Swenglish

I have lived in England for almost fourteen years now and it makes me feel Swenglish, particularly when I go back to Sweden for visits. The contrast between England and Sweden is enormous. It’s not like travelling between two countries is more like going to a different planet. It takes a lot of time for me to adjust to planet Sweden and I feel like a moron, completely out of touch with how things work.

The living standard in Sweden is so much higher than what I come across in England. I am sure there must be some poor people lurking about somewhere it’s just that I never see them. All my friends and family are firmly middleclass and live in nice houses or flats in amazing neighbourhoods.

Whenever I come to my sister’s house I can spend hours just playing with the water tap in the bathroom. The cheer joy of a tap that actually blends the water! With an easy press the water comes out, mixed to a comfortable temperature, not boiling hot or freezing cold just perfect mix of the two. The toilets always flush with a soft touch on a button. You don’t have to spend five minutes flushing and praying to God that your excrement will disappear!

The first day or so in Sweden, I struggle with the language and usually make words in half-English and half-Swedish. Luckily most people in Sweden do speak English so they are able to decode my homemade Swenglish. My nieces and nephew used to find it hilarious when they were little.

My sister also told me that I use an English sentence structure rather than a Swedish. Strangers must think I am retarded or something. I mean I look Swedish and normal but act as a moron.

The technology is also very advanced. I am not even sure I can manage to do food shopping on my own anymore. It’s too technically advanced for me. I therefore love to go to the supermarket with my sisters. Everybody bring their own bag, designed to fit perfectly into the shopping trolley.

You often start your shopping by going into a side room where you can dispose your empty pet bottles, glass bottles and cans in specially designed holes in the wall. Everybody do exactly as you are told and are very careful not to put the pet bottles in the can hole and so on. For the trouble you get paid in form of a receipt that can be deducted from your total bill at the till. You get about 0.10p per bottle.

When you disposed your bottles you walk into to the proper shop and there you grab a scanning machine from a wall full of scanners and then you simply scan your items before you pack them into to your purpose designed bag. When you come to the till you use another machine to read your scanner and then you slot your card into the machine and out comes a receipt and your shopping is completed. I am amazed!

You can also choose to use a manned till if you do not wish to use a scanner but even then you are met with machines where you slot your coins and so forth and I feel like I am at an attraction at Disney World or something. As a Swenglish person I always do all this things in the wrong order and get confused and that is when I feel like a moron.

My last visit to Sweden was over the New Year and the nature was fantastic. I went up North, about three hours car ride North of Stockholm to a county called Dalarna. My sister is part of a commune there. One of those shared homes that were so popular with the lefties during the seventies. This is a sort of commune second home. It is lovely located on the top of a mountain.

And the views are fantastic!

We slept in bunker beds and each room can fit up to six people but I only shared with my sis and her hubby. You have cute little curtains on your bed and I felt like I was in the film Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe.

The cute sink

My sis I woke up early and had breakfast to the most amazing sunrise in the quiet kitchen heated by a wood burner.

When I opened the cupboard I saw something in the corner of my eye and it turned out to be an exposed little mouse. Since I had opened the door the mouse couldn’t get away so we stood there looking at each other for a while until the mouse made a kamikaze jump down to the floor and disappeared under the sink.

After our breakfast sis went out to collect wood and sort out the pine tree that fell over an electric wire during the storm a few nights previous.

On New Year 's Eve we grilled our meat over the open fire in the dining room and had a great meal over a heated political debate. At twelve we went out and sent off lanterns over the woods and I was terrified we would cause a forest fire!

That’s it. 2011 is over and 2012 is here and my new life is supposed to start.

I’m still waiting...

Bad company

My niece is following my footsteps and decided to move to England. She is going to live and work in Brighton for nine months. The good news is that she first stopped by my flat for a few days before her move south.
Sadly, I am not very good company at the moment because I am skint and have a bad cold. So she is left to her own devise. However, she is an independent young lady so she manages.

It turned out that she never read Jane Austen so we have spent the evenings catching up on my Austen DVD collection. I love my dear Jane!

My niece posted a picture on the mushrooms growing in my shower on her Facebook page and her Swedish friends are shocked. Life here in the ghetto is different from the high living standard in Sweden...

On Saturday night there was some commotion in the staircases at 11pm and I went out to have a look. Seriously, one day I will fall victim for the “curiosity killed the cat” wisdom. On the stairs I found six teenagers loitering about. A young couple were making out and the rest were just making noise. They all stood tall as I arrived and looked like small innocent angels, ‘we haven’t done anything’ they explained. A wee boy of ten or so said he was waiting for his mum. I told them to keep it down because some people are sleeping. It did actually get quieter after that.

The next morning I had to sweep the stairs from chicken bones and empty take away boxes. I do suspect the kids but maybe I am wrong.

Apparently I live within the area where they will have a trial period of dispersal zone for youngsters; only two can stand together without being dispersed. Should I contact the police about the kids? Is it really right? Where should they go?

Yes, I do get fed up by the noise, the litter and the fact that they nick my flowers and destroy the curve appeal. If I call the police to disperse them then they will just end up on someone else’s doorstep.
Maybe I should interact with them in a more positive way, get down with them so to speak, “give me five, man”.

Ignorance

This morning I went down to Brixton town centre where the metropolitan police had parked a van on Windrush Square. The van showed images from CCTV footage during the riots and asked the public, “Do you know this person?”
I walked up to the van to have a look, curious as I am and saw that some of the images were on children!
I think it is wrong to publish images of people (suspects) before they have been proven guilty of any crime and especially so when it involves children.
I asked the officer by the van what they are doing and he said they are trying to identify looters. I then said, “But you show images of children”.
He then responded that they are old enough to do the crime!
I then said that they are not proven guilty yet and their crime is poverty.
Then the police man said that he is poor too but he don't steal!

I get so tired sometimes. If you work as a police man you earn more than minimum pay and therefore you are not poor. However, more than 50% of the children in Lambeth live in poverty. The poverty I talk about here are children who have to go to school hungry because their parents can’t afford breakfast, children living in poor housing with mould on their bedroom walls and with various infestations and overcrowded situations putting their health at risk.

This ignorant police man actually compared his own situation with real poverty.

He then asked me if my windows were smashed during the riots and when I said no he insinuated that I then have no right to say anything because it didn’t affect me.
I nearly told him that the riots would never have happened if it wasn’t for the police murdering Mark Duggan!
But I thought I better hold my tongue or I get myself arrested! You can’t be too sure nowadays when it comes to the metropolitan police force. Besides, talking to him was like talking to an ignorant football hooligan or skinhead – nobody was home, the light was not on.

Surely the looting by the bankers cost us all far more than the riots in August.

Why don’t they show images of the greedy bankers as well?

Why don’t they spend their time finding out how Sean Rigg could die whilst in police custody at Brixton Police Station?

That this sorting the wheat from the chaff can go on without any protests or opposition is cheer ignorance to me. It is scary to have a police force that treats people different depending on their wealth. Where is the justice in that?

Weekend peace

On Sunday I had just settled down for a nice breakfast in my PJs when there was a knock on my door. I open and there was a young police officer asking if I had heard any noise last night. My next door neighbour had had her door kicked in sometime during the Saturday afternoon or evening.
There was a small congregation of worried neighbours out on the landing, they too in their PJs. I joined in and was told that many neighbours had been burgled. A worrying thought.

In this case they had only managed to steal the landline! Surely the black market for stolen landlines must be limited these days when most people only have a mobile, or? Someone suggested it must have been a drug addict or something.

I don’t care who it was, it makes me feel insecure. I can’t even afford a home insurance and neither can my neighbours. I try to save up for a new pair of glasses since I’m blind as a bat with my old ones and glasses has to come before an insurance.

It’s all because the security system does not work, people can just kick on the door’s security system and let themselves in!

I called the landlord and told them there is no security here. She said she will talk to the maintenance guy about it but I’m pretty sure nothing will come out of it because they need to replace the entire system to one that you can’t kick open.

What to do next? Buy a gun? Create a neighbourhood watch? Hope and pray it will not happen to me? What?  

All suggestions kindly accepted...

The big clean up

After being home for days resting my bad knee and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t go to the Nottinghill Carnival, I decided it was time for me to get out of the house. So on carnival Sunday I went to cinema and saw One Day, which was such a co-dependent rubbish.
As I came out from the cinema I walked pass a group of people that were smeared in chocolate and obviously just came back from Nottinghill after playing the mas with Pure Lime, the band I used to play with.
I was gutted so I called my sponsor, she said she will come and visit me. On the way home I noticed that the front garden was filthy with rubbish and I decided to clean it up. I’m not too keen on my sponsor to see the filth I live in.
That is how I ended up spending carnival Monday sweeping the street armed with a broom, refuse bags and garden gloves.
As I worked hard in the sun, the drug dealer from across the street passed me and tried to pretend he didn’t stare at me. I keep on bumping into him across Brixton but only when I do something weird.
I collected three bags of rubbish from the front garden and three bags from the back garden. I also cleaned the staircases up to my door. I don’t know if my cleaning makes me a mad woman or a genius? I surely hope it’s not yet another cross-addiction of mine! Gulp, is it?

Now, a slight change of topic. I always said I love Brighton because of all the seagulls there, which reminds me of Stockholm. (Stockholm is built on many islands and is surrounded by water and therefore has lots of seagulls.)
However, recently some seagulls seem to have moved into Brixton and settled down on my street. I hope it’s not all the filth that attracted them. I now realised that I hate the buggers because they have a nasty tendency to scream at 4am! Now I have to get myself a shotgun and sort the bastards out!
Maybe I can ask my drug dealing neighbour across the street?