Niklas' blog

About 11 years ago I spent a short stint of living in a Stockholmian suburb called Hökarängen. It’s a smallish town built in the 1950s when work was rife and the ‘burbs surrounding the capital of our nation were cemented – or rather, built in concrete slabs. So was the case with Hökarängen, where I lived in a flat inside a three-floor apartment building. I rented the place second-hand from a person who’d painted the walls by using a sponge, colouring everything terracotta/meat. He had a kid, about 3 years old. He’d used her hands to print every wall in the living-room from the ground to as far up as she could reach, which hopefully was cute in her dad’s eyes, but made everybody else in the world who saw it think he was kidnapping, hoarding and and abusing children.

There’s always something about visiting past places in your life. I remember the two cats I owned while living there, a couple of Cornish Rexes; that quickly amounted to nothing because I actually developed allergic problems with them, so I had to sell them and at the same time I moved.

It was a little funny going back there, more than ten years later. As Mia and I slowly walked under hanging branches covered by a dark sky, the cold air seemed to seep into my every part, and it didn’t matter. It was like opening an old scrapbook, which made me think about where I am now in life, compared with then. Mia and I literally stood at crossroads, right outside my former abode, where ten paths met not far from a stable. No horses out. We peered into the apartment where somebody had the lights on and I saw the meaty, sponged colour staring back at me from the walls as though no time had passed. No cats gazed at me from afar, which Arne (my fave rex, and no, I didn’t pick the name) used as post for watching the neighbourhood. He is probably old now.

Mia and I locked arms, slowly walked back to the center of Hökarängen and I really enjoyed it. Leaving what was a temporary home for our main reason for being in Hökarängen in the first place: cheap stuff and a psychotic experience. Perhaps an explanation is in place:

Mia and I have recently been following a new Swedish TV-series called “Ullared“, which focuses on a town far south in Sweden, a place where people go en masse to spend, spend and spend, mainly from one single company called Gekås, where people come every single day and spend more money than they do at IKEA. One day, Gekås will rule the Earth.

So, when a free local magazine dropped through our letterbox and alerted us to the fact that a place called Matdax were having a zany christmas special coming up, we had to go! It of course meant going there on a Thursday between 21:00-23:00 in another part of town, but heck, that was even more alluring like the Ullared experience! By the way, the people responsible for putting together the ads for Matdax deserve a gigantic medal. Just check this example out:

Just check out the reklam for Matolja (cooking oil) in the middle of the right-hand page; they hammer that message in by posting the same picture 19 times in a row! Oh god, if only all ad-people were that side of genius I’d be cheese on toast all day, every day.

We arrived at Hökarängen Centrum and immediately spotted a line of people trickling from the entrance beyond my field of vision. Bog. Mia and I gawked at the queue and I realised that this was really reminiscent of American/Soviet food queues:

We took baby steps forward for a good 30 minutes, wondering whether we’d do better to go home as it was freezing; winter in Stockholm is approaching fast! Still, we had each other and bit the bullet as I thought about how a lot of people who have nearly escaped freezing to death say that you feel really warm just before you die; I did actually feel quite warm just as we entered the store. While thawing in the store a little later I could have swore I felt rocks in my shoes, but that was just from my feet regaining consciousness.

It took us a couple of minutes to actually enter the store properly as people were continuing the queuing inside the store, for shopping baskets. Yep, living in Sweden means queuing and liking it. When released from the line, we sprung into action by loading up on oranges, then cheeses, then skin lotion, then eggs, then–then—argh! Berzerker! We went nuts. It’s easy getting really far into spending a lot of money on trinkets, which really is what the whole Ullared-ish experience is about: getting lost in the madness which is cheap stuff in the thousands, with loads of other people (subconsciously?) egging you on. Must. Buy.

We left the store with three full grocery bags and one big panettone and have rarely been to the grocery store since then, I may add. Here’s a small slideshow of pics from our little visit in Hökarängen:

Mia has written this post on our nightly adventure and I agree with her, we ought to turn it into tradition. Until then, I’ll just try to stay in as much as is humanly possible because it’s absolutely freezing outdoors. By the way, who wouldn’t want to stay at home with these cuties?¹

Bonus round: I’ve filmed our neighbours’ zany xmas decoration, the same as it was last year. And the year before that. I panned left to right to compare the two affected balconies to give you a little perspective. Imagine living inside one of these apartments!

1. And Lotta, of course![back]