To Guide or Not to Guide

 The prospect of writing a guidebook was daunting indeed and I thought long and hard before deciding taking the task on. The whole country would have to be covered, by just one person. Me. It would involve collecting and arranging an enormous amount of factual information, adding comments and guidance where appropriate, about everything from travelling to and within the country to accommodation, where to eat, what to see and do in every corner of the land from the far south on the narrow channel separating Sweden from Denmark, to the polar North, far above the Arctic Circle. There would also be guided walks in the major centres and a particular emphasis on history and culture.

The deciding factor, however, was that it would take me to parts of the country I hadn't been to before despite being a long-time resident (how many people have been to every part of the country in which they live?), or would like to revisit. So I said yes and signed a contract, well aware that the assignment would involve infinitely more work than pay. But there were other potential rewards to consider.

As expected, the fun part was in travelling around the land. The great fun part was in digging out, or surprisingly coming across, stories, information, that few people would know about and that potential readers were not likely to find elsewhere. Who knew, for example, that the first prisoner of war exchange in the second world war took place in Gothenburg? I stayed two nights in the hotel where final negotiations were held. The manageress told me she had once met someone who worked there at the time and how alarmed she and other members of the uninformed staff were when they saw and heard uniformed Germans greeting each other with the “Heil Hitler” salute. They assumed that the Nazis had invaded the country, as they had already done in Norway and Denmark. And when I went to the harbour area to find the exact spot where the exchange had occurred, how surprised I was when I asked two elderly gentlemen sitting on a bench if they could tell me where the dock was that I was looking for when one of them revealed that he had witnessed the scene as a small child living in a flat overlooking the harbour. It had made such an impression on him that he was able to describe it in vivid detail.

The most enjoyable trip was a four-day journey across Sweden from east to west in a narrow canal boat, with confined cabins rather like large wooden sardine tins standing on end. But there was very good food and pleasant company in the narrow dining room, while traversing the peaceful countryside and being able to visit places of interest along the way, jumping off the boat at the many locks. Sometimes we crossed a lake in the chain of waterways that can take you from Stockholm to Gothenburg if you have the time – and let's face it – the money, to spare. For someone like me, however, it was free of charge as the canal company wanted the publicity. And I did have to work.

Another highlight was a visit to Mora in the province of Dalarna to the north-west of Stockholm, where the annual 90 km Vasa Ski Race ends and which is home to the magical Zorn Museum. Anders Zorn (1860-1920), my favourite Swedish artist, whose skill as a portraitist led to his making seven trips to the United States, where his commissions included portraits of three Presidents, Cleveland, Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. But it was by no means only portraits that he painted and if ever you get the chance, lookout for some of his wondrous water colours.

From Mora there is the inland railway line to Gällivare 70 km above the Arctic Circle, with an overnight stop in the town of Östersund, situated on the shores of a lake, Storsjö, famed here for its version of the Loch Ness Monster. The local tourist office has a map showing where you are most likely to see it. It also has its own website www.storsjoodjuret.jamtland.se.

The inland line was the first main line to be completed in Sweden and, unfortunately, the first to be closed to passenger traffic. However, it has been kept partially alive from Midsummer until the autumn by informative enthusiasts, the train stopping here and there for you to get out and look around, and long enough at some stations for passengers to get refreshment or a meal.

A further 70 km beyond Gällivare is Sweden's northernmost township, distinguished these days by being an urban centre on the move as it is literally being undermined by its huge iron ore mine. It has been relocating in stages to a safer site. Small township it may be, but it is also the centre of a huge municipality covering an area of some 20,000 km that contains the country's highest mountain, thousands of lakes, seven rivers, two national parks and much else of note.

Yes, all that was the fun part of the work. The rest was a hard slog to produce 400 printed pages that were eventually published in London and New York.

Letter from my island 02

 

Alone and unattached, or with fox-family and friends, the unwelcome canine creature for whom I have little sympathy, is not the only island animal for which I have hard feelings. Even the squirrels that run around the cottage before darting up a tree, fail to melt my heart, at least since the time when I used to grow strawberries. Of course, I was not naive enough to think they would be left undisturbed by local land-based or airborne marauders if unprotected and so they were carefully covered with netting. It was a good year for them and they were admired by friends visiting from the other side of the planet. Suddenly my friends called out to me.

”Don't get angry,” they said.

Angry? Why Should I get angry?

They were laughing.

I followed their gaze, and there was a squirrel, which had managed to lift up the netting though I fondly thought it was firmly secured, sitting on the ground, happily munching my plump red fruit!

Then there are badgers. I have admittedly only seen one on the property in the past year or so, but there used to be a whole family somewhere very close by. They would regularly come out for an evening stroll when it was getting dark, keeping to the edge of my place as though there was a public right of way there. Innocent enough, you might think, but given half a chance they would tip a dustbin over and spread everything in it around the landscape, something the fox must have learnt from, although I have never heard of him trying to get at anything so large and with a lid.

Most people visiting the island would rank the roedeer above the squirrels as the most attractive of the island fauna. They ooh and ah over them and think they are so graceful and pretty. Residents hate the sight of the them. Let them get anywhere near your vegetable garden and it's goodbye to all your hard work and epectations. In the growing season, when the island is full of the food that they can keep them in the pink of condition, they will nonetheless go for the little you have carefully nurtured and maintained against all the odds. And they won't just take a lettuce and be satisfied with that, but will go along a whole row and bite the tops off every one!

Towards the opposite end of the size scale are the much-despised slimy slugs. There are two varieties that set alarm bells ringing in these parts, the longer black 'forest slug' and the fearful brown invaders commonly known here as 'murder slugs'. Many are the tips that are bandied about for dealing with them. One that I have tried is to sink little pots of beer in the ground around the vegetable plot. Sure enough, no sooner had I done so than it became evident that the creatures will do anything to get some free booze. Their advance party must have spread the word far and wide and soon every slug on the island was heading in this direction!

Okay, many drowned in the drink, but their numbers are unlimited. Moreover, it didn't take long for assorted birds and beasts to discover there was good ale-marinated grub to be had in those sunken pots. I would come out in the morning and find they were no longer in the ground, but had been lifted up and tipped over to get at what was inside.

So what to do? Even with only the smallest horticultural aspirations, life is a perpetual battle against these voracious, heartless invaders – and I have hardly mentioned aerial bombardment by winged creatures of varying sizes, all with evil intent. I have but one card up my sleeve, one that I tried to a very limited extent very late in the season last year. I hesitate to speak too quickly, but a full-scale trial is due to begin in the spring.

Letter from my island

 

Letter from my island (in the Stockholm archipelago)

This morning, looking out at the snowy scene and noting how an overnight fall has completely covered the areas I cleared only yesterday, I saw the fox crawling underneath the cottage. He has become a regular, uninvited visitor. But should I not feel sorry for him? He wants shelter. He wants food. The trouble is, his visits invariably spell trouble.

There are no recycling bins on the island for plastic or metal, only for glass and newspapers – near the jetty, about one-and-a-half kilometres from here. To throw plastic and metal containers in the ordinary rubbish, which is collected every other week, would leave me with a bad conscience, especially with regard to plastic, so I collect them and wait for the recycling boat to come, which it does twice a year. I have been tying them up in refuse bags and leaving them on a trolley outside, ready to be wheeled away when the time comes. Hmm... It's no longer possible. The fox gets there first.

His sense of smell tells him immediately whether anything has contained food, regardless of there being traces left or not, and he will stop at nothing to get at it. I have placed a heavy log over a bag, but what use is that against one so skilful and sly. He will somehow get it, and although he may not be good at untying knots, will gnaw his way through the bag, drag it away and spread its contents far and wide. So now the bags are piling up in the tool shed, where he has little chance of reaching the bolt that keeps it closed.

Or has he? My nearest neighbour assures me he is by no means the only representative of his species on the island, so I suppose he could return with some of his friends and relations and stand on each other's backs. You may think it's very unlikely, but I have underestimated him before. And lived to regret it.

Alfred Nobel and his Prizes

It's that time of year again, when speculation is rife as to who will receive the prestigious, and lucrative, NobelPrizes, with acclaim or criticism from the media pundits and others once the winners are announced.

Whether Alfred Bernhard Nobel realised what a stir he would create, we cannot know. He was a man of great contrasts. A Swede born in Stockholm in 1833, he spent most of his life abroad. The inventor of dynamite and other explosives, he was even called a 'merchant of death', but aimed to promote world peace. A skilled chemist, he wrote poetry in both Swedish and English, and prose in other languages too. The son of a man who twice went bankrupt, he became one of the wealthiest people in the Western world.

His great wealth did not bring him happiness, however. He never married, suffered from loneliness and was in delicate health from childhood. Only in the last three years of his life did he have a home of his own in Sweden, where he had bought the Bofors (pr. ‘Boo-fosh’) armaments factory. He nevertheless died in the Italian resort town of San Remo on December 10 1896. And December 10 is the day on which the Nobel Prizes are ceremonially awarded each year, the Peace Prize in Oslo, the others at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.

His will was written in Swedish without legal guidance, which led to much delay in its implementation as it was disputed. It stipulated that the greater part of his estate should be invested and the income distributed annually in the form of prizes to those conferring the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year within the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and what he called ‘brotherhood among nations’, but which we know as the Peace Prize.

Swedish institutions were to award the first four prizes: the Royal Academy of Sciences (physics and chemistry), Royal Caroline Institute (physiology or medicine) and the Swedish Academy (literature). The Peace Prize was to be awarded by a committee of the Norwegian Storting, or Parliament, as Norway was joined to Sweden in a union under the Swedish crown during Nobel's lifetime. A sixth award, the Economics Prize, was added in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden in his memory.

There is no doubt that Nobel had a great interest in each of the fields he mentioned. The Peace Prize is the one that is most intriguing. Nobel believed that when the great power of explosives was understood, nobody would use them for military purposes. He knew from personal experience what devastation they could cause. In 1864 the factory where he had been studying nitroglycerine was blown up killing everyone in it, including his 21-year-old brother Emil. Nevertheless, he maintained his factories could well put an end to wars sooner than all the peace congresses that were held.

He was also influenced by his friendship with the Austrian Baroness von Sutter, a pioneer in the peace movement. She was herself awarded the Peace Prize in 1905. But as with the Literature Prize, some of the laureates selected in Oslo, such as Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973, and Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978, have been highly controversial, while others generally considered to deserve the award, such as Mahatma Gandhi, have been unacknowledged. And when the first Literature Prize was awarded to Sully Proudhomme in 1901, Sweden's foremost author August Strindberg, who never received the prize, and more than forty other prominent Swedes wrote a letter of apology to Tolstoy.

The stipulation about conferring the greatest benefit on mankind in the preceding year has been more closely observed for the Peace Prize than for the others, with juries otherwise tending to look back at what candidates have achieved during their careers as a whole and not only in the very recent past.

Unexpected

It's not only in such dramatic circumstances as being stranded abroad and threatened by fire, that the unexpected can catch you unawares. Take what happened to me less than two months ago.

I had been feeling unwell for weeks and put it down to allergic reactions, poor sleep and anything else I could think of to explain it away. However, one of the closest neighbours on the island where I've spent almost all my time since returning to Sweden from enforced exile in California, is a retired district nurse and she and her husband finally persuaded me to see a doctor at the local medical centre, about a fifteen minute boat ride away. Which I did, taking with me my shopping trolley as you can't buy anything on the island and I badly needed to replenish my food supplies. I would go to the supermarket after my appointment. Hmm.

Tests were taken. The doctor looked at the results – and sent for an ambulance! I had a very high level of infection, an even higher level of inflammation and low blood counts. Ten minutes later I was on my way to the hospital, shopping trolley and all.

I'll say this, if you absolutely must go to the hospital A & E, it is much better to arrive in an ambulance than simply to walk in. Your status is definitely higher, though unless you are deemed to be in the most urgent need of attention it doesn't mean you will spend very much less time waiting for someone to come and decide what to do with you. But you won't have to lie among a herd of other poor souls seeking help. At least I didn't.

I arrived in the afternoon. Well after midnight I was wheeled to one of the wards, having first been covid-tested. Without a negative result you won't be placed among non-covid patients. Of course. At about one o'clock in the morning I was given something to eat and later moved into a room with one other person, blissfully snoring in his sleep. By two o'clock I was attempting to join him in slumberland and might just have succeeded an hour or so later when I felt someone groping for my arm, needle at the ready. To take blood. A couple of hours later, maybe less, it was the turn of a young lady wanting to record my blood pressure, temperature etc. “Have you had a good night's sleep?” she asked.

I tried to open my mouth, but words wouldn't come.

(To be continued)

Life has its Contrasts

 

What do you say to forty-four degrees of scorching heat and having to escape from one of California's wildfires, compared to staying in a small timber-built cottage on a tiny, at times ice-bound, island in the Stockholm archipelago – which is where I am now? The pandemic has certainly brought contrasts into my life.

The present problem does not involve checking air quality and the progress made by fire fighters, but keeping a careful eye on the thermometer to know when the taps are likely to dry-, or rather freeze-, up and there is no running water. That has already happened a number of times. A lesson I learned the first time was to fill up everything available as soon as the weather gods relented for a day or two and the taps started to drip, drip and eventually run again. For a while.

There are no municipal supplies on the island so everyone has to make their own arrangements, which inevitably means having a well drilled deep into the post-glacial stone-strewn ground. Mine goes down about forty-five metres, which is far below the frost-free level, but the water has to come up to the surface. I have installed a small heater in the space below the cottage where it comes in, but the weak link is between that and the well outside. Of course, I should have made sure it was sufficiently well insulated long ago, but as I never envisaged staying here in the depths of winter, I never bothered.

But going without running water is by no means the only hazard to be aware of. There can be storm winds at this time of the year, and with them the likelihood of a power failure, like the one that occurred a couple of weeks ago, leaving the indoor warmth to fall alarmingly in the direction of the sub-zero temperatures outside. Fortunately, I was rescued by my kind neighbours, who invited me to sit in front of the efficient wood-fired appliance that spreads its warm glow around their place.

Then stepping outside also has its dangers as there are patches of smooth ice to look out for, sometimes artfully concealed by a thin layer of snow – like the one I fell over on with a nasty bump more than a week ago. It still hurts!

My covid story - expect the unexpected

 

My story begins with a scheduled three-week visit to family members in California. That was early in March last year, 2020. Countless flight cancellations, travel restrictions and ESTA extensions later, instead of being six thousand miles away, I was still there. But life for me was not to be a simple matter of seldom venturing beyond the front door, mask-wearing and social distancing whenever I did step outside, thoroughly washing hands and ordering supplies on line for delivery. Much more drama lay in store.

It began with a heatwave. Where the family live, the temperature rose to thirty-five degrees Celsius, followed by highs of thirty-eight and a couple of days with a scorching forty-two, which is a little over one-hundred-and-seven on the Fahrenheit scale. Then came a prolonged night-time thunderstorm, with not a drop of rain but countless lightning strikes that ignited the tinder-dry terrain. Many of the innumerable small fires soon merged to form large conflagrations spreading their ugly flames and fumes to threaten everything and everyone in sight. And well beyond.

By the morning, grey ash was raining down on us through the increasingly acrid air. An official warning was issued: Be prepared to evacuate! To think, I had come for a short stay, yet here I was five months later, marooned by the pandemic and now, along with everyone else for many miles around, menaced by one of those fearful fires.

What to do? We decided to pack what we could and head initially, the next day, to an in-law's place some fifty miles away. Social distancing within the extended family circle would have to go by the board. “Take only what is of value to you,” the kids were told. “Provided it isn't too bulky.” They silently set about their task. They had seen the ash and smelt the smoke. And were old enough to understand the seriousness of the situation. An uncomfortable, nervous night awaited.

The situation was yet more ominous by the time we finally departed, well aware that the family could have seen the last of their house and home with all but the few belongings we were taking with us. The children were duly deposited with the in-laws while we went to check on somewhere to stay. We were very fortunate. Many evacuees were forced to rely on emergency arrangements made by local authorities or organisations, with covid complicating every step of the way. In our case, a relation of the in-laws had a temporarily empty apartment we could use, not far from San Francisco airport.

We went there, left our things – then drove all the way back to the fire-threatened house to rescue what else we could. The pungent air, thick and tinged with an orange glow, was painful to breathe. Out came our face masks. The virus was not now the only menace to keep at bay. Inside, items were quickly collected, including clothes and food from fridge, freezer and cupboards. And this time, before we left, a mandatory order to vacate was in force. Incredibly, we later learned that some people refused to go and had to be removed. Perhaps they had an exaggerated belief in their ability to protect their property, not only from fire, but the possibility of looters breaking into homes when it was guaranteed that nobody was there. All roads into the area were then closed.

We collected the kids and went back to our small temporary refuge, which we arranged as comfortably as we could. From there we were able to follow the fight against the flames. Press conferences and fire-fighters' briefings from the command and control centre set up in the local park just a few hundred metres from the family's home, were relayed online. We also continually checked air quality on the Purple Air site. Single figures were best, but anything under fifty on the scale used was still shown as acceptable. Where we had come from it was well over four hundred.

But even in our new location the air could be far from good. All depended on the winds, as pollution from other fires, and there were many of them, could easily drift in our direction. It was infinitely better, however, than what we had left behind. Nevertheless, we seldom ventured out during our enforced exile. When we did, we drove to a coastal area for an afternoon or evening walk in air that was indeed fresher, with mask-wearing and keeping a safe distance from other people still the golden rule.

We remained refugees for more than a week. By then the fire – ‘our’ fire – was sufficiently contained for us to be allowed back. It had destroyed more than nine hundred homes in a part of the state not normally afflicted by the notorious wildfires. But in 2020 they were more widespread, numerous and intense than ever, the weather more extreme. At the height of the emergency, the governor urged people who didn't believe in climate change and global warming to come to California. Well, for my part, I was already a firm believer and thanks – or no thanks – to covid, was already there.

However, the immediate area around where the family live was now considered safe. At most, two thousand four hundred people had been battling the blaze, ringing it in, back-burning, denying it fresh fuel. When weather permitted, which wasn't always, helicopters and a fixed-wing aircraft joined the fray, dousing from above. When we walked past the park now that we were back, we could see long lines of vehicles marked ‘mobile sleeping trailer’ or ‘mobile shower trailer’ drawn up on the grass. Members of the national guard had joined the fray which, though being slowly won, was by no means over.

Neither was the heat, which briefly rose to an unbearable forty-four degrees, a little more than a hundred-and-eleven Fahrenheit.

In the subsequent months, despite more heat, if nothing like as great as before; rainstorms threatening flash floods, rock- or mudslides; high winds bringing down power lines, leading to outages and starting yet more fires, though they were quickly dealt with; and a four-point-four quake that sent the children under the dining-room table fearing worse was to come (they had been taught what to do at school); we didn't need to abandon ship and seek refuge elsewhere, though by no means everyone in that neck of the woods could say the same.

If there is one thing the pandemic taught me it is that you never can tell if or when you may be caught up in life's great dramas. Suddenly to find myself part of catastrophic events I had only heard or read about, or seen on television from afar, has made me realise there are times and places where you can expect the unexpected.

As a covid castaway, I had found myself in such a place, at such a time.