It was January 8th, 2005.
We’d been warned. So we battened the hatches and hunkered down. As you do.
Through the windows we could see an uncanny glow in the night. The wind dropped and an eerie silence fell. Then the night darkness was restored as the wind picked up again. We looked into each other’s eyes. This was it. Would we survive?
The roof tiles began to rattle as if impatient to be free of their moorings. The very windows seemed to shake in their frames. Then the full blast hit us from the west. Suddenly there was resounding crash above us. The lights went out.
By now, I trust you are sitting on the edge of your seats. We were certainly sitting on ours. But don’t worry. We survived. How else would I be able to write such meretricious nonsense? So it wasn’t the end of the world. Just Storm Gudrun.
If you live in the English-speaking world your first question might not be ‘How did our intrepid adventurers survive this major natural disaster?’ But rather, who the hell gave such a weird name to a storm? After all, the only time I’ve come across the name myself was in a novel by DH Lawrence, who is definitely not to be trusted with meteorological terminology. Though, having said that there was something Lawrentian about the weather – not least in its wanton brainless violence.
Well, those responsible for the odd baptism belonged to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, which has the dubious privilege of naming all the OTT weather we get in Scandinavia. In alphabetical order for some reason. Why Norway? Maybe because usually they are the first to get it. Not that that really explains anything, of course. Unless the meteorologist that first negotiated the deal was partial to Norse legend. Meanwhile the Germans, who share much of the same mythology chose to call the storm Erwin, which was at least more familiar thanks to its popularity amongst Nazi war criminals.
Only now, I suspect, will your next question be, well how then did you survive this brutal outburst by Mother Nature? For the brutality should not be understated. The winds were gauged to be of hurricane force in places. And as will soon become apparent, the havoc wreaked was enormous.
The crash in question was caused by a tree falling onto our roof. My usual defence in these cases is to assume a semi-foetal position and retreat into self-inflicted catatonia so someone else can sort the problem. Unfortunately there was no-one else other than my wife. I was brought back to my conscious self when she poked my with a non-too-blunt instrument.
There was to be no escape. Out into the onslaught and onto the roof with an axe and a tarpaulin. This is not something you should try at home. And it’s an experience I shall do my very best to avoid repeating at mine.
Next day we got up after a sleepless night and inspected the damage. It could have been worse. The tarp had stopped any rain leaking to the attic space. But as looked around the garden, the scene was one of devastation. Meanwhile the forest behind the house had been razed to the ground. God only knew what our road was looking like. We didn’t get very far. It looked as if half the forest had decided to take a nap along our exit route. Trees lay across the road deep into the distance.
What’s more, we had no electricity and no landline phone, and even with the reduced tree cover, our mobiles worked no better than usual. TV was also obviously out of the question, even if the batteries in our radio still worked. If it was any consolation, we were not alone. We soon learned that much of the rest of southern Sweden was out of commission.
It was not the most powerful storm of recent memory. In parts of the country, the hurricane that hit Sweden a couple of years later (Per, if you’re still interested) reached a greater force than Gudrun and caused a similar amount of damage. No doubt it would have caused more, if there had been many trees left standing after Gudrun.
For the majority, the most immediate problems concerned the restricted mobility imposed by the weather event (as they like to call it in the States). Combined with the devastation wreaked to substations and power lines, this meant that many were in danger of starvation and/ or hypothermia.
And what about us, then? We’re hardly hardy survivalist types. But we had an ample supply of blankets and a functioning wood-burning fireplace – not to mention a limitless supply of fuel for it. We also had a fully stocked freezer that allowed us to improvise meals for the present – at least until the freezer defrosted in the unseasonably mild temperatures and we were obliged to dump the remainder. In the absence of our electrical pump, we hauled up fresh water manually from our dug well, and less fresh water from the brook that runs along the side of our property. And we had candles that allowed us to find our early way to bed – where we spent more time than usual, until the worst was over.
Fortunately with us this came quite quickly.
Our energy provider was and remains the local power company, Herrljunga El. Its range is limited to the locality and it’s owned by the council. Small is beautiful. Despite the continuing blast, they had our overhead power lines back up and running within three days. And the local forest owners had the road cleared in a similarly short period of time. Our telephone company, Telia, is a leviathan by contrast, so our landline was out for a couple of weeks. But at least we were now able to drive up to the village where there was reception for our mobiles.
So we had it easy compared to some other places. Hardest hit was the neighbouring province of Småland. Throughout Sweden almost half a million homes were left without electricity immediately after the storm. Two weeks later there were still 25,000 properties powerless; three weeks on still 10,000, meaning some people had to be evacuated. Most of these were living in Småland. And most were subscribers to another leviathan, this time the state-owned company, Vattenfall.
It was also in Småland that the majority of casualties, including nineteen mortalities, occurred. And there that people took the greatest economic hit. If they were forest owners, that is. For as many trees were felled as are normally ‘harvested’ in the course of a whole year. The landscape was devastated. Even ten years later the roads were lined with piles of rotting timber. The sudden huge surplus caused by the storm meant the price had sunk so low that it was no longer profitable to sell the stuff.
So for us, matters could have been a lot worse. True, my wife was days away from defending her doctoral thesis in Gothenburg. Yep. Here they have to be nailed up like Luther’s effort and defended in public by an appointed academic prosecutor. But at least when the road was cleared and the trains were back running, we could get into town. So we did and holed up in a comfortable hotel where we had access to wi-fi for the remaining interval before the Big Day. Which was just as well. A week after Gudrun, Inga arrived. She had expended most of her fury over Britain. Still it was like hitting someone when they were down. At least someone that was not fortunate enough to be cosily ensconced in a city suite sipping Napoleon brandy.
Since there has been so much weather in this blog, I’m sure you’re expecting me to say something about climate change. After all, these ‘storms of the century’ are becoming more regular. And even if you’ve paid nothing to read this, I still feel the need to strive for customer satisfaction. So brace yourself.
I realise that it’s unfashionable to be sceptical towards the issue. But I wonder how much the idea that humans have generated or accelerated climate change is down to our usual tendency to regard ourselves as the centre of the universe, and, in the absence any longer of a god, the motive power behind all that happens for good and ill on our planet. A form of inverted hubris maybe.
But with or without us, shit still happens, as the dinosaurs might have pointed out.
And whatever the shit that is going to hit the fan, we might usefully spend more thought, time and money on learning to live with it than trying to prevent it. Which is not to say that some of the so-called mitigation measures are not in themselves excellent ideas. It is just that trying to get 200 nations to commit to committing economic hara kiri has so far proved to be impossible. And we haven’t even bitten the real silver bullets. If spewing out carbon dioxide is the major contributory factor, then firstly and logically, economic growth should be halted, then reduced; secondly, so should the number of human beings on the planet.
Since neither of these is a vote-winner, we are left with carbon-trading schemes that are totally meaningless. And conservation pledges that last as long as the next election.
Put it another way, mitigation is not going to work. And anyway, why the hell is it called ‘mitigation’? If the word means reducing the severity of something unpleasant or painful, then surely so-called adaptation is also a form of mitigation. And one that doesn’t take such hostages to fortune as some of the absurd geo-engineering expedients that are being seriously proposed.
The fact of the matter is that even at the present level of climate change, millions of the poorest and most vulnerable members of the human race are going to perish unless plans for massive shifts in population are put into place. And as far as I can see, that is not at the top of any Western politician’s agenda.
So bite that bullet, bud, and see how it tastes.
Thank you. I feel so much better for getting that off my chest.
Now I feel comfortable with returning to the rather misplaced plot. So let’s get back to telephony – our increasingly important link to the outside world.
As I mentioned earlier, our telephone lines also came down in the storm. Even where terrestrial cables were still managing to maintain an overhead position, mobile phone masts had been flattened all over the place or were last spotted flying along with the odd roof and rowing boat in the direction of Finland.
So the flip side of this was that we got our TV back before the phones. However, analogue through the usual masts was practically non-existent. When we moved in, we got one out three channels and that only poorly. To improve matters, we installed a satellite dish that survived the storm and the falling tree. But not the march of progress.
Our government has a habit of issuing the odd diktat now and then – in the name of the above-mentioned progress, of course. So some time after the storm, we were informed we would all be switching over to a digital network for TV broadcasts. This meant that the whole population of Sweden had to suddenly invest in a new TV. But never mind. I’m sure we’re all rolling in money in the land of only mildly fettered social democracy.
So we bought our TV and a rectangular black box to go with it. All hunky dory, then. The connection down the phone line was not perfect but at least we had sound and vision. We also had, as before, the Internet down the same line, which was fine as far as it went. And it went so far as either the one or the other. The signal was so weak that networking on your computer at the same time as watching the TV would result in frequent electronic DTs. Not to mention the fact that all such digital communication was now hostage to meteorological fortune. Add to that, as mentioned, we have no mobile phone coverage in our neck of the woods.
So it goes, out in the sticks. We bucolic types will do anything to retard the advance of technology, it would appear.
In point of fact, the reverse is true. As I pointed out, Swedish governments tend to have an unlovable authoritarian streak, about which I will say much more in the next thrilling instalment of this blog. So when we were told we were going digital and would have to fix our own access to this brave new world, we got precious help from the authorities. Unsurprising when you think about it. Both the major parties here have an urban base and find it most convenient to continue to appeal to those places where the greatest numbers live. So if you choose to live far from the hurly-burly, then that’s your problem. Jimmy.
It’s just as well, then, that farmers – in Sweden at least – are amongst the most adaptable and enterprising of beings.
So back to the Swedish embodiment of self-help – the ‘förening’, club, association, committee, whatever, that you may recall from the previous blog.
Before you can say gigabyte, one of the elders of our parish had proposed setting up a fiberförening. (You should be getting the hang of this by now.) This club would be devoted to the connection of the whole village to the rest of humanity by means of fibre-optic cable. With someone else having taken the initiative, the State was happy to chip in with a wee byte of the cost, as was the state-owned telecom company, Telia. As long as we tied ourselves to their digital packages, of course.
Most admirable of all, to the point of being heart-warming, the remaining cost would be borne by all members of the förening equally. And since we are amongst those that live farthest from the village hub, we were also amongst those that benefited most from the deal.
So the dig began. And send up a Hallelujah for Herrljunga El. The local electricity company took the opportunity to dig down the power cables at the same time. Seriously. I could fall in love all over again.
Needless to say, that’s not the end of the story. Since we are literally at the end of the line, our connection remains shaky. It’s all well and good when it works. But somewhat counterproductive when the system blinks in the middle of a financial transaction, and your pot of gold lands in the grateful lap of a fraudster theoretically based somewhere in the Cameroun.
Moreover, our reception doesn’t seem to improve no matter how much more speed and bandwidth we are promised. You have to wonder how telecom R&D works. The latest brainstorm of our telecom provider was to send out new digital boxes. Now the old one, had its moments. But generally speaking it provided sound and vision. So well done, that box! The updated version is pretty good on the visual front, but often finds it beyond its abilities or beneath its dignity to provide aural input. So it’s back to what is called here the Japanese reboot solution half time – closing down the whole system at source and switching it back on again. Unless you prefer watching TV by reading lips.
Add to that, the fact that we no longer have a landline. For some reason this state of the art upgrade no longer supported landline phones through the wi-fi. So now I’m forced to learn and love my mobile, when I find this unnatural, to say the least.
I have no doubt that if any government official ever took the trouble to read this blog, ‘hen’ (Swedish gender-neuter pronoun) would shake ‘hens’ head and complain about the ingratitude of the electorate (as represented by myself, that is). ‘No matter how much we give them, they always want more’, so to speak. But then the chances of any government official actually ever trying to find out what people think, rather than telling them what to think are relatively small. Don’t you think?
Meanwhile, I myself think you’ve probably had more than enough of this extended whinge by now. But, in true political fashion, I will studiously ignore that.
So hold your breath. We will next plunge into the fascinating world of cesspits.
Letters from Sweden 