Work

An Arctic Adventure

Leave a comment

I went to a summit at the start of the Swedish EU presidency. It was a different kind of trip, because naturally the Swedes wanted to show off their wild and wonderful homeland, so off we all went in a chartered plane, to Sweden’s northernmost town Kiruna, way above of the Arctic circle, whence to discuss the presidency agenda and priorities.

It’s different there because this far north the nights are long in the winter (20 hours plus) and the only hope for natural light rests with the magical – but fickle – aurora borealis, or Northern lights. So when we arrived at four in the afternoon, to be greeted by the chairman of the Sameting (parliament of the indigenous Same people) and other local dignitaries, all decked out in impressively serious and furry winter gear, it was in pitch darkness. The Commissioners were whisked off to the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, while the skeleton crew of foot soldiers (myself included) was shipped to a rather more mundane hotel inside the security parameter of the conference centre.

Not that I’m complaining. We had a minder assigned to us, and actual hotel rooms waiting when we arrived – unlike some of the security detail (there were hundreds of policemen flown in for the occasion), who rumor had it were lodged all over, in old military barracks and even bunk beds in local garages; not a pleasant place to sleep when it’s -10C, but still preferable to standing watch outside the premises in the snow throughout the night, as some did.

It’s easy to forget how quiet it gets when a place is covered in snow. All noises are dampened by it, and so as we took a ride through town it was eerily silent. It wasn’t just due to that, tho. Kiruna is a mining town, situated literally on top of the world’s biggest iron ore mine, and because the latter is expanding, the former has to move; the old part of town is being evacuated so that mining operations can be carried out right underneath it, and that means most of the houses are vacant, staring emptily at us as we drove around. It’s effectively a ghost town.

That feeling of otherworldliness is further enhanced by the sight of Iron Mountain (Malmberget) across the valley, covered in lights and smoke in the darkness, like a vision of Mordor (mining goes on 24/7, as there is little point to adhere to a normal working day when you’re miles below ground). Add to that the fabulous wooden church that looks more like a temple to Norse gods than to their middle-eastern counterpart, and you get the feeling you’re in some Tolkien/post-apocalyptic/Viking/snow zombie crossover story.

The next day couldn’t be more different: while the Commissioners have a chance to hob-nob with the King of Sweden, open a satellite launch site, and other media-friendly events, those of us who weren’t allowed near the Ice Hotel last night are now given a guided tour of the venue, and it doesn’t disappoint: it’s like a very different kind of fairy tale, one where you are transported to a world of ice – the rooms, the furniture, even things like chandeliers and glasses are made out of ice, and the designs and decorations are incredible; the hotel is rebuilt every year, but they save the best rooms, so over 30 years they have accumulated an incredible array of weird and wonderful rooms (not all of them conducive to a good night’s sleep, it has to be said!). The overall impression is one of a winter wonderland (in the Elsa-from-Frozen-meets-C.S.-Lewisian sense) and the setting – all forests and snow covered vistas plus the frozen river (from which the building blocks of the hotel are taken) – doesn’t do anything to diminish this.

It’s easy to see why it’s popular, but since the sun barely makes it over the horizon (at noon it is fully visible for less than an hour) it is soon dark again, and the politicians get down to business. They spend the afternoon hammering out a work program and looking at various high tech business displays, and then there’s just enough time for a joint press conference of the Swedish PM and the Commission’s President before we all hurry back to the plane and travel back south.

Our 24h adventure is at an end. As we rise into the velvety darkness I peer out for a last chance to see the aurora, but there’s nothing there. Reason enough to come back? Maybe. I find myself next to one of the Commissioners, and discuss the possibility of bookending the presidency with another meeting at the height of summer; he is keen to see the midnight sun but less so about experiencing midge-infested marshes. I tell him how the indigenous people spend a night in early summer sleeping naked in the marshes, getting stung enough to aquire immunity, yet he seems unconvinced by my implied solution. My one attempt at direct lobbying is apparently a failure – but who knows? We’ll see in July.

2019 according to Socrates, Aristotle and… Hugh Grant.

Leave a comment

We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions S.M.A.R.T. and make sure to make the most of time,.

So I’ll stick with the familiar format – develop as a human (intellectually and physically), travel, have new experiences, and set myself new challenges – one trip or challenge per month on average, for a total of twelve.

Trips: I have nothing planned (beyond the fact that I am in Rome celebrating New Year as I’m writing this), but hiking somewhere with my brother, taking the kids on several trips (the first one in February), and paragliding in either Spain or Switzerland (back allowing) are definitely happening.

Challenges: As last year was plagued with injuries, I don’t dare set any fitness goals at the moment. I do hope to improve my fitness, but in what way remains uncertain as of yet. The ideal is a workout per day, of some sort.

In the workplace things are equally up in the air, with my job as a roving reporter having come to an end, and nothing concrete to replace it. I want to keep writing and working with communication one way or another, tho, and I have a few ideas – let’s see what happens.

I already know I want to stay vegetarian for the coming year (having stuck with it for two months I see no reason to change back to a carnivorous diet), and I want to continue to stay off refined sugar, so that’s two. I really want to learn how to paraglide properly, which makes three. Also, limit time spent on social media (more difficult than it sounds?) – four. Keep a diary – five. Read (at least) one non-fictional book per month – six. Improve my piano and French skills, for a total of eight. And linked to all this: use my time more efficiently and wisely.

There is a funny passage from the book About a boy (later filmed with Hugh Grant in the lead) that has stuck with me:

His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

The protagonist of the book is a time waster, but the concept works: divide your day into time slots, and make sure to use them. That will be another challenge.

Why do this? Well, first of all, because, as the poet Herrick wrote in To Virgins, to make much of time:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying

and this same flower that smiles today

tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

the higher he is getting,

the sooner will his race be run,

and nearer he is to setting.

In other words: Our time is limited, and every breath takes us closer to death. That’s grim, as realizations go, but if that doesn’t light a fire under your ass to get things done, nothing will. Also, to quote Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Let’s make this a year of excellence.

2018 – S.M.A.R.T. or not?

Leave a comment

At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.

Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Did I succeed? Yes and no.

Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)

Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.

Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…

French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.

Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.

Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.

Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.

Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.

Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.

So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.

Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…

Work, work, work, work, work!

7 Comments

On Monday I was supposed to receive a medal. It’s one of those traditions the purpose of which I don’t understand: you get one after twenty years as a civil servant. But it isn’t merit based – everyone gets one. All you have to do is stick with it two decades. That made me think.

I never really made a considered career choice. I got very lucky in that my coming of age corresponded with Sweden’s joining the EC, as it was then. My training made me a good candidate for the job of interpreter, and my knack for languages ensured that I made it through a training programme many failed.

After that a job was guaranteed, and so I took it, because it was interesting and well paid, and my then-girlfriend-later-to-become-mother-of-my-children-and-ex-wife was also offered one, we moved in together, and the rest is history.

Only…

Twenty years on, interpreting isn’t interesting any more, as there are no new challenges, only variations on well-known ones. Happily, I’ve been able to do other things for the last couple of years – working as a journalist, writing speeches and scripts for commercials – but now that’s coming to an end.

And so the question arises: do I really want to be nothing else but an interpreter for another twenty years? The answer is obviously no, but then the real question is, what do I want to do instead?

Write. Be creative. Travel. Experience. How best to combine these things? Well, being a blogger is one good way of doing it, obviously, but it doesn’t pay – for me, at least. They say to have three hobbies: one to keep you in the money, one to keep you fit, and one to keep you creative, but I’d like to combine the three, if possible. The Japanese concept of Ikigai is a better model: the point where what you love, what you’re good at, what you can make money doing and what the world needs intersect, that’s where you should strive to be, because that’s your ikigai, literally your reason for being.

So what’s my reason for being?

Danish and the Danish 5: XXX2 (extremely excellent expletives)

Leave a comment

Totally irrelevant football fans.

Everyone likes a nice ass, and no one likes a smart ass, the saying goes. The Danes don’t care. They have a thing for arses. All kinds.

The list of Danish idioms involving your rear end goes on and on. My favourite may be their expression for a job that is particularly badly done, which is then said to move up and down like King Volmar’s arse (gå op og ned som kong Volmers røv). Quite the epitaph.* But then Danes have always had a troubled relationship with their royals (and vice versa).

Getting an arse-full isn’t a quaint pre-metric measure of the kind Americans and Brits are so found of. No, få røven fuld means being taken for a fool. If you are instructed to seal your arse (lokke røven) you are told to be be quiet in the most direct way possible.

But Danes don’t just focus on the behind. They also have a healthy interest in fully frontal parts. This isn’t expressed in idioms so much as a very liberal approach to information about people’s (no longer) private parts. As we have seen, some individuals market their goods in public, but this is just an expression of a more widespread (!) phenomenon: even Danish public television has a series of programmes called “me and my pussy/dick” (“Jag og min fisse/pik“) where you are treated to close-ups of different… er… bits, while the unseen owners regale you with cautionary tales from the netherlands.

So that’s Mor Danmark for you. Unlike John Bull and Uncle Sam (both rather creepy characters that seem hell-bent on molesting you, one way or another), the Danish national character is down to Earth in the extreme, an old lady with a naughty streak, face probably like that of a happy prune, telling you the truth whether you want to or not.

[Tried to find a suitable illustration for this imaginary woman on the Internet. Take my word for it: don’t.]

—–

*I really hope he was one of those early Viking kings that invaded England, so that he can feature in that famous pamphlet, World’s Greatest British Lovers.

Danish and the Danish 4: fabulous food and where to find it.

Leave a comment

From word porn to proper pleasures of the flesh: eating.

Copenhagen is home to NOMA, voted the world’s greatest restaurant several years in a row, but what about other Nordic food?*

I’m very happy to report that I have found some real gems while here, and they are both wonderfully traditional and nydannet – a word that means contemporary, newly created, whilst happily incorporating the Danes themselves – coincidence? I think not.

So, without further ado, here’s the ultimate guide to eating like a Dane:

For breakfast, you cannot do better than pay a visit to a recent addition to the culinary landscape of the capital, Grød. It’s a splendid example of how you don’t need a complicated concept to succeed, as long as you do what you do to perfection. Grød means porridge, and that’s what they serve, with as many as a dozen toppings. The porridge itself is very satisfying, creamy and fresh, and the extravaganza on top ensures that you never get bored. Oh, and you will be full for a looong time afterwards!

It’s porridge, Jim, but not as we know it!

For lunch, foodies and workmen alike have smørrebrød – open sandwiches with a plethora of different toppings, often incorporating traditional components such as herring or roast beef, but with interesting twists. My favorite place is a non-assuming place on Nytorv square, Mät, where you can have as many of these little delights as you like for a fixed price. Buyers beware, however: Danes are environmentally conscious, and the menu specifies that customers will be charged 15 kroner extra for each smørrebrød left unfinished!

Let’s just say I didn’t have to pay the forfeit…

No culinary expedition to Copenhagen should leave out JaDa Café. The name means “Oh, yes”, and I dare say that’s what most people whisper under their breath as they enter the establishment: JaDa makes the most gorgeous, custom-tailored ice cream I have ever seen. A perfect spot for an afternoon indulgence, and one likely to be as pleasing to your palate as your eye.

It even comes with the proverbial cherry on top.

It’s a good thing you’re biking around, because by now you have probably gained about 10lbs. However, dinner still beckons. I’ll give you two options:

Just down the street from Grød lies another interesting trendsetter: Manfred’s. Awarded by Michelin, this basement establishment is very relaxed and cozy, but what makes it stand out is that it’s vegetarian, and everything on their menu sourced from the restaurant’s own local farm. I had a seven course meal, and every single dish was surprising and good, from the cold cucumber/buttermilk soup starter to the red beet/blackcurrant/algae dessert.

If instead you want less food, and perhaps some animal protein, I would suggest a visit to Blaaregn, a local eatery where, if you have guts enough, you can find yourself face to face with a cod head on a platter.

Sink your teeth into this cod piece if you dare!

Baked to perfection, this fish – the only one that can compete with the herring for most traditional Danish food – was quite possibly the best seafood I’ve ever had. Baked to perfection with capers and nothing else, its meat was tender, succulent, and somehow a marvellous metaphor: if you dare to go back to your roots (and can face the prospect of putting someone else’s tongue in your mouth) there is no end to the gourmet experiences you can have here!

—–

*NOMA is an abbreviation for NOrdisk MAd, meaning Nordic food.

Danish and the Danish 3: XXX (extra exciting expressions)

Leave a comment

Sex sells. You’re reading this, aren’t you? So this post will be about porn.

Not the fleshy kind that elicits one-handed browsing tho (unless you are very particular in your tastes), but word porn. Specifically, some words and expressions that have amazed me in my efforts to decipher Danish and the Danish*.

First of all there’s swearing. There are two kinds of swearing, of course. The first is utilising curse words to emphasise things. Like all non-catholic countries there’s fewer curse words involving deities (beyond Gud and Satan), and more emphasis on bodily functions. So Danes utilise skidt and pisse (shit and piss) a lot – my favourite being pissegodt (literally tasty as piss) – but have also adopted that most prolific of American curses, the f word; only they pronounce it as fåkk.

The other type of swearing takes place when a mere promise isn’t enough. The Danish language has a peculiar expression here: Amager halshugg. Turns out Amager was the place of execution in Copenhagen; halshugg means decapitation. Interestingly, this expression is apparently very popular with recent middle eastern additions to the population, coming as they do from a culture where swearing of this kind is more prevalent. A Syrian refugee using a turn of phrase that’s shorthand for “may I be taken to the Danish capital’s executioner for capital punishment” – now that’s integration for you!

Overall there are quite a few historical references in Danish expressions, and few are flattering to a Swede: when something går ad Pommern til (lit. “goes to Pomerania” – an area in the Baltic that used to be Swedish), it means it’s going straight to Hell. If someone is being beaten up really badly they are slået til lirekassemænd – beaten until they become organ grinders – a profession associated with war invalids in the 19th century after – you guessed it! – wars with Sweden and others.

Who is to say Danes aren’t longing for revenge still? They might not say it out loud, but there are clues: if you compare, say, a Swedish matchbox – which features an innocent, naked child on the cover – with its Danish equivalent, you will find an old man there instead. Innocent enough, until you realise he is maritime war hero Tordenskiold, responsible for burning the Swedish enemy fleet.

Come on baby, light my fire...

So it all comes back to their history. It may be that the Danish sentiment is best summed up by the undying phrase of former prime minister Uffe Elleman-Jensen, who, after the Danes had voted against joining deeper cooperation with the rest of the EU, and then won their only European Football Championship to date, said: If you can’t join them, beat them.

——

*For more word porn, you can read these posts from Germany and Slovenia, you pervs.

Danish and the Danish 2: bikes, boats and babes (of all kinds)

Leave a comment

The first thing you notice in Copenhagen are the bikes. They are everywhere. Everyone bikes, young and old alike, and if you’re too young or too frail, chances are you’re still being whisked around on a bike, but of the rickshaw kind.

Alternative bikes and an air bag alternative to bike helmets, Hövding.

The bike as a mode of transport is very well looked after: bike lanes in virtually every street, even separate bike bridges to take you across the harbour, and bicycle shops and repairmen on every corner, almost. What’s more, there’s a well functioning system of hand signals to help biker communicate their intentions, and, most importantly, all drivers respect bikers.

And so it is that I spend a good deal of my day biking around the capital. I got a rental bike from the NGO Baisikeli (Swahili for, yep, bicycle) which sends part of their profits (and old bikes) to Africa, so that felt good – although at less than 100€ for three weeks I’m not sure how much of a profit they’re making. It’s hyggelig, at any rate.

All I wanna do is… baisikeli?

The other mode of transport that is immediately noticeable in Copenhagen is the boat. Friendships and other party boats turn the harbour into a movable feast when the sun is out. Everything from dinghies and kayaks to tankers and cruise ships can be seen from the docks. It’s hardly unique for the capital either, as nearly all Danes have a close affinity with the sea:

Denmark is a small place and you are never more than 50 kilometres from the shore. The coastline is over 7,000 kilometres*, which means that shipping and fisheries have always played a great part in the economy, and their fleet (both navy and merchant) has always been strong.

You can even ride a black or white swan. What’s that all a-boat?

These circumstances also explain how they could found (and subsequently lose) an empire. Empire? Yes. Denmark used to rule Norway, southern Sweden, the Dutchies of Schleswig and Holstein, AND had colonies in India and the West Indies. Losing all that (but keeping Greenland and the Faroes islands still) must have contributed to forming the national psyche into what it is today.

So what is that character? I’ve already mentioned that the Danes are fairly liberal, and I don’t know whether it’s all the biking and the boating, but all Danes look great. Rarely have I seen so many babes (of both sexes) in on place.

Possibly this is a reflection of their society in general, because Danes are apparently the world’s happiest people, and we all know we look our best when we feel good. (All that happiness seems to work in other ways, too; I cannot remember when I last saw so many pregnant women and babes (of the newborn variety) out and about.)

So… happy on the inside, and pretty on the outside. But as a nation it seems Denmark is still marked by their 19th century losses and the occupation during World War Two. They were always enthusiastic members of NATO, but have had a troubled relationship with the EU. And they’re not very keen on foreigners coming to live in Denmark, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s refugees from far away. So there is a sense of “Oi, back off, this is ours, and you can’t come and take (even more of) it!”. Which is fair enough, I guess. Two weeks into my sojourn I feel a little like Oliver Twist, tho. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

—–

* To put it differently: if it were a straight line it would stretch from Copenhagen to the Caribbean.

Danish and the Danish: beer, burqas and bikinis (or lack thereof)

Leave a comment

I’m in Copenhagen for three weeks to learn Danish, and about the Danish.

The language is famously difficult to grasp, not because its grammar is particularly complex or its vocab full of anomalies, but because the Danes can’t be bothered to pronounce their own tongue. Think I exaggerate? It’s so bad, Danish babies have been shown to understand their parents significantly later in life than all other children worldwide. So people whose mother tongue it is struggle with Danish, and this is the language I’m supposed to pick up in three weeks?!

Of course, as a Swede you’d think I’d be helped by the similarities between our respective languages; after all, for much of history the two countries were either one or in various unions with one other. Surely this is reflected in the two languages?

Helped might be the wrong word. You see, for the rest of history we’ve been at war. Linguistically it’s nearly always the case that if two synonyms exist in both languages, then one is anachronistic in one language and simultaneously the contemporary word in the other.

This is probably due to a conscious effort on both sides to distance themselves from and be less like the arch enemy (in between the Liza Minelli-like reoccurring reunions of various kinds). That phenomenon makes me very self-conscious when speaking to the natives, aware as I am that I’m likely sounding weirdly archaic by instinctively picking the wrong word. Imagine if someone came up to you in an English-speaking country and addressed you with “Salutations, swain, what giveth?”. That’s how I feel.

It could just be that Swedes are more self conscious altogether than Danes, of course. Certainly Danes are much more liberal, sybaritic and individualistic than Swedes.

In my first week here I have been constantly taken aback by people’s drinking habits, for instance. The settings for lunch restaurants include shot glasses, something which hasn’t been the case in Sweden for fifty years. Beer is everywhere, but there are few truly drunk people. Little grannies will have a beer whilst chatting on a garden bench, labourers walk along chugging from a bottle whilst working, and people of all ages rent special party boats (essentially floating tables) to go around the harbour whilst drinking.

That company name, tho!

The harbour area is also home to sunbathers throughout central Copenhagen. Not all of them think bathing attire essential. And no one bats an eyelid as these impromptu nudists stroll around the docks, with latter-day Zorn tableaux ensuing – you got to love a country like that!

And if you want further proof you needn’t look further than Christiania, of course. The hippie collective in the middle of town is famous for its street vendors that openly sell drugs, but beyond the sweet and heavy haze of Pusher Street (as it is called) where people are puffing away there is a rather endearing and enduring sentiment that it is every individual’s freedom to live how they want.

As seen through a green haze.

There are, famously, those who don’t think these freedoms should apply to all, however; the second day I was here a law was adopted that makes it illegal to wear masks in public. The government isn’t targeting halloweeners, it’s after Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab.

Whilst I’m not in favour of a religion or culture that imposes that kind of clothing on a gender, fining them or confining them in their homes for dressing the way they do isn’t going to achieve real change, to my mind.

But here again, liberals are fighting back, and so it was that I witnessed first hand the demonstration where hundreds of masked Danes went out in solidarity with Muslim women on the first day of the ban. That, more than anything, endeared them to me. After all, where else can you see a topless niqab-wearer and a Stormtroopette join forces?

2018 and the art of being S.M.A.R.T.

3 Comments

I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across some good advice that really resonated with me. If I have failed to reach my goals in the past, it’s nearly always been because I haven’t made sure they were S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. So that shall be my credo for 2018: be smart about what tasks I set myself.

The fundamentals haven’t changed: I want to develop as a person, intellectually and physically, by testing my limits, working diligently and hard towards certain goals, and I want to travel to see the world and broaden my horizons, ensuring that by the end of the year I can look back and see progress and time well spent.

So: smart intellectual challenges – the ones I’ve worked on for a couple of years now still remain the same: I want to read more non-fiction, get better at piano, French, and chess. That’s not very specific, tho, so measuring progress will be key; I need targets I can quantify. One book per month. One new piece of music learnt every two months. One hundred French words per month. And as for chess… well, getting a rating of 1400 before the end of the year would be an easily measurable goal, if not necessarily that easily attainable. (I’m hovering around the 1300-mark as I’m writing this…). Plus I will note down every half hour spent on each activity, thus keeping a tally for accountability purposes.

So I’ve got all of those down to an A.R.T. Physical challenges are a little different, mainly because of the uncertainty I’m living with at the moment, so for 2018, I have decided to change tack a little. For my first challenge in January I will do a runstreak. Running every day will hopefully allow me to rebuild what was damaged in the accident in November. If that goes to plan, Paris marathon in April will be another milestone on the road to recovery, and if that goes well I’ll sign up for either another ultra marathon, or a full length Ironman. Or both.

Alas, there are too many unknowns at this stage for me to know if I will be able to run such distances again, but if I can, then a total of 1500k each of running and biking seem attainable goals overall. At least I know I can bike, so if running is out then I’m doubling that number for biking (and only watching Netflix while on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone – limiting my Netflix binging AND encouraging more time in the saddle!).

Weights have never been anything but a complement to my other workouts – now more so than ever as I try to strengthen my weak leg – but again, if I find I don’t recover my running capacity, I will focus more on getting strong/building muscle. Having always been skinny it would be interesting to see if I could actually muscle up.

As for swimming, I want to learn how to crawl properly! At present I can hardly do one length in the pool, and even though I managed the Ironman 70.3 anyway it would be nice to shave off five or ten minutes from that time, so learning how to crawl at least a kilometre is another challenge.

I will be working more in 2018 than I have for a decade, which will hopefully have the dual effect of giving me the opportunity to take on more interesting work on the job, and allowing me a bigger travel budget, as, happily, my children have said they want to travel more with me, so that will affect what trips I take this year.

2018 promises an Arab spring once more, as I’m going back to Morocco in January and have another trip to Egypt in February (with the kids). I have a week of holidays in March that I don’t know what to do with yet – downhill skiing would be nice, but again it’s dependent on me making a complete recovery. I want to go back to Spain and get a fully-fledged paragliding pilot’s licence. Hiking in Iceland would be lovely, the last part of Bergslagsleden still beckons, and I want to do at least one journey further afield – maybe watching the great sardine run in South Africa? Or taking the kids to the US? There’s no shortage of possibilities.

Other challenges: I wouldn’t mind doing more for the environment. This could involve installing geothermal heating in the house, keeping hens for eggs, joining a wind power collective or other changes. One thing I do know I want to try is becoming a vegetarian. At least for a month.

Not eating any sugar in any shape or form may be another challenge, and limiting my social media intake to half an hour per day wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

And of course I want to continue building my blog, writing about my experiences for the joy of writing, but also as a living testament to what I do with my life when I don’t have my kids. Hopefully my readership will continue to grow, but that is less important. If I can inspire only two people, that is more than enough for me.

Here’s to a S.M.A.R.T.er future!

P.S. All this goes out the window if I were to get my dream job, of course… 😄

Half a lap around the sun…

Leave a comment

…and it’s time to summarise what’s happened this far 2017. As has been the case these last couple of years, I set myself certain tasks in January, to be completed over the next twelve months, and at the halfway mark it makes sense to take stock, to see what has gone according to plan, and what hasn’t. 

Have I managed to go on an adventure/set myself a new challenge/have a new experience every month? Happily, yes. January I ran a marathon with a difference, February I went to see Alhambra, Grenada (the text about which seems to have been deleted, sadly!), March I dived the incredible reefs of Pemba, April saw me join a monastery of sorts in Mallorca, then came hiking in Madeira and in the troll-infested forests of Sweden (whilst also trying out the benefits of a paleo diet), before finally taking on my first triathlon last month. 

Looking back, it’s quite a lot crammed into six months, so I’m pleased with that. 

I’ve managed to work out quite a lot (unsurprisingly, what with the races) but not as much as I had set out to do in total – weeks of hiking and skiing and diving have prevented me from reaching the goal of a marathon run and biked every week, and I haven’t done much yoga either. But then there’s still six months left to remedy that. 

Have I developed my French, my piano and chess playing, and done more non-fiction reading? I certainly got off to a good start, doing thirty minutes per day of each, but a good friend giving me a Netflix password threw a big spanner in that particular structure. I haven’t completely derailed, but there have been leafs on the tracks, shall we say.

As for taking on new tasks at work, I have, happily. And not least because of this very blog, in fact. Turns out people at work read it and thought I might do good in Internal Communications, so from now on I will spend one day per week as a roving reporter, highlighting goings-on in my work place. Very happy about that. 

So what’s next? I will try to make up for lost time in those areas where I haven’t quite managed to reach my targets, obviously. 

I’ve still got the mountain ultra X-trail coming up in the beginning of August, and ten days of hiking the Bavarian alps hot on the heels of that. After those ten days I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the year. An acquaintance has invited me to Bilbao, and another to Nepal, so those things might happen. Or not. Readers should feel free to make suggestions. 

I still want to try and beat my marathon record before the end of the year – I’ve improved significantly on my personal best for shorter distances, but whether that will translate into a new marathon PB remains to be seen. Time to start looking for a fast race, in any event. 

At work I have made a promise to attempt to add Danish to my official language combination, so that should keep me busy for quite some time (maybe there are Danish movies on Netflix?!), and the new job will hopefully continue to present new challenges, as well. 

All in all I feel quietly confident that the second half of this journey will be as filled to the brim as the first half was. Come fly with me!

Having the time of my life

Leave a comment


“People’s life do flash before their eyes right before they die. The process is know as ‘living’.”  – Terry Pratchett

I don’t want to come to the end of my life feeling I haven’t accomplished and experienced as much as I might have. In a way, that realisation is the main reason for this blog; by charting my adventures and self-imposed challenges I can look back and see how well I’m doing in this regard. 

This year, I set out to achieve measurable progress in a number of specific areas, and I determined I would go about it differently from what I have done previously.

Whereas in the past I set lofty goals for how many books I should read, how many irregular verbs or piano pieces I should learn – and then not doing it – I now avoid such targets and focus instead on ensuring there are slots in my day for the activities in question. 

This means I plan as much of my time as I can in advance to ensure I get everything I want done, writing a schedule for the day; one half hour is devoted to reading non-fiction, the next to studying French, the one after that to playing the piano, et cetera. 

In fact, it’s the same principle I’ve been applying to travelling; by planning trips in advance – giving them an allotted time – I ensure they get done. I just never thought of using the same principle in my day-to-day life before. 

Now, three months isn’t a long time, but I’m really pleased to report the method of structuring my time is bearing fruit already. I’m not a machine, so the actual time I spend on these activities often doesn’t correspond exactly to the schedule, but even so the results are better than I dared hope for: in the last three months I have logged over 50 hours each of reading, piano playing and French studies, plus 150 hours of workouts. This works. 

In fact it works so well that I have decided to add another activity to the list: chess. I hadn’t played for a long time when a colleague challenged me to a match in February. This rekindled my love of the game, and I haven’t looked back since. In Pemba, I even played a Danish national champion and won 2-0 (he was a national kite-surfing champion, but never mind…).

If you want to play me, I’m on chess.com – improving my game for half an hour every day, as per schedule.

20-20 hindsight 


2016 is coming to an end. It seems not long ago that I sat down to set out the goals I had for the year, and now the time has come to summarise what I have accomplished, and what targets I failed to reach. 

I wanted to challenge myself, have new experiences, travel, go on adventures and develop as a person. Overall, I think it’s fair to say I have. 

I overcame my fear of diving, and went not only to Nemo33, but also on two marvellous diving trips, to Thailand and Malta. On top of that I travelled to Mallorca, Luxembourg, Barcelona, London, Leeds, Edinburgh, Sweden, Rome, Switzerland, and Sardinia, so I certainly fulfilled my ambition to go on adventures. 

I challenged myself in other ways than diving: bungee jumping and canyoning demanded overcoming myself mentally; and taking on not one, but two new roles at work has certainly brought new intellectual challenges and opportunities into my life, for which I’m very grateful. 

I tried abstaining from caffeine and alcohol for a month, and lived to tell the tale; I tasked myself with reading more non fiction as a way of contributing to the fight against the dumbing-down of our society; I try to be more mindful of what I eat.

The main challenge of 2016 however was gearing up for the immense task of running an ultra marathon. It took two marathons to prepare for that adventure, along with untold hours of physical exercise, but I did it, and couldn’t be happier with the result. 

Not everything went according to plan, however: my grand design to develop as a piano player looked set to succeed until too much travel meant having to give up on regular lessons, which in turn left me disinclined to practice. 

The same is true for my ambitions to improve my French – I started out well, but a lack of structure meant I let it slip by the wayside, almost without noticing, and I didn’t read as many books as I planned, either.

I didn’t bike as much as I had planned – the lofty goal of 2000 kilometres turned out to be more than twice the distance I actually covered, and I didn’t participate in any kind of Ironman. I did run the 1500 kilometres I had set out to do, however. 

Oh, and I did write about it all here – no mean feat in itself, either.

So, what to learn from all this? First of all the importance of setting goals. I set out to do something every month, and on average I did, even though some months by necessity were more intensive than others. 

Secondly, the need to have clear-cut, measurable targets if you want to achieve something; having UltraVasan as a goal allowed me to plan what I needed to do to reach that level of fitness, week for week. 

Third, to push beyond your comfort zone. If I don’t, I tend to not get anything useful done, but by forcing myself to face up to my fears I have had a much more rewarding year than would otherwise been the case. 

What I take with me most of all going into 2017, then, is that excellence is a habit. No goal is achieved in one great leap, or overnight, but by chipping away at it, you can do wonders. 

Here’s to making next year a Year of Wonders!

Luxembourg deluxe

imageSo there is this country that I’ve been to dozens of times for work, and never really saw, even though it’s tiny, and right next door. Or rather, I never bothered, because it was tiny and right next door. And I associate it with work. How interesting could it be?

Luxembourg was one of the founding countries of the E.C., and as a thank you for that – and for being small and inoffensive and neither Germany nor France – it was rewarded the seat of several institutions, amongst them the Council of Ministers, so I’ve been here more times than I care to remember, but this weekend I finally decided to make a visit memorable, so after two days of the usual minstrel show, I drove away from the wind-swept Kirschberg plateau, to Esch-sur-Sûre.

It’s a tiny town in the Luxembourgian part of the Ardennes, situated on a bend of the river Sûre, snugly nestled against a mighty outcrop of sheer rock on which the oldest castle in the country still stands, eleven hundred years after it was built. The town is surrounded by lush forests on all sides, and it’s easy to see why people would have chosen to settle here – the river teeming with fish, the forest full of game, plus it’s a natural fortress to begin with, and with the streets spiralling upwards and houses built with massive walls of local rock, the whole village becomes part of the ramparts, easily defensible from Viking marauders and rival knights and robber barons down the ages. The inhabitants must have felt very Sûre of themselves. In this regard as in many others, Eche is a microcosm of the microcosm that is Luxembourg (a nanocosm then, perhaps?).

The landscape around the town, up and down the meandering river, is exceedingly pretty, wealthy and clean. This is what southern Belgium would look like if it were run by the Swiss. My one gripe is with the (more modern) houses, which look like a Belgian imitation of Swiss architecture. But there’s not too many of them – mostly it’s small-scale farms and forests, and perfect, undulating roads that attract swarms of bikers.

Unlike Mallorca, however, it’s motorbikes only, which means that when I rent a mountain bike I have the wooden paths and back roads entirely to myself. I spend several happy hours pedalling upriver, through a nature reserve that also holds the main water reservoir of the country, and then run downriver for another hour, past fly fishers and through a valley so steep and narrow that there is only room for one row of cottages in the village therein. It’s like stepping onto the stage of a Grimm fairytale.

After that, it’s back to the hotel for the long awaited spa visit, and – after goodness knows how many visits to different saunas, plus a hearty dinner (Luxembourgers pride themselves on having a French kitchen with German-sized portions) – to bed, jolly well pleased with my discovery.

Sunday is spent driving around the countryside. It’s not unlike Mosel, in that there are fertile plateaus above the river valleys, and just like Mosel there are castles by every strategic bend in the rivers. I visit two. The first one is something of a disappointment, as it has been turned into a renaissance chateau, and is closed to visitors – the only redeeming factor being the Sorceresses’ Tower, a remnant of the older burg, and last residence of medieval women suspected of whichcraft. 

Apparently they were allowed only one window, which showed them the place of their execution-to-be. Today, modern wrought-iron art depicting dancing flames marks the spot where the women met their fate. It’s creepy.

image

Oppressive? Me? Never…

The second castle is the real deal. Vianden, located just on the border with Germany, has been a stronghold since the days of the Romans, and the counts of Vianden didn’t mince about – the castle is an impenetrable fortress that was never taken, but fell into disrepair after the last Count moved elsewhere – the family sprouted several branches, two of which form today’s Grand Dutchy and the also grand Dutch royal family, so it’s not as if they didn’t have other places to hang out. It’s been lovingly restored, but I can’t help but think it would have been even more grandiose as a ruin.

I spend a couple of hours pottering about the castle and the walled town, and then finish off the weekend by having an enormous Angus entrecôte in nearby Diekirsch – cooked on a sizzling stone at the table – before finally turning the car back to Belgium once more. This is the way to experience Luxembourg properly, I think.

 

Norrköping, Sweden

imageI’ve long thought I should try to write a travel entry on the topic of Sweden; I’ve lived abroad long enough that it’s a different country from the one I grew up in, after all, and for most readers it will be just as exotic as any other place I experience on my journeys.

This week offered the perfect opportunity: I went to a town I’ve never visited before, in a part of the country that is oft overlooked – Norrköping, Östergötland. The name means Northern chipping (or market town) in the Eastern part of the Land of the Gotae – one of the three original tribes that populated what is now Sweden- and in some respects I suspect it has remained essentially the same since this was Viking heartland.

This feeling is enhanced upon arrival. Even flying into Stockholm, the capital, the impression is one of forests and smallholdings right up to the edge of the city, and going by train to Norrköping showcases more of the same – an infinite number of lakes (the result of the perma ice having retreated from these lands relatively recently, thus not allowing the land to rise up just yet), all of them dotted with little red wooden cottages along the shores, and often with woods growing right up to the water’s edge.

Norrköping itself has been a city proper almost since the time of the Vikings, but the town has been razed and burnt several times over, so today the oldest buildings are no more than two hundred years old. This, together with the grid layout of the city blocks, it’s eclectic mixture of new and old, scruffy and chi, and the well-to-do hipster look sported by just about everyone makes it reminiscent of Brooklyn.

I am instantly smitten. Of course it helps that the Swedish summer is in full swing, meaning blue skies and glorious sun during the day, and white nights on top of that. I wake at four thirty every morning, simply because it’s light outside already. There’s also the fact that nearly everyone looks good and healthy – the Lamp hotel breakfast is a wonder to behold, easily beating the finest hotels I’ve ever been to, and no one smokes, or is obese – and when I go to the gym in the evening this is borne out by the fact that people from all walks of life have found their way there – old and young, men and women, immigrants and Viking descendants, they are all here.

I’m dead serious about the latter, by the way. At the board of Transportation, the authority hosting us for the week, there is a immensely large man called Thorbjörn Kämpe (Thor bear fighter) – it doesn’t get more authentically Norse than that. In fact, replace the cardigans and stupid trousers, give them an ax and shield and most every one of these muscular, bearded, tattoo-sporting hip folk look much like their infamous forefathers.

You can accuse me of sugar coating it of course, my head soggy with nostalgia, but for the life of me, this kind of town – a Nordic Brooklyn in the wilderness, with bars and coffee shops littered generously throughout, with a sex shop facing the town church, with the minister of the latter going to work on his mountain bike, with Valkyrie-look-alikes and spry octogenarians out and about with equal grace, and immigrants being seen as normal rather than a matter of controversy – is my idea of the ideal place to live.

Berlin I

Leave a comment

January 2015

image
Day 1

I cannot imagine there is any city so emblematic to, and shaped by, the history of last century as Berlin.

As I leave my hotel I have only to turn a corner to happen upon the building where the faithful press conference took place that marked the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain. It’s 9 November 1989, and after weeks of protests the DDR regime has to ease restrictions on travel permits (mainly to other Soviet Block countries). Now they’re holding a meeting with western media to announce as much when the flustered person responsible gets a question about when the Wall is going to open. Unprepared and overwhelmed, he rereads his instructions before uttering the undying words “As far as I understand, immediately”, and history is made.

I was in high school when this happened, and remember vividly how our German teacher, a stately old matron called Frau Ekebjörns – a woman who could have out-ironed the iron chancellor Angela Merkel – came into the classroom teary-eyed the next day. Watching the documentaries, hearing about the plight of the people, both those who stayed and the hundreds who died trying to escape, it’s easy to understand why she did, and yet a couple of blocks further on, this suffering is dwarfed to insignificance by the memorial to the Jewish holocaust.

It’s deceptively simple, with 2,410 massive slabs of concrete resembling traditional Jewish graves, all uniform in size but varying in height from 0 to 4 metres, laid out in orderly rows (although some are deliberately slightly askew). Surrounded as they are by public buildings and pizza parlours, it’s not very impressive at first sight, but when you pass in between those rows, with the concrete weight of 6,000,000 murdered people crowding you, towering over you, it’s impossible not to feel grief and disgust at humanity’s incapacity to prevent such horrors and her capacity to organise them in cold blood.

Berlin is a marked city, forever associated with these events, and yet, ironically, World War 2 and the Cold War are the main reasons for why Berlin has changed more in the last sixty years than any normal city will ever do. The bombings of the former and the no man’s land of the latter have both meant that – once bombs stopped falling and the Wall was torn down – developers could run amok on an unprecedented scale, and so they did. 30% of all buildings in Berlin have been built after 1989. I would imagine that the percentage was even greater after the war.

Being a Berliner* of a certain age (and who wouldn’t want to be an old jelly donut?) must be akin to being a Londoner after the Great Fire or a Parisian after the not-so-great Hausmann came to town; It’s life, Jochen, but not as we knew it.

And all the better for it.

______
*But then the typical Berliner isn’t. 100,000 people leave the city every year and 150,000 move in to take their place, so the population is mostly from somewhere else.

Day 2

I said yesterday that Berlin was emblematic, but just as we use capitals as shorthand for governments or regimes, so iconic buildings act as symbols for nations. Big Ben is the UK, the Eiffel Tower France, et cetera*.

Germany’s symbol has always been the Brandenburger Tor. It was established enough as such that Napoleon knew to enter the city through this gate – he was hailed as victor by the crowds**, and then promptly nicked the quadriga that adorns its apex.

The city gate got its statue back once Napoleon’s star waned, and ever since it has formed the backdrop to all important events in Berlin, from the operatic posturing of the Nazis to the tearing down of the Wall, hidden lights making sure that the peace goddess and her four horses were always in focus, day or night.

Last night it was dark, however. The city decided to shut down the lighting in order to avoid having the Pegida-movement*** use it for their purposes. In the end the counter-demonstration brought together a lot more people than the anti-Islamists, but I was still pleasantly surprised at this simple, yet symbolically potent move; you have the right to express your opinions, however baroque, it seemed to say, but don’t think that you can make it look as if this country stands behind you in your xenophobia.

Seems some people do learn from history, after all.
______
*Sweden is symbolised by a rather less permanent erection, namely the garlanded phallus we impregnate Mother Earth with at Midsummer.

**I can imagine what it must have been like, having done the same two years ago in the Berlin marathon. I didn’t win, though.

***Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Nincompoops.

Berlin, day 3

Maybe it’s the weather, but I am starting to feel maudlin. It’s cold, damp and grey here, which doesn’t help, but on reflection I think it has less to do with the whims of the weather gods and more to do with the climate of oppression, which seems ever present; set in the pavement in the form of gilded cobble stones marking the names and horrific ends of individual Jews who lived there*, in the air – stories of how Stasi kept scent records of all those interrogated in case they would need to track them down with bloodhounds later – yes, even in the ground itself. Only last night we were told that today’s itinerary would have to be changed due to an unearthed WW2 air bomb that needed detonating.

None of these occurrences are normally associated with the everyday hustle and bustle of a western capital, and yet seem normal here. And when we finally reach the Reichstag, the writing is literally on the wall – in the shape of graffiti left by Russian soldiers on what little remained of the building when they were done with it.

100,000 Russians died conquering Berlin, while the allied forces shamefully hung back to let the Red Army slaughter and be slaughtered. There’s a large memorial down the road from the Reichstag to these fallen comrades, which must feel a bit odd to Germans who know their history, considering that Russian soldiers did a lot more than just write the Cyrillic equivalent of Kilroy Was Here on convenient walls – but then that too is the madness of war, I guess.

All in all, these dreary thoughts turn my mood from maudlin to ennui, and I’m reminded of the rather more contemporary graffiti that adorned the student lodgings I once inhabited in Göttingen: “Es ist Deutsch in Kaltland.”

But then I’m struck by a different thought: here we are, a group of people from all over Europe, invited by citizens of Berlin from all walks of life to learn about their work, hopes (and shortcomings) for a better world – from the chairman of the Special Senate Committee in charge of Berlin’s new airport Schönenfeld** to the German-Turkish woman volunteering to help integrate people like herself in society, working door to door to bring immigrant Muslim women out of isolation – and suddenly there is a metaphorical (if not a real) ray of light in the skies above Berlin. To (mis)quote Goethe’s undying dying words:

“Licht… Mehr Licht!”
_______
*A laudable initiative by an artist who has done the same in many cities both in Germany and abroad. He was turned down by Munich, however: ostensibly because they felt that it would be to dishonour the dead to tread on their names, but for once the well-to-do burgers were probably more interested in avoiding having their streets being quite literally paved with gold.

**A spectacular failure of almost comical proportions.
Day 5

The last two days here in Berlin have seen us tossed from one extreme to another, from the Stasi-untersuchungsgefängnis (investigation prison), where one of the former inmates* described the various interrogation (read: torture) methods in use and their respective merits, to Die Komische Oper two kilometres down the road, where the same regime offered subsidised culture to the masses; from the Holocaust Museum (an experience so overwhelmingly terrifying that I will not even try to put words to it) to the mixed sauna in the hotel where a stark naked woman offered to teach me Tantric massage within an hour of meeting me (All the elderly gentlemen eves-dropping on our conversation seemed very disappointed in my decision to decline the proposition. I wonder if they thought the class would take place there and then – and for all I know that might have been the case!).

Everywhere you go in Berlin there is this paradoxical juxtaposition of a lovely people and the hideousness of their past. If you ask me, that’s the thing about the Germans: there is an immense capacity for Verlustigung (the word means entertainment, but it’s literally “lusty behaviour”) which – paired with the incredibly efficient manner in which they go about everything – somehow enables them to move effortlessly from a real appreciation of both highbrow culture and hedonistic sex to societal bloodlust. To paraphrase Faust**:

Das ist der Kern des Pudels.

_______
* He was 84, of which he had spent 10 in prison, first at the hands of the Soviets and then the East Germans. With a twinkle in his eyes he explained that his interrogators still lived in the area, but that none of “die Kollegen” had volunteered to work as guides there.

**An operatic German intellectual who unknowingly strikes a deal with the devil and then finally realises who he’s dealing with.