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| Even on his day off, Moses couldn't resist parting something |
Another more subtle difference is the inclusion in almost all Swedish kitchens I have encountered of the humble cheese shaver. Not the cumbersome cheese graters you’ll find in most British households but the cheese shaver, a simple tool designed to shave off handsome slivers of cheese which you can then drape onto your sandwich. It also works on cucumber, so two birds and all that jazz…
Perhaps the most startling difference between Sweden and the UK (knighthood for Mr. Acronym!), though, is Sweden’s dependency on bicycles.
Perhaps the most startling difference between Sweden and the UK (knighthood for Mr. Acronym!), though, is Sweden’s dependency on bicycles.
Cycle lanes in the UK are exhausting to contemplate. They smack of political correctness, of council approval. With only road-kill for company, the pathos of their existence is there for all to see, each little painted bicycle symbol a reminder of the folly they represent. Not to mention they are as narrow as the rules will allow and brazenly ignored by even the most discerning of motorists.
Should a cyclist ever have the temerity to actually use a cycle lane in the UK then they know they are playing with fire, and could at any moment become a statistic at the hands of a lazy taxi driver who thinks that ‘cycle lane’ is a setting on his washing machine.
Not so in Sweden. The Swedes love cycling and Sweden loves them to cycle. Over here the term cycle lane doesn’t really do justice to the service provided to cyclists. Here the cyclists exist in total harmony with motorists, gleefully hurtling along the bicycle highways which run adjacently, and in no way inferiorly to the roads. There are two lanes as per, say, your average road, and even delightfully thoughtful signposts to other surrounding townships.
While cycling around Lund (which is a previous winner of best cycle town in Sweden) you could often be forgiven for thinking you’d strayed into Hobbiton, such is the labyrinthine nature of the paths which you are free to whiz along, with the added bonus of having gorgeous Skanian countryside to gawk at as you do so.
Enthusing as I am about this cycling utopia, it would be easy to slip into a reverie and start imagining a world where there are no longer any cars, trucks or any other CO2-belching monstrosities, but only bicycles. In this world of whirring bike chains and clicking gears, puncture repair would be added to the kindergarten syllabus and the salubrious smell of WD40 would become omnipresent.
In this world, I can think of only two flies which could seriously jeopardise the ointment. The first is the risk to the hitherto unmentioned pedestrian. As until recently I was more often than not a pedestrian myself (more on that later), I can attest that in a society where the cycle rules, the pedestrian faces a tricky existence. Perhaps as a newcomer to Sweden I am merely not yet accustomed to identifying cycle lane from footpath. Maybe it’s something I’ll just get used to, but in the unrelenting hullabaloo of downtown Malmo I found myself hopping from the path of oncoming cyclists so often that I began to hear cycle bells tinkling in my sleep.
The next stumbling block is the unprecedented crime rate which comes with a society abundant with bicycles.
In 2010, the Swedish Crime Survey reported that 60, 500 bicycle thefts had been recorded by police in 2010 alone. Of these 60, 500 thefts, 1% was cleared up.
Though these statistics make concerning viewing, it does represent a slight decline in bicycle theft over the last ten years. That said, I get the impression that were those statistics in the UK there would be mass hysteria about bike thieves gone wild. The tabloids would no doubt claim that the crimes were related to the production of a new class-A street drug and, before long, the anti-immigration lot would jump on it and erroneously claim that someone foreign was up to something.
In Sweden, or at least in the portion of Sweden that I am most familiar with, Skane, there seems to be a far more laissez faire attitude to the situation. In Malmo and Lund especially, people seem to almost accept that their bikes could go a-wandering at any time.
This no doubt explains why the majority of people cycle around on what could most accurately be described as rust buckets. ‘If it goes, then it goes’, seems to be the mentality in Sweden and, compared to the mentality of ‘the bigger and shinier the better’ which the UK adopts, this is actually most refreshing.
I myself have been looking for a bike recently and was advised by friends that student ads would be the best place to look. After a few weeks looking around it seemed to me that the going rate for a bog-standard bike here is about 500 SEK.
Responding to an ad in Konsum for a bike priced exactly that, I was soon in possession of my first Swedish rust bucket.
Making the leap from terrorised pedestrian to maniacal cyclist was as smooth a transition as I could have hoped for, and I was soon admonishing the slightest pedestrian infraction with a merry tinkling of my bell.
I have taken an immediate fondness to my new two-wheeled accomplice, and so was greatly annoyed last week to find a plucky, drunken man carefully examining my bike outside Malmo’s Triangeln station. Assuming he wasn’t admiring the two tone rust effect on my chassis, I, in a vain attempt not to betray my meek nature, challenged him.
What ensued was the usual confusing mix of Swedish and English exchanges before the man, quite brilliantly ignoring the fact I had just caught him trying to steal my property, asked me for a lift to Malmo’s Mollan district.
Taken aback, I waited for any sign of abashment in his twinkling drunken eyes, any sign that this might potentially be a situation he would look back on someday and cringe with embarrassment at, and, when seeing there was none to be found, said: “Go on then pal, hop on”.
