Sweden

​SWEDEN:

CHEESECAKE AND MOOSE STEAK
Well, it looks like this must be part two of the ‘Going to New Zealand Saga’. Even though I am STILL nowhere near the place. This time last year I was in St. John’s NF, so my timing has synchronised sort of.

Maybe this has something to do with me feeling so depressed the last week before I came away. It’s uncanny how a sudden memory of where I was at the same time in a previous year can bring to light some parallel bearing to what is going on now, a bit like when a song comes into your head and you’ve no idea why. You go through the lyrics of the song and it tells you something you need to know, a little like a dream too. Something slightly less than conscious.
Anyway. It’s hard to keep an intention of travel when loads of your mates are all very settled. So here I am now. I sleep next to a very drunk and pretty woman from Donegal at Stanstead Airport. She being cold and me having a huge cosy-looking sleeping bag, we share it with a cold Austrian chap. Us being gentlemen, we restrain ourselves. It’s against my religion to see someone sleeping in the cold. I chat with the Austrian chap who’s come to see his new English girlfriend that he’s met in Nicaragua.
The plane lands at Skurup near Malmo at 9.30 am and I am very tickled to be in Sweden again. I think I have some sort of addiction to being in foreign countries. Maybe its because it gives me a legitimate reason to feel like an outsider. 
Hitching looks tricky from the airport, so I get a bus to Lund and hitch from there. Seeing things Swedish is like stepping back in time, almost looping back to a time two years ago. I was in Scandinavia deciding back then that I would check out New Zealand and then decide which country I would then choose to settle in. Well here I am again, and a lot has happened in between. 
I get a lift to a crap place; the E6 between Malmo and Goteborg  (Gothenburg) is slow for hitching anyway. I start walking and then get picked up by the ‘Polis’ who take me to the next available junction, which is worse than the one I’ve just walked from. ‘Oh crap, now I’m really screwed!’ thinks me. 

The first car that comes past picks me up and takes me 130 kms, even though he says he’s only going ten. I guess he wants to check that I am not an axe murderer before he makes any commitment. He tells me that there’s guaranteed work in Tromso in northern Norway where they are building a gas pipeline. They are building a town there. Enough work for eleven thousand people for ten years. Or something. I think the money would be good too, as it would mean working in darkness at this time of year. And it would be bloody cold. I was idly thinking of going up there again, so now I have a ‘valid’ reason. I will see what I can make of Oslo first.
I get dropped at a truck stop and then get approached by someone asking me if I can drive to Goteborg. I say ‘Yes of course I can!’ And show him my driving license and off we go. It’s fun to be driving here again. He seems to be a bit of a scamster; screwing the social security with his pretend gammy leg and such-like. So he tells me, his girlfriend is a ballet dancer and used to go out with the singer from Metallica. Hmm. Yeah, right. Whatever.
Being back again in Goteborg (pronounced ‘Yotta-boora’ if you want to be really clever) is slightly weird, for reasons which will become apparent further on. 

I go to see the bleeping pyramid sculpture outside the National theatre. Presumably, this many-sided steel cone construction has been emitting its differently pitched bleeps continuously for the last three years since I was last here. That’s a very long piece of ambiently noodling noises. 
I then walk to the mall area where I used to sell UFF magazines. (UFF – Ulands-hjalp fra Folk til Folk, Land help from People to People/Humana/Tvind.) 

Humana is an International charity of dubious reputation that has ‘schools’ that ‘prepare’ young volunteers to go out to African countries as ‘solidarity workers’. A large part of this ‘preparation’ involves selling magazines on the streets.

I’m so glad I’m not selling magazines any more; there was always a feeling of being trapped in an endless tide of shopping humanity. It was horrible. The only way out of it was to tackle it head on; sometimes very difficult. Anyhow that was then, this is now, and much easier for it. Somehow it all feels like some sort of therapy, returning to the scene of the crime and all that:
It was during my stint here a couple of years earlier that I’d decided to steal myself some extra food rations; three bars of chocolate – and got myself in the caca over it. The protocol is that all the school had been sent off to different towns around Norway and Sweden, a group of five to six each in various towns. Most of us hitch-hiked to get where we were going with only sleeping bags and a big box of magazines each and an ‘official’ ID card that was run off the school photocopier.
It was up to us to find somewhere to stay for the two weeks we would be away, and to supplement our daily twenty kronor (two quid) food ration however we could. Twenty kronor being approximately the price of a cup of coffee. This entailed an art form known as ‘klunsing’; the Scandinavian word for ‘blagging’. We’d flash our ID, a magazine and a cheesy grin and in lots of places in affluent trusting Scandinavia we could talk ourselves into free accommodation, free meals (of varying quality) and into people’s hearts. In Bergen we’d eaten in a fantastic Indian restaurant and a wholefood veggie place. Sometimes we had to live off yesterdays cakes and sandwiches from bakeries. One time that was all we ate for a week and it gave us all laryngitis. I yearned with all my being to eat something other than small triangular curly dried-up ham sandwiches.
I was banned from dumpster-diving on ‘health grounds’, despite my objections that I had been in the habit of doing it for years, and that I wasn’t dead yet. Indeed, I was most definitely enhancing our nutrition.

As it was, in Goteborg on this particular occasion, the food supplies were running low; two slices of bread and a shared pot of potato salad between five of us. We would buy potato salad because it was the cheapest thing there was. We’d had it every day for a week. I hated it. It’s what we always bought. I had come across the tactic of hovering around the area of a McDonalds in order to do my fund-raising. This afforded me a number of opportunities; 

1) a guaranteed flow of people

2) music on the MTV screen inside every time I went for a piss or to count my money in the loo or got bored or fed up.

3) most importantly, I could keep an eye out through the window for anyone that had abandoned their delicious nutritious McHappy meal. Then I could go in and grab myself uneaten still-warm fries and usually half a drink before the counter staff came and threw it away. Believe me, when you’ve been eating as much random crap as we’d been eating, a half-eaten McDonald’s really does suddenly seem like real food.
One day, fancying a change from my usual exciting diet, I decided to get myself some chocolate from the five-fingered discount store. This had worked fine on the two preceding days, but the third time I got the hand on the shoulder treatment as I was walking out. (Never re-visit the scene of the crime.)

This was potentially a bigger disaster than it might otherwise have been. I was counting on the tendency of police in foreign countries to often be lenient on its guests. This time if I got into trouble I would have the school to answer to. It would probably completely knacker my chances of going to Mozambique. I got sent to the police station. Oh shit. I racked my brains and tried not to panic. How can I work this? I knew the school had a quite bad reputation amongst the Scandinavians for ‘mind control’ and various alleged abuses of funds and its participants trust. This, I decided, might be my way out of trouble. I told the police that we were given almost no money for food (true) and that I had to eat somehow. There was a difficulty in that I had no proper ID, i.e. my passport, to prove that I was not a wanted criminal in seven countries or something. The only people who could identify me was the school. I pleaded with the cops not to contact the school, implying that if my crime was found out, I would be flogged within inches of my life. Or something. Miraculously, the nice police people did the honourable thing and turfed me out on my ear, making me first promise most solemnly that I would never ever be a naughty boy ever again. I made some sort of remorseful apology and went on my way, very bloody grateful in that ‘hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck, blimey, I-really-did-almost-cop-it-then-didn’t-I?’ kind of way. Immediately after that, I became mostly concerned with how I was going to explain my absence from my duties. As it turned out, no-one seemed to notice that I hadn’t been around and my terrible secret was safe…
Afterwards on the long journey back to the school, I klunsed a van full of eleven people a super fantastic Happy meal each at some McDonalds place somewhere on a long empty Swedish road surrounded by pine trees. It wasn’t the best food in the world, but I was quite pleased with my ability to sort out everyone’s dinner with no money in a matter of seconds. All by the power of Blah…
Upon leaving Goteborg after my trip down memory lane, the bus driver lets me get on the bus going to Surte even though I don’t have enough money. He says I can give him the rest tomorrow.

Surte seems to be a village. It’s 7 pm, dark and cold, I have no money to spend, so I head out of the village and lay out my sleeping bag. I sleep pretty well except for sliding down a very slight incline. I wake up with frost and ice on my sleeping bag. I shall have to get a tent type device. This Canadian minus fifteen centrigrade bag does its job fabulously.
Thursday 16th October.

I wake up in a hazel and Bjork (birch) wood cosy in my bag with my head looking up watching leaves slowly falling in some gravitational ballet whilst the early morning sun lights up the golden canopy against a brilliant blue sky.

Yesterday hitching was easy enough. Today it takes four hours to get my first lift, but I don’t mind. I am busy enjoying being in Sweden and learning Norwegian from a phrasebook (een, to, tre, feer, fem, sex).
I get stopped by police again and they want to see my passport and they are friendly enough. I get a ride with a black African woman from Uganda, she came here in the seventies. She’s great – she oozes happiness. She leaves me by the road at Torp with a big smile on my face! Aah! Here I find a carbon fibre bicycle frame which I think might be worth a few bob so I’m going to see if I can sell it in Oslo. Hopefully border control won’t give me too much hassle over it. For dinner last night I had skipped steak cooked over a fire in the woods where I slept. I get caught raking through the bin behind the ICA (‘eeka’) supermarket and was told ‘You should not be here!’. So I waited for an hour lurking about the place and went back again when I saw the manager come out and drive away. 

Steak and cheesecake mix. Not the best skipping experience ever but okay. So it’s the Atkins diet for me then for a while.
Skipping (dumpster-diving) is the great yardstick that separates one way of being in the world from another. On the one hand we live in a world driven by consumption. For the most part, we live to consume, and we consume to live. We work to pay for what we have. We often relax by ingesting TV and food. On the other, there are those of us that are more resourceful, who have realised that by letting go of certain assumed social mores, have found other easier ways of achieving similar useful satisfying ends. Skipping to me has always been a mixed blessing. There have been occasions when having hit the ‘jackpot’ of a really decent skipload of food, one part of me is elated, another part is distressed that we live in a world that will just throw so much food, clothing, furniture, building materials, whatever other gems, into a big metal container and then just throw it away, digging up some poor hillside in the process of supposedly ‘disposing’ of it. Skipping is a dirty genius. It’s like being the rat that survives after the shit hits the fan. If you can be resourceful, you will survive.
There’s a certain type of culture where everyone has their favourite drugs, dreams, football, travel, whatever story. There’s a certain type of person that has a ‘best skipping experience’ story.

I once lived on a traveller’s site in my home town of Reading, Berkshire. It was a mere scrap of woodland hemmed in by dreary industrial development on one side and the beautiful River Thames on the other. (The woods were later cleared to build yet another Tescos supermarket.) We were next to King’s Meadow, not far from where the WOMAD World Of Music And Dance festival used to happen every year. 

It was on this site that I was shown how to steal a tarpaulin and build my own bender (like a yurt but much simpler to construct). The guy who helped me construct it said ‘You have just built your own house. You have no mortgage and no rent to pay. You are now officially free!’ This at the time was somewhat of a revelation. You don’t have to do things the way everyone else does. (Though these days I’m certainly not big on nicking stuff.)
Here it was we lived under the winter frost, kept warm with wood burners made out of old propane gas bottles, with bits of found flue pipe for chimneys. Insalubrious as our surroundings were, we were ideally placed for free food. We had the basics necessary to living covered. Free shelter, free warmth (wood from around us and skips), reasonably good company and free food.

We were next to a wholesale cash ‘n’ carry warehouse – that was where we got all our fruit and vegetables. Literally just down the road was the old Huntley and Palmers factory, famous throughout the British colonies for its biscuits and was now owned by the Jacobs biscuit empire. One day someone raided their skip and came back with two rucksacks full of Jacob’s Club bars. You’d have to get very stoned to deal with that much chocolate. So we did. 
We had another skip, right in town. December 20th, the day that the shop closed for the Christmas holidays, and wouldn’t open again until the sixth of January, was a mad day for us. By the quirks of European legalities, every food product has a date stamped on it saying when a food should be sold or eaten by. It then gets thrown away if nobody buys it. It will get taken off the supermarket shelves a day or two before that date too. Supposedly people don’t like to buy food when it’s ‘just about to go BAAD’.

The reality is that the date stamped is deliberately over-cautious, making certain that there is as little chance as possible that someone might get dodgy food, give themselves food poisoning and sue the company that made it. A perhaps shrewd economic and public relations move, but it does mean that an enormous quantity of good food gets destroyed. (Approxiamately thirty percent of all manufactured food gets thrown away at some point.) 
A LOT of good food. Balance this against something like the poverty of Guatemalan peasant farmers who can’t afford to eat their own cash crops because they have to sell them to export to the US, leaving themselves the dregs. 

It a strange scenario being in the position of re-dressing a little of that imbalance.
Anyway it was December 19th and the supermarket had an awful lot of food that technically was ‘no good’. It was more food than I had ever seen. A skipfull. It was all kinds of stuff, including some Christmassy things like Christmas pudding and mince pies. We didn’t know what to do with it all. Fortunately we knew someone who had a lot of visitors to his house. This guy we knew dealt weed and he graciously helped us empty the skip. We filled his car three and a half times. Just to give you an idea of how much food we shifted, we had 142 litres of orange juice and grapefruit juice. About forty kilos of cheese. Literally a ton of other stuff. All good. We stacked the cartons and everything else up in this guy’s front room, and everyone who came to score in the run up to Christmas got a free hamper. How’s that for a community service?!
Another go at the same skip once bestowed us with fifty-three tins of beer. They were four-packs that had lost a tin each by damage in the warehouse or someone had shoplifted one tin from the pack in the shop. They were thrown away because the computer system dictates that the beer may only be sold in packs of four, and not individually, so the other three would get chucked. We got very drunk. 
Technically it’s illegal. When I first came across the noble art it wasn’t, but I guess there are some people out there who just don’t like the idea of someone getting something for nothing and so it was outlawed. There have been a couple of times when an apoplectic manager will come out from the back of his supermarket to throw out more food and will find me raking through his skip. Conversation will go something like ‘Get out of that bin! It’s private property, that’s theft, that’s not yours if you don’t leave I shall call the police, I’ve had enough of your sort etc etc blah blah blah…’

To which I will point out to him ‘What? I know technically I’m stealing food from going into a mighty big hole in the ground. I need to eat. There are lots of people out there who can’t make ends meet, and you’d rather they had to come in your shop wouldn’t you? It’s not like the money the shop makes even goes to you does it? Some of this food has come halfway round the planet just so you can throw it away. Some people would call that disrespectful. I don’t care about your stupid law; call the police if you like. What we are doing is morally right.’

Usually knowing that we were right and he was wrong, the usual response would be that the shop manager would bluster something along the lines of ‘Well don’t make a mess’ and stomp back inside muttering to himself. It was actually quite unlikely that the manager would ever come out, most times you would have the place to yourself.
I once stayed for a night in a homeless hostel in Dublin where all the food there had been supplied by a local Marks and Spencers. So there I was with all these old boys eating posh salmon sandwiches and swanky instant meals for breakfast. Classy.

Very often whilst in the habit of skipping, you will find yourself eating better and more than you would if you got your groceries at the front of the shop.

Sometimes you find yourself inadvertently at the hands of fate and at the forefront of avante garde nouvelle cuisine. Like Moose Steak a la Cheesecake Mix roasted teasingly over an open fire. It can be exhilarating. Maybe you have to be stoned. I’m not; I just get off on it anyway.
I dream of a baby seal following a leaf in a stream and then of its mother coming to see after its baby. Then a gun muzzle comes to the mother’s snout and it is shot. The mother seal looks at me as its eyes filled red wondering ‘Why?’ and then falls onto her back and floats downstream. It is a very quiet dream but it’s still disturbing.
I was wondering the night before what I was cooking, and have been wondering if the animal had had a natural existence. I think I am eating moose and pork. Maybe the pork is actually seal. (The Skandinavians do eat some different meats than we Brits do.) Maybe I shouldn’t eat meat, even if it is skipped. I have also been thinking how eating skipped meat is a way of rescuing some respect for the animal that has died.
This morning I wake up with my mind not in contradiction with my surroundings. After several weeks in Norwich of headaches and bad sleeping – battling the vision in my head against the reality around me, I’m glad to be back in motion with myself. Yeah I guess I’m a bit of a loner, but right now I feel comfortable with that.