Euro Blog
Vardø II – The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved
On a desolate windswept clifftop in Vardo lies the Steilneset Memorial, a commemoration of the 91 people tried and executed for witchcraft in 1621.
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Utsjoki – The outer edge of the EU
Utsjoki is the most northern municipality in Finland, making it the absolute outer edge of the European Union. The mighty Tana, a 250 mile long river that snakes through both Finland and Norway emptying (eventually) into the Barents Sea, forms the backbone of this tiny village…
Heart of Lapland
In Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece (or indeed Apocalypse Now, a film heavily based on it), the protagonist treks for days and days in treacherous conditions towards The Heart of Darkness. He is confronted with increasingly bizarre and disturbing objects, symbols and actions that demonstrate the savagery of the native people.
I’m minded of this I pull into a roadside shop that is selling Sami art…
A Midsummer Night’s Christmas
I ploughed on up through Finland until I finally reached the Arctic circle. As the so called home of Santa Claus, I’m sure Rovaniemi has its charms in the snow-capped months of midwinter, but in the middle of summer it has an ambience so surreal that it could have come straight out of a Ray Bradbury story.
Falu Rödfärg
Fifty percent of Swedes are now either overweight or obese. Various shopkeepers and checkout girls along the E4 coast road certainly gave credibility to that report. It seemed the more northerly I progressed, the more kilos the locals carried. Yet one petrol station just outside Umeå bucked the trend.
Øresund – A bridge too far
The toll for the Øresund Bridge (https://www.oresundsbron.com) is enough to darken the sunniest of dispositions and, having forced a smile to the cheery Swede at the tollbooth, I pulled the van into the nearest village, albeit 110 Euros lighter.
The MAMIL: a peculiarly british creature
The British didn’t invent cycling although, post Wiggins, Pendleton, Hoy et al, they would have you believe so. The Middle Aged Man In Lycra (MAMIL) is an oft-sighted creature in Britain today. In cities up and down the nation they surge past, face contorted into a curious mixture of pain and pleasure that seems to scream “Queen and Country”. For when the Brits take to something, they go at hammer and tongs, full of sound and fury, as evidenced in our approach to the beautiful game.
Au revoir
There’s nothing more hilarious than a monoglottist attempting to communicate with a foreign comrade using only the power of gesticulation, especially when there is the aroma of a liaisons etranger in the kitchen. Its the sort of thing that would have Radio 4 listeners in stitches at 6:30pm on a Monday evening week after week, month after month, year after year. In this case, a prawn sandwich proved to be a mime too far, despite the eventual deployment of the, what I had previously assumed to be universal and thus fail-safe, wavy-fingers-above-the-head routine. The lady in question, I’m sorry to report, had to content herself with the Kent Crisps.