The Cold Swedish Winter: Six Ways To Become a Swede
Danny Robins
Writer and Comedian
Editor's note: You can hear The Cold Swedish Winter on Radio 4 on Monday 11 August at 1130am. Here, the author Danny Robins talks about how he came to write the series and his tips on Six Ways To Become a Swede. The programme will be available on demand for 7 days after transmission. Read about how Danny Robins chose the music to accompany the series.
When I stood on stage performing comedy to a tiny audience in a North London pub back in 2005, little did I know that I was about to go on a journey that would take me to the frozen expanses of the North, the land of the Vikings, Abba and Volvo, a place where pickled herring is considered a delicacy and IKEA is not an offensive four letter word. As I stared out into my audience though that fateful night, I met the startling blue eyes of an attractive blonde girl and experienced what the Swedes would call “love at first eye throwing”.
Eva and I are now happily married – we even have a Swinglish child – and in the nine years we’ve been together I have become fascinated with her homeland, learning the language, embracing their occasionally strange customs and even developing a taste for herring.
I’ve made several documentaries about Sweden, but I’d always wanted to write a sitcom set there. My idea was that it would be ‘A Year in Provence’ with added snow and jokes. I drew on my own experiences to create the character of Geoff, an English stand up comedian who reluctantly relocates to Sweden when his pregnant girlfriend Linda decides she wants to move home to have the baby, and finds himself a fish out of icy water. I’ve never actually lived in Sweden but I’ve spent a lot of time there and many of the culture shocks Geoff goes through are things I’ve experienced. There are many semi-autobiographical moments in the series. Eva comes from a town called Eksjö, just as unpronounceable as the fictional Yxsjö (it basically sound like a sneeze). Her Dad was mayor, just like Geoff’s father in law, though he is much less intimidating and doesn’t own a gun or know how to skin a moose. Her mum is an avid folk dancer like Linda’s mum Gunilla and I did do a stand up comedy tour of Sweden, which gave me plenty of material when writing Geoff’s own attempts to make the Swedes laugh.
The Cold Swedish Winter is first and foremost a love letter to Sweden, but the sort of love letter a comedian would write, where you don’t actually say ‘I love you’, you just joke and tease and mock the object of your affection, but you both know really, deep down, how you feel.
Six Ways to Become a Swede
Has The Cold Swedish Winter made you want to follow in Geoff’s footsteps and move to Sweden? Well here are six suggestions to help you fit in. The Swedish word for six incidentally is ‘sex’, something which, even after nine years, still makes me laugh.
1. Don’t talk to strangers.
Swedes are famously shy. Their naturally reserved nature and inability to make small talk can often make them come across as rude. The stereotype is that the further North you go, the less people say, so that right up by the Arctic Circle, locals have managed to reduce all conversation to a single intake of breath.
2. Learn how to be ‘Lagom’.
‘Lagom’ is a uniquely Swedish word. It doesn’t have any literal translation in English but basically means ‘not too much, not too little”, sufficient, average. That doesn’t do it justice though, as this single word encapsulates the whole Swedish socially democratic outlook on life: everyone should have enough for their needs but nothing nicer or more expensive than anyone else. Lagom is the middle of the road; as Ian explains to Geoff in The Cold Swedish Winter, “if it was a colour it would be beige, if it was a person it would be Alan Titchmarsh”.
3. Worship the Sun
It’s cold a lot of the time in Sweden. If you live up North, there’s a good chance you’ll have snow from October till May, so when summer comes the Swedes really try and enjoy it. Basically, they go nuts, transforming from quiet, slightly melancholic people into whooping party animals The official beginning of Summer is Midsommarafton (Midsummer Eve) where Swedes dance around a phallic maypole, sing songs about being small frogs, then get very drunk, take their clothes off and jump in a lake.
4. Plan your alcohol buying
For some reason Swedes have decided that it is socially dangerous to be able to buy alcohol in a normal supermarket, so they have stockpiled it all in one place called Systembolaget, a state-owned chain of off licences with restrictive opening hours, lots of posters warning you of the dangers of drinking and no fridges, because, of course, if the booze was chilled you might actually want to drink it. They close at 2pm on a Saturday, so you really need to plan buying that bottle of wine for your mate’s party.
5. Spot a moose
Moose are one of the national symbols of Sweden and, like the Swedes themselves, they are shy, so you’re unlikely to spot one roaming about in the open. Wander into a forest at dawn or dusk though and you could just be lucky enough to meet one. Moose are responsible for a lot of road accidents ever year in Sweden – I don’t know why they let them drive (boom tish, I thank you). Seriously though, if one of these giant beasts with their enormous antlers runs in front of a car, the car will come off worst.
6. Become ‘bra’ at Swedish.
So here we are at number sex and I hope you’ve thought this list was ‘bra’ which means ‘good’ in Swedish. When my American friend Kurt was asked by a Swede why, after ten years of living there, he wasn’t speaking Swedish, his answer was simple – “why aren’t you speaking Swedish?” That’s the main problem with learning the language, the Swedes are so damn perfect at English it feels like you don’t need to. As with anywhere though, you can never truly understand a nation till you know the lingo. My favourite words are ‘grönsaker’, the word for vegetables, which translates literally as ‘green things’ and the word for spectacles, ‘glasögon’, which means ‘glass eyes’.
Danny Robins is the writer of The Cold Swedish Winter