – like building new flats and houses – but some happen rather fast. In the three weeks we were away the last train had left Kiruna’s old railway station. The station is too close to the unstable ground so they’ve had to stop the trains further up the line and extend it round the back of the mine instead. For the time being the station is no more than a glorified potting shed, with ‘Waiting Room’ grandly printed on a piece of plastic signing on the front. There’s a slightly more substantial station building planned nearby.

Let’s hope that particular change happens fast, because I for one don’t fancy the chances of 25 Japanese tourists, 8 Norwegians, 4 visiting Swedes, and 5 locals trying to shelter from minus 30 degrees in a small hut.

You’d think it would be hard to get used to the extremes of light and dark, but the funny thing is that the opposite seems to be the case. The brain adapts very quickly, and apart from a general reluctance for the body clock to admit that any time would be a reasonable time to go to sleep, everything feels perfectly normal. Light all night for weeks of the summer, the sun shining from the north into our bedroom window, it just feels normal.

Nothing here, though, stays the same for long – the shortening and lengthening days happen at breakneck pace. The official end of the ‘midnight sun’ is in July (the date uncertain because it depends where in relation to the nearby mountains you are). The sun begins to dip beneath the horizon, briefly, towards the end of July, and sinks a little more every day. The descent is slight, so twilight hours are long and light. So it continues to feel like it is light all night way into August. A bad weather day can suddenly make the difference though – lots of cloud in the twilight hours can feel dark. It’s a sad feeling – one gets addicted to light and the body doesn’t want it to go away, even for an hour or two.

Actually for a week in mid-August Kiruna feels very dark indeed for a few hours each night. This is partly because one isn’t used to it, but also because the street lights are still not on. When the twilight is dim, the lack of street lights contrast with midwinter when, in total darkness, the street lights are ablaze. So this week in August is the darkest Kiruna streets ever get.

Then comes that sad day – around 14th August – when the dimness of the twilight is deemed to be dark enough for the street lights to come on for a couple of hours. We feel the dull impact of the dark sky, and long for that pale blue feeling above and the ‘light without shadows’. You know that winter is on its way in, and the mosquitoes on their way out. It’s a mixed blessing.

We had planned a trip to Stockholm for a few days this week. It’s a city we know well and where we used to live. We were prepared for the shock of the crowds, the noise, the busyness, the streets, the traffic. But one is never really prepared for the difference in light. Our brains in Kiruna had fooled us into thinking we were already experiencing darkness, when all we really had was twilight. In Stockholm it was if someone had suddenly put a hood over our heads. When you looked across the street, you couldn’t see anything, except a street light. Here was real darkness, black velvet darkness, with stars. What a shock.

The point on the map that I can see on my computer screen says, ‘Everything is fine’.

It said that eight hours ago too (a different point) and 17 hours earlier (another point). Someone who stayed with us is now walking alone in Sarek National Park for a couple of weeks, and he is using a GPS to send signals of his whereabouts. There’s no normal phone connection out there, so the GPS is a bit of reassurance for a lone walker. He has the equivalent of a panic button, which he can press in emergency, which will be sent as a message via the US back to someone here if he needs to be rescued. But that will not happen, because he is a very capable, fit, and sensible young man, so everything will be fine.

It’s a clear case of less is more. He only has the two modes; ‘Everything is fine’, and ‘Emergency’. No, ‘Bloody miserable day. Ate my last bit of chocolate at lunchtime. New socks on and the sun is out so I am speeding up a bit’. Nor, ‘Give Lucy a hug and don’t forget to feed the guinea pig’. Nor any, ‘Listening to Queen Latifah right now, yo’. Just, ‘Everything is fine’.

I like that. I can imagine the dangers he is facing bravely, and the philosophical thoughts he is thinking. I see him standing on a mountain peak, smiling, surveying the world beneath him. I imagine him tying his tent down in a gale and cooking up some tasty dried beef, the wind whipping around his face and the clouds scudding across the sky. I imagine his journey just as I would like it to be, totally extraordinary, and no waffling messages of the ordinary get in the way.

I think I have too many modes to operate in and I ought to stick to the basics. I would like to feel everyday that ‘Everything is fine’. Because basically, it is. If it isn’t an emergency, then it’s fine.

Our street appears to be acting as an undercover agent. It has another street’s identity and more than one official name (or number).

We’d lived here for three months before I realised that our house had two different street numbers. The one we are familiar with (8) is on the wall on our street, Tvärgatan. Next to our house is another road and walking up this road I noticed there was a different number on that wall (64). How can we have lived here for months and not noticed?

It turns out our house used to be in this other street (Adolf Hedinsvägen), but when the local council decided, for safety reasons, to stop access to it, our house instead got attached to this street (Tvärgatan) where it was given a different number. So that solves that mystery. But as if that isn’t confusing enough, Tvärgatan is the name of a street that used to be further up the hill, which disappeared with building development. It is, then, the name of a dead street. No wonder people look blank when you mention it.

All this seems appropriate, since ‘tvär’ means ‘contrary’ in Swedish, and is a name given to a street running at a slightly odd or ‘contrary’ angle to the main road. We have a tendency ourselves to be a bit ‘tvär’, so a bit of street subterfuge is in keeping with our own character. It is, after all, a little ‘tvär’ to go north in the winter, and perhaps a little ‘tvär’ to live in snow and not like to ski. Rolf is ‘tvär’ in refusing to eat Swedish herring, or go to a beach, and I am a little ‘tvär’ in being attracted to live near a mine where our house will one day fall into a pit.

Being ‘tvär’ is ok, and living in Tvärgatan is ok too. I wouldn’t mind all the subterfuge and double identities, only we are running a bed and breakfast and if we are so ‘tvär’ that no-one can find us here then that is way, way too ‘tvär’. Tvärgatan, we have belatedly realised, is a street without a street sign. All the people who have struggled through the snow to find us last winter, finally arriving exhausted on our doorstep – did any one of them complain, or mention that it would have helped if our street had its name on a sign? Not one. Don’t ask me how we can have lived here and not noticed ourselves – I have no idea.

On the local council’s website we read that there is an edict that all streets shall be named. So we send off our request for a street sign, and receive back a slightly surprised reply from a council official who has been out to have a look and can confirm for us (in case we were in any doubt) that indeed our street does not appear to have a sign, so he will order one from the sign company, and as there are buildings there on the corner, the street sign will have to go on their wall. So far so good. Only then he says they will be sending us the street sign.

I have a feeling we are about to uncover a bit of street history. There is, no doubt, a reason why this hasn’t happened before. Perhaps the owner of the building at the end doesn’t want to have the sign? After all, he doesn’t need it, as his building is facing another street which already has a (different) street sign.

It makes you wonder though. It’s as if we live in an arctic variation of the Bermuda Triangle, where ships – or in our case, guests – disappear without trace. Or maybe they too are working undercover.

Yesterday morning I was out wielding the ‘lie’ (pronounced ‘lee-ah’), kindly loaned by an unknown local lady, trying my best to look like the 14 year old girl I’d watched demonstrating its use (on an internet site called ‘The Scythe Connection’). For environmental reasons, it seems, the scythe is due for a comeback.

‘The Scythe Connection’ are people (actually a family, in Maine, USA) promoting the use of scythes because they use human, not fossil, energy. They describe the experience of using a scythe as a meditation, the movement from side to side being like a tai chi move (‘wave hands like clouds’). It is, they say, ‘the rhythmic movement of body, breath following, flowing, mind at peace’. On their website there are several short videos, and the first I watch shows a young girl cutting ‘swathes’ (what a wonderful word) through a field. It looks as if she is dancing with her scythe. It’s mesmerising, and the sound is a soft ‘swish swish swish’.

Then I really wanted to have a go, and was completely sold on the whole idea of getting out there and going with the flow of the land, and as a side-product actually managing to cut back some of our wilderness. I wasn’t prepared to copy the girl’s example and go barefoot in a floaty white skirt, but I was ready to commune with nature and have a transcendental experience nonetheless.

However, before I could do this the blade had to be sharpened. This, for me, was the tricky bit. I’m scared of sharp objects. The girl in the video sharpens her so speedily and with such confidence you can barely see the movements of her whetstone as it moves from one side of the blade to the other. That was never going to be me. My demonstration might become a bloody horror movie. So I just handed it over to Rolf and asked him to do it. Pathetic I know. He didn’t do it with the same panache as the girl, but I was grateful anyway.

I took the tool and stood, feet wide apart in the grass, thinking peaceful, flowing thoughts. My first movements were nothing like tai chi, or meditation. I got the blade stuck in the ground and I swore a lot. In time it did get a bit better, but I soon realised that cutting back weeds in Kiruna would never feel like cutting back hay in Maine. The ground here is lumpy and hilly, and half the plants bend over just when you want to cut them so the blade just slides over the top of them. Still, it was satisfying seeing the stems that were cut, and getting a feel for how to wield the tool, the movement beginning in the spine, not the arms.

Coincidentally to the ‘lie’ tale, a friend of mine recently wrote to me complaining about the way lawnmowers ruin a perfect summer’s afternoon. Just when you want to fling open those French doors, bask in the warm sunshine and listen to the gentle trill of birds, there’s the cough splutter and whirr of next door’s lawnmower or strimmer. She imagined a world where gardens were all wildflower meadows, with no lawns to be cut with noisy machinery. Now I know that if the neighbour’s wildflower meadow needed a trim she would much prefer the sound of a ‘lie’. It’s a repeating, gentle ‘swish swish’ sound. It sounds like the ‘lie’ is caressing the stems when it is actually cutting them.

As I’d been working against nature in my use of the ‘lie’, not with it (unlike the girl in the video), I soon became exhausted, and had to give up. I discovered all sorts of muscles in my back that I hadn’t realised were there. This morning each of them reminded me again, and all I wanted to do was lie on the sofa. My thoughts turned, instead, to poetry.

‘Heark how the Mower Damon Sung,
With love of Juliana stung!
While ev’ry thing did seem to paint
The Scene more fit for his complaint.
Like her fair Eyes the day was fair;
But scorching like his am’rous Care.
Sharp like his Sythe his Sorrow was,
And wither’d like his Hopes the Grass.’

(Extract from ‘Damon the Mower’ by Andrew Marvell)

I do recommend a look at the scything video. It may not change your attitude to lawnmowers but it will lower your blood pressure.

http://scytheworks.ca/riseofthescythe.html

We were still looking for a ‘lie’ (pronounced, ‘lee-ah’), a scythe. Our enquiries had led us nowhere, and the grass was up to my waist.

Last year I was sentimental about the wildflowers, but this year the impracticality of managing the meadow has outweighed its charm. It’s not like a meadow here is a rare treat – they’re everywhere there isn’t tarmac or grass. If we leave it uncut it will need some grazing animals, and those aren’t so easy to find here either. Our kind neighbour Aina is tolerant of our encroaching wilderness, but keeps her grass neatly trimmed, and we feel we owe it to her to make the effort.

We went out to ask in another hardware store. Of course, there was no ‘lie’, though they could order it…but we needed it now, and nothing comes to Kiruna quickly.

We set our hopes on the local sale (‘Loppis’) taking place in neighbouring Jukkasjärvi the next day. We tried to visualise someone saying, ‘I know what, let’s get rid of that old ”lie” we never use!’ and taking it along to the ‘Loppis’ saying, ‘here, try and sell this – I don’t suppose anyone will want it, but you never know.’ It was hard to imagine, but we held on to the hope.

After the hardware store we didn’t want to go straight home so we did a bit of cruising around town, looking at streets we didn’t know so well. There are still some wonderful old wooden houses in Kiruna, and streets intact from at least the 1920s, which is very early on in Kiruna’s history. As were going slowly down one street I saw a ‘Loppis’ sign and some plastic and metal stacked up in a tiny window facing the street. You never know – maybe they had a ‘lie’.

Down three narrow stairs, leading us slightly under pavement level, was a cavern of stuff piled up so tightly you could barely pass by. Old rugs, lamps, shelves, tools, books, clothes, fishing stuff, kitchen utensils, material, china. No ‘lie’ though. A man squashed into the clutter at the end of the shop asked us if we were looking for anything in particular. ‘A lie’ I said, and laughed, knowing it seemed a bit ridiculuous. Aha, why did we want that? (his name was Olle). And was there really nowhere we could buy one? Didn’t our neighbour have one? (No). Couldn’t we borrow one from someone else? Well yes, and we could hire one maybe. But we couldn’t just go and knock on a door of a stranger and ask. Oh you can, he said, this is Kiruna.

Someone else came into the shop. Olle asked him if knew of anyone with a ‘lie’. These people here, he said, they want to hire one. The man didn’t own a ‘lie’, so Olle offered to take our telephone number, in case he came across someone else willing to rent out theirs. We were grateful, and on the way out of this cavern Rolf picked up a print of the Beatles’ single, ‘Help’ (US version). It seemed an appropriate purchase. We came home and hung it in our hallway.

The rest of the day was equally exciting – someone came to help us take down a dead birch tree, but that’s another story..

Then this morning the phone rang quite early. ‘It’s Olle,’ said a voice, ‘from the secondhand shop’. I knew from that moment what was about to happen. You know that feeling that, given a chance, things always turn out badly? Well it’s not that feeling. It’s a joyous, reassuring feeling, that people can do things just to be helpful, for no benefit for themselves at all.

Yes, he’d found an old woman with a ‘lie’, and she said it was OK for us to borrow it. No she didn’t want payment. No, no need to come and fetch it, he would bring it round right now.

So he did. Now it’s resting outside the door, waiting for the angel of death to make an appearance.

We’ve been away a while. The grass at the back of the house is so high it’s impenetrable, so there’s no way a lawnmower will deal with it. If we had one, that is, which we don’t. So we went in search of a ‘lie’ (pronounced ‘lee-ah’).

A ‘lie’ is a good old fashioned scythe – the kind you have to be careful not to chop other people’s legs off with, and the kind featured in Bergman’s films on the shoulder of the angel of death. I didn’t like the idea, but having been brought up in farmland, where attacking a meadow with a ‘lie’ is child’s play, Rolf reassured me that he would have no trouble using one without endangering my legs or summoning the angel of death.

To our great surprise the local hardware shop in Kiruna didn’t have one. The owner was sympathetic but his face said ‘we don’t get much call for them these days’. We went to the DIY supermarket and all they had was a ‘lie’ handle – the blade would have to be ordered. When they told us the price we wondered if we could just get to like the grass wilderness instead. That had originally been our plan when we moved here, suspecting the grass would be a problem while we were away, but we’d soon realised that a wildflower meadow becomes a birch scrub and in town that’s all that separates you from the encroaching wilderness. Buying an all-singing, all-dancing lawnmower is the favoured option, but if you’re away, as we were, at the key growing time – when the snow melts away and the sun shines longer and then shines all night – then you’ve missed any chance of using a lawnmower. A ‘lie’ it would have to be.

We asked our neighbour. Anyone she knew who needed a ‘lie’ already had one, handed down from their father or their father’s father, so it wasn’t immediately obvious to her where you would go to buy one. But she suggested Vittangi, a small village about an hour’s drive east of Kiruna, where a degree of isolation has kept people feisty and independent and no doubt fond of their ‘lie’.

We like Vittangi, so it seemed an ideal outing for a sunny day. It was 24 degrees of heat in fact. The landscape glowed with colour – the stimulation of 24 hours of daylight accelerates growing and gives a once frozen landscape real green energy. The drive there was on the main road out of Kiruna (there are only two roads out) and although on some parts you encounter the occasional mine lorry, there’s lots of empty road stretching ahead of you into forest, so it’s pleasant drive.

Arriving in Vittangi we suddenly remembered ‘closed for the summer holidays’. In a small community that’s the normal practice in July, and most of the shops there were closed. But we were in luck – the hardware store was only ‘closed for lunch’. So we drove down towards the river to wait somewhere.

The Torne river is very wide in Vittangi. The skyscape is grand and expansive, water below in all directions, sky above. We found a small spit of land reaching out into the river (water on all sides) where we parked ourselves on some fold-up chairs for our lunch. It was blissfully warm, and silent. The water was almost millpond still; quite recently it had been ice. Pike snapped at the surface among the reeds, making us turn our heads, surprising us with a sudden break in the silence. It was enough to help dismiss thoughts of blue water being good for swimming.

We were in a good mood by the time we returned to the hardware store. There were no other customers there. It was a cavern of a place, stacked with several models of the vehicle of choice for this time of year (a quad bike) and spare parts for the vehicle of choice another time of year (a snowscooter). A man rose to greet us, and we asked about a ‘lie’. No, he hadn’t had one of those in stock for a couple of years, sorry. No explanation, no suggested alternative, no offer to order one. Pity we weren’t after a quad bike. It was disappointing to say the least. With nothing else to do, we drove out of town looking for adventure and, failing that, for somewhere to stop and have some coffee out of our thermos flask.

Our first stop was scenic enough – right by a lake in a clearing in a forest. The natural world at our feet. But the ants there had a mission to find and destroy, and were crawling determinedly up our legs within twenty seconds. Time to move on.

Our next stop we’d rejected earlier because it looked like it might have been private summer houses, but on closer inspection it was a public area, with pontoons out into the water and no-one in sight. The pontoons were on the edge of a wide lake surrounded on all sides by low forest. There were small benches of soft pine to stretch out on and we wondered if these were primarily for fishing. The water lapped invitingly against the rocks. I was resistant to swimming, as I have been ever since 1997, when I jumped in one summer’s day and leapt out again five seconds later. I hadn’t had a dip in the arctic chill since that day.

I went in. It was cold, but not painfully so. The water was clear and clean, and yet it had a strong primeval fishy aroma which reminded me I was not in my element. It always feels a bit threatening, being the only person in a large body of water, and in particular arctic water has always felt off limits, so I was nervous. I wondered if the fish were ravenous and might mistake me for giant bait. After all, they’d had a rough winter. What monsters might lurk in this deep? Pushing the thought aside I swam out a bit more, and then, sensing the degree of cold, I got out and dried myself in the sun. It was hard to believe we were in the arctic. We drank our coffee and felt happy.

Then at the distant clearing a car drew up and two men got out. Would this be paradise lost? When they saw us they walked to the other pontoon. At the bench and table there they silently ate lunch and read newspapers for ten minutes or so. And then they left. Some people are lucky enough to work where they can come to places like this for a bit of lunch, and don’t even feel the need to look up from their papers.

Another hour or so passed, in almost total silence. It had been a day we meant to get a ‘lie’, anxious to regain control over the growing wilderness in our garden. Lying on the pontoon looking out at the lake, the untamed marshlands and the low spreading birch forest, a ‘lie’ seemed rather irrelevant.

Most days are clear and sunny. The prevailing wind direction brings cloud in from Norway and leaves it hanging over the mountains to the west, discharging yet more layers of snow over the peaks. The cloud rarely reaches Kiruna, so days are not only light but sparkling, since there’s no softening layer of humidity to dull down the sun’s rays. The sunlight is what Swedes would call ‘strålande’ – streaming light that is impossible to ignore. The impact is physical as well as psychological – the longer days of bright light are quite exhausting after the months of darkness.

When I poke my head out the door in the morning I can hear a variety of birdsong. The temperature is still mostly below freezing, and can dip down to the minus 20s, but can also come up above freezing in the daytime. Only the very top layers of snow are melting – the piles are massive, especially this winter when the snow arrived in large quantities in November. A photograph would show no sign of spring to someone from more southern countries – there is no green visible.

Although the deep snow may become a little unreliable soon, it’s still ‘good to go’. The ice is thick on the lakes and reliable for many weeks yet. The Ice Hotel has just closed for business, but for the last two weeks you could have stayed in its ice rooms for a fraction of the price it charges the rest of the winter season.

It’s the peak season for walking on the lakes, enjoying the sunshine, doing a bit of ice fishing. This weekend hundreds of keen ice fishers took part in the annual competition to catch the biggest fish. This sport requires them to sit, or preferably lie (on a warm reindeer skin), on the ice, and wait for a fish to bite. It’s peaceful, like cricket in the summer.

As we walk out onto the lake I’m hit by vivid memories of going to the beach on holiday in England. Rolf is carrying what passes as ‘deckchairs’ – small foldeable canvas chairs to keep us off the ice – while I carry a large bag with lunch, suntan cream, bottles of squash and a thermos of coffee. We’re in search of the perfect spot – out of the wind but in the sun. Sometimes our determined pace is slowed by having to wade over sand dunes – well no, snow dunes of course – and sometimes our eyes are drawn to patterns in the water created by its movement against the rocks, in this case frozen patterns. In the distance we see other determined figures on the beach, also in search of that elusive perfect spot. There are family groups, probably arguing over who forgot to pack the sandwiches, but blissfully at this distance we can’t hear them. This beach is big enough to accommodate whoever comes on to it, and it’s always easy to head away from ‘the crowds’. Snowscooters pass, also in the distance, like boats passing by, only noisier. When they have gone we’re returned to the silence, as we stretch back on our chairs squinting into the sun.

It’s light, lighter every day than further south, and the flat earth top lengthens the twilight hours. For aurora watchers the bad news is that it’s only dark for three or four hours. The good news is that the aurora is generally more active in the autumn and in the spring, so your chances of seeing it are higher in those few hours that are available. We drove the car out to Abisko one night last week. The ‘fjäll’ region looks different in the dark, and we were lucky that night the sky was completely clear and I have never seen so many stars – the milky way almost lit up the night. We were parked where we could see the ‘Aurora Sky Station’ on Nuolla, the hill behind the village. The Sky Station is shut now – it closed at the end of March – but the aurora were clear to see from where we were standing, flashing over the whole sky and over the Sky Station’s darkened ski lift.

The end of March and the first half of April really is the best time of year and we never like to miss it. So it’s peak season, right? Well no actually. In fact there are very few visitors here. I guess we have to market it a bit better in future. Or maybe we just keep it to ourselves.

When I was a child the happiest day was when ‘Bunty’ popped through the letterbox. ‘Bunty’, a comic for girls, whose characters were my friends and who always triumphed in the end, beat the bully, and won the affection of all their classmates. Since then, as an adult I haven’t felt the same excitement when hearing a loud thump of something being delivered through the front door.

In Kiruna, of course, nothing is delivered through the front door – it’s delivered to a mailbox on the road. It’s a sad thing to lift the lid and find nothing in it. I wish it had a light on it which flashed when something was inside, to save me the pain and embarrassment of going there to see the inside of an empty box. But there is one day a week when what’s in the mailbox sets my pulse racing – the delivery of Kiruna’s ‘Annonsblad’.

A cross between ‘Exchange and Mart’, a community newsletter and a local parish magazine, ‘Annonsblad’ ought not to be of much interest. It’s mainly advertising – mostly special offers on sausages or woolly underwear – so it ought to be something that goes straight in the bin. But we really treasure it. Hidden in its pages are insights into local life which, when you see them, are like spotting a flash of gold at the bottom of a running stream.

It would spoil the pleasure if there was no effort involved, so the effort is wading through the commercial advertising, not letting your eye be fooled into thinking that that small box down there is just another advertisement for salami.

This week, skipping through the ads for holidays in Turkey, local potatoes, sports wear, reindeer steaks, leather furniture, and a page of announcements of church services, I came across some small boxes advertising the date and time of various annual meetings of local organisations. There was one for the meeting of an organisation that looks after a museum of local buildings. Another organisation having an AGM seems to have been set up to manage a piece of open land (this meeting would take place in the ‘conference tent’). Advertisements in ‘Annonsblad’ often begin as puzzles – there was an AGM announced for an organisation which had the name of two local hills, something to do with burials. We managed to work out that it’s an organisation set up by mine workers’ unions to help people save to cover funeral costs.

Moving swiftly on to births, marriages and deaths (‘congratulations, hugs and kisses to three year old Ludvig, from Mamma, Pappa and Spiderman’) and what children will get for lunch in local schools this week (meatballs on Monday, fried herring on Friday). The local government is looking for anyone speaking fluent Arabic or Somali, to ‘provide society orientation for our new Swedes’. There’s a box announcing the temporary closure of a snowscooter route (possibly due to exploration by the local mining company, though this is not stated), and an advertisement inviting people to donate their used electric equipment to a recycling workshop. The library advertises itself with the question, ‘Are you looking for poems to express grief or faith?’ (well, I suppose it is Easter) and the financial advice bureau reminds us that ‘Life is the biggest gift, and we are given it for free’. There’s a large advertisement for the next Council meeting and a reminder that if you don’t feel like attending, and would like to find another way to punish yourself (my words not theirs), you can listen to the whole meeting on local radio.

Almost half a page of small black print is headlined ‘Rocket launch from Esrange’. Esrange is a rocket range and research centre north of Kiruna. The advertisement announces their intention to launch a rocket in the next week, and it details the radio frequencies on which, at set times of the day, you can find out if the launch is imminent. If it is, and you have the misfortune to be in the area at the time, it reminds you that there are some shelters. It describes the extent of the area that might be affected by jetsam from the rocket launch – this area includes the village of Vittangi, but they tell people not to worry as they won’t really be affected (really?). Finally they ask the public to ring a special number if someone finds any rocket bits, and there’s a reward for the first person who rings.

Please sir, can I have my rocket back? Pure gold.