Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

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…

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.