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NORTHERN SWEDEN DISPATCHES

HOCKEY

Embracing Sweden’s ‘ridiculous’ sports

With the playoffs underway for Sweden's top ice hockey league, ex-Londoner Paul Connolly explains how his time in Sweden's far north has changed his views about some of the country's stranger sports.

Embracing Sweden's 'ridiculous' sports

Wow, there are some ridiculous sports up here. Some of them are so unutterably ludicrous I’m not actually sure that I didn’t dream them. Did I really watch a television broadcast of a man jumping around on piles of tyres on a small motorcycle? If I did see it on TV was it a documentary on the world’s most rubbish circuses?

If it was, why do I remember the ‘winner’ being interviewed on TV and beaming as if he hadn’t just succeeded at the world’s most pointless sport but instead had achieved something relatively worthwhile and more fun to watch, like boiling an egg or stroking a dog?

Then, of course, there’s the trotting, with a man on a small wagon being pulled around a small oval track by a horse. It’s like chariot-racing for 3-year-olds. It is to Ben Hur as an egg-and-spoon race is to Chariots Of Fire. It’s predictability is also quite astonishing.

The leader at the first bend almost always wins.

Why not end the race at the first bend? You could fit in a lot more races per meet. Incredibly, people, real flesh-and-blood people, actually pay money to watch it.

SEE ALSO: Hockey wasn’t always Sweden’s pride on ice

But it’s not all bad up north, sport-wise. My neighbour Randy has done me the favour of introducing me to ice hockey. He’s a season-ticket holder at AIK Skellefteå, the best team in the country.

As a Manchester City fan, whose love of English football’s once-perennial losers, but now current champions, predates by two decades the billionaire takeover by Sheikh Mansour, I’m really not used to supporting a league-dominating club. And, shamefully, I have also found it hard to shed the more primal, combative behaviour more typical of football fans.

During one of my first games, a thrilling 4-3 win over northern rivals, Luleå, I lost my cool a couple of times at visiting supporters celebrating a Luleå goal. Randy would look at me with alarm and pat my arm. In England it’s perfectly acceptable to shout a few choice words at opposing supporters – not so much here.

This is good, however. At ice hockey games you get a much broader demographic than football matches. In the UK, at least, football spectators tend to be male and 30-50-years-old. At Skellefteå ice hockey matches, I think the male-female split is around 60-40. And there are a lot of younger females. This makes for a much less testosterone-fuelled atmosphere.

Which is fine as there’s plenty of testosterone swilling around on the ice. Granted it’s not as violent as the NHL in North America (I’ve seen one match there and counted 13 officially sanctioned fights between players), but it does get pretty nasty.

And I have to admit, I still don’t quite get ice hockey.

When the puck becomes trapped on the boards, the scrimmages sometimes resemble a footie kickabout in a school playground. And the rapid turnover of players is a little too confusing. But I’m pretty sold – I’ll be attending all the home games of the semi-final stage once Skellefteå dispatch defending champions Brynäs over the next few days.

I might even buy a scarf.

And Randy might have to wrap it round my big gob if things get a little too tense on the ice. I don’t think I’ll ever quite go full Swede when it comes to watching sport.

Paul Connolly

Read more from Paul here, including his Striking a Chord music column

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PAUL CONNOLLY

‘Sweden ticks all the boxes – except for one’

Ex-Londoner Paul Connolly loves living in northern Sweden. Really, he does. If only the local delicacies didn't taste of asbestos and insulation – and that's BEFORE you even get to the fermented herring.

'Sweden ticks all the boxes – except for one'
Sweden, you're letting yourself down, writes Paul Connolly. Photo: Kr-val/Wikimedia Commons & Jurek Holzer/SvD/TT & Restaurang Tre Kronor

This article is available to Members of The Local. Read more Membership Exclusives here.

We've recently had some correspondence with Migrationsverket over our Swedish citizenship application. It's not gone particularly well.

Indeed, so badly has it gone, that yesterday I started to worry that we might have to move back to my place of birth, Blighted Blighty, the self-harming, laughing stock of the civilized world.

This induced real, gut-wrenching panic. I really don't want to go back to the UK. I've made this plain in other columns.

I love northern Sweden, truly I do. I love our house overlooking a lake; I love the friendly people; I love the work-life balance; I love the gender equality; I love the community spirit.

Why would I want to return to a country incapacitated by a spasm of senseless nostalgia and anti-modernity, and presided over by a political class that has abdicated responsibility and handed over the running of the country to the old, the dim-witted and the barbaric?

I want to live in a civilized country, a forward-looking country. And Sweden ticks all the boxes – except for one. And where does it let itself down? Its food culture.

Does any country that not only allows, but celebrates the existence of kebab pizza, deserve to be called civilized? I'd imagine not many Italians would think so.

You see, northern Swedish food is lousy. There's no getting away from it. I try to be positive about everything here but the cuisine up here is undeniably abominable. 

READ ALSO:

There are people who rave about Flying Jacob, a recipe devised by an air freight worker in the 1970s, a dish with chicken, peanuts and bananas. 

“A recipe devised by an air freight worker in the 1970s.” Has there been a more dismal phrase written in culinary history? 

I suppose we should offer thanks that the recipe doesn't conclude with 'and garnish with brown linoleum shavings'.


You can find the original recipe (in Swedish) for Flying Jacob here. Photo: Kr-val/Wikimedia Commons

Of course, a principal ingredient in the Flying Jacob is cream. 

Northern Swedes have dairy products with everything. Bloodpudding (an utterly taste-free distant cousin of the UK's delicious black pudding) is eaten with butter. BUTTER!

It's the same with palt, a food that was used when the Swedish army had run out of cannonballs in 17th century warfare.

I'm not actually sure what palt is made from. 

It could be a wood industry by-product, or perhaps now that asbestos is banned from use in construction work, they've found another purpose for it as the principal ingredient in one of northern Sweden's least tasty and most-hard-to-chew, er, delicacies.

I've tried palt, of course I have. My twin girls love it and have insisted I try it (with butter, of course!). 

My verdict? I've never actually eaten insulation but I imagine it's not too dissimilar in texture and taste to palt.

But it's not been a complete dead loss. The girls, displaying that bewildering toddler fascination for terrible food, love it, for example. And there was a local dog that sometimes trotted onto our land for a spot of toilet action.

One well-aimed palt boulder soon disabused Lasse of the notion that Connolly Acres was a safe haven for a bowel movement. He's not been seen since.

READ ALSO:


A ball of palt. Photo: Jurek Holzer/SvD/TT

Food is so terrible up here that I wasn't even going to mention surströmming – the rotting, fermented herring that all Swedes claim to love.

In any case, surströmming is a national rather than regional food. When I say 'food', what I really mean is 'dare'. Because that's what it is. It's a dare. The vast majority of Swedes don't eat it because they like the taste.

If they genuinely enjoyed the taste why would they place the tiniest flake of rotting flesh on a piece of tunnbröd and smother it in potato salad, cheese and onions? How can you taste that?

No, if Swedes really enjoyed surströmming, the way they proclaim to, they'd be scooping it out of the tin – in much the same way as Winnie The Pooh uses his paws to eat honey from those big jars – not covering it in a mountain of other ingredients that are used purely to disguise the foul taste of hell.

However, it's the north's pizza obsession that most baffles me. They don't even like proper pizza. 

Kebab pizza? Hamburger pizza? It's pizza for toddlers.


Kebabpizza, one of the most popular pizzas in Sweden. Photo: Maja Suslin/TT

Ask for extra fresh tomato on your pizza, and they look at you as if you've asked for the sacrifice of their first-born. But ask for another couple of kilos of kebab meat or a litre of bearnaise sauce and they'll smile and oblige happily.

Bearnaise, yeah, there's that butter again. This reliance on dairy is easy enough to explain. Cream, milk and cheese are all easily-accessible in the north; they're local foods in the same way that tomatoes, peppers and onions are staples in the Mediterranean. 

And, during the cold winters of the past, the populace needed to fatten up.

But it's 2019 now. We have central heating. How about trying something that isn't smothered in cream or invented by an air freight worker (would you want to fly in a plane designed by Gordon Ramsay?)? 

READ ALSO:

How about some food with tomatoes?

Tomatoes have been our stock ingredient, the base of nearly everything (non-child related) we cook, since our London days. 

We've had northern Swedes over for dinner and they've been clearly discomfited by the pronounced absence of dairy in the food – one chap picked at his tiny portion of tomato-based food as if expecting to uncover a hand grenade.

I'm pretty sure most of the villagers here think we're part of some tomato-obsessed cult.

My neighbours are mustard-keen gardeners. They have a greenhouse where they grow huge numbers of tomatoes. A year or so after we moved here, I asked them what they cook with them.

The woman looked at me, puzzled, a big bowl of tomatoes in her hand.

“Cook? No, I don't cook with them. I just grow them because I like to. And because we know you like them.”

And she handed over the bowl of lovely tomatoes. And has continued to do so every summer since.

It's an exchange that encapsulates northern Sweden: wonderful neighbourliness and a total aversion to good food.

Paul Connolly is a Skellefteå-based writer and monthly columnist for The Local. Follow him on Facebook and read more of his writing on The Local.

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