Always outnumbered. Generally overdresssed.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Stockholm Syndrome

I had the misfortune to find myself in Stockholm over the weekend.

It's a truly awful place.

  • For a nation that prides itself on its design credentials, building a city spread over an archipelago isn't a great start. Unless you own an amphibious Volvo getting anywhere at all involves a tedious trudge over a network of bridges. And the weather, even in midsummer, is shit.
  • Socialism 1.1 Ten weeks paid maternity/paternity leave - which must be taken by both parents. What this means in practice is that there are loads of blonde men pushing three-wheeled prams with little frowning blonde children in them. Even the children are miserable in Sweden.
  • Socialism 1.2 No waiter or waitress in Sweden will serve you, as it were, automatically. You have to sit there for ages while they ignore you, and then when you eventually become so hypoglycemic and exasperated that you go and ask them whether they have any intention of bringing you any food they look at you like an unwiped arsehole. And that would be fine if you weren't paying £25 for what appears to be a W12 saveloy and a bowl of chips.
  • Their buses are gay:
  • Language - all Swedes speak English anyway, and that makes me think the Swedish language is really just English, written by a dyslexic with an extremely juvenile sense of humour. In fact the place we know as Sweden could just be a forgotten English internment camp for social deviants, founded in the 17th Century and allowed to develop its own culture, like a kind of Siberia for twats.
  • Fucking crows. Crows everywhere.
  • Ok, ok. There are some nice design shops, but all those modernist lampshades are Danish and Josef Frank was born in Austria. In the airport arrivals lounge they have photographic parade of famous Swedish people. I recognised ABBA and Dolph Lungren - listed as an 'actor and engineer.'
  • I stayed in a hostel dormitory with a German pervert in little shorts who liked to get up at 6.30am for a bout of sneezing, which I'm sure he was doing deliberately. I mean, he looked like he was enjoying it. The kind of weasle-faced Eurofucker who's just dying to cut off and sautee your penis.
  • Rutger Hauer is Dutch.

Seriously, never go there.

2 comments:

Ben Kay said...

I'm reading the 'Dragon Tattoo' books at the mo. I kind of hate myself for doing so, but I'm in and I can't get out.

They make Sweden seem really fucking odd.

I prefer the Sweden of Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Persona. Quite different Swedens, of course, but more appealing than Yours or Larsson's.

Anonymous said...

It's a triumph of socialism if you can take a gay bus from Stockholm all the way to Sofia