The Swede who threw a better spanner in the works

There are so many people to thank for so many reasons, all those people who made life easier for the rest of the world population. All those people who took things one step further for the greater good of all, those people who thought “ this can’t be it? There must be more to this tool than this?!”

Well, no more sleepless nights for all you home-handy individuals who have found yourself on many occasions looking down on your personal adjustable wrench and thought “who came up with this clever tool and is it a Swede?”

Let me quench your thirst for answers. Firstly, is it a Swede? But of course it is a Swede. The inventor of the adjustable wrench, unknowingly, is the forefather of the expression ‘less is more’. While Johan Petter Johansson (1853-1943) was working as a fitter, he found himself standing in a sea of wrenches to match a whole range of screws and nuts. The confusion and frustration was evident for JPJ and being the clever sausage he was he combined the whole lot into one single tool, the adjustable nut wrench, or the universal wrench. This little piece of invention was constructed and patented in 1892. Since then, the regular toolbox contents have been more or less halved and many trades’ people’s backs have been saved, chiropractic clinics gone out of business, all due to our nifty JPJ. So inspirational has the adjustable wrench been that some people even write songs about it. Credit given where credit is due.

Shine a light on the Reflector

In these days of brightness I feel an overwhelming urge to share some warm thoughts on how good it is to have a reflector in you pocket. Any person who ever spent a winter in that Nordic country of mine will know that to make your self be seen in the dark is almost as important as having a seatbelt in the car. Debatable, absolutely, but such is the attitude of some Swedes. I don’t know of any country that has such a strong urge and an identified need to be seen in the dark as the Swede. Sure, my vast knowledge of cultures wearing a snappy reflector on their body doesn’t include the Polish highlands or the depth of the Ukraine, still I feel confident to claim that Swedes must surely be on the top 3-list of such activities.

And what a wonderful free marketing tool the reflector is! Every bank, business and promotional ‘do’ produce a reflector to hand out for free. Because guess what, there is a whole willing population of Swedes trying to be seen in the dark. Yep, one plus one is two and never has Sparbanken got so much free advertising as they do in the winter darkness of Sweden, with their logo dangling so temptingly from the pocket of a responsible Swede.

Oh, the joys of attaching a new reflector to the pocket of your winter jacket lifted your spirit as few other things did. The shapes and styles were many and the choice was often hard, but then again there are normally two pockets on the jacket so why not stick one reflector in each pocket, go crazy. So every little winter pocket of my childhood contained a piece or two of hard shiny plastic, attached to a safety pin and a piece of string. Sometimes the safety pin stopped being safe and while rummaging around inside the pocket for the reflector many small fingers drew a drop of blood or two. Often the string was a complete mess and instead of hanging freely outside your pocket and swinging while you walked, one would only spot a piece of plastic half peering out of the pocket in a choking kind of fashion, probably wrapped in the half-ripped pocket lining as well. But safety before all else.

As we moved into the 21st Century many things changed, but Swedes still like to be seen in the dark and a new cool approach to the reflector lurv is the Firefly reflectors. Stylish, fun and functional, just like your regular Swede. And why stop at saving your children from the darkness of winter, include your dog in the light-loving-reflector fest!

White cabbage is the new rocket

Who invented the Swedish pizza salad?

Who ever it was, their image should be immortalised in a white cabbage sculpture.
Pizza salad is for the visit to a Swedish pizzeria like soy sauce is to a Japanese meal – a must. And on top of it, one could interpret this glorious delicacy as a culinary expression of Swedish socialism because the pizza salad is FREE. Amazing. Or not.
The pizza salad is made by one of the cheapest vegetables there is, white cabbage. It’s a vegetable that in general isn’t going down in history as the most sensual or exotic piece of nature. While asparagus could trigger erotic ideas and the lure of phallic horizons, white cabbage draws a blank. Or, for the breastfeeding masses out there, white cabbage could, at a stretch, trigger ideas about soothing breasts riddled with the agonies of mastitis. Therefore, the likelihood of asparagus and white cabbage ending up on the same plate is not very big.

To create this delicacy, the cabbage is sliced thinly and then doused in oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and if you’re lucky, a spot of pickled capsicum. Does this sound pretty lame? Just hang in there. The salad gets better the older it gets. A bit like a nice wine. It needs time. Just not too much time because then your Grange Hermitage of pizza salads turn into bad cabbage. And you don’t want to eat that, trust me.

In Sweden, it doesn’t matter how fantastic the actual pizza is, and how cheap it is, if you don’t get offered your free pizza salad, the likeliness of a return visit to that particular pizzeria is close to zero. Sounds strange, but then again, we can be kind of strange people. So when my craving for a good ol’ pizza salad to go with my Kebab pizza gets the better of me I head to Sven’s Viking Pizza in Bondi Junction. So good is his salad AND his pizzas that the Italian Association of Pizza Makers in Australia is looking for a way to close him down. Not bad for a guy with a viking helmet. Go Sven!

Brush in style.

‘A spring clean’, what a wonderful, slightly dated expression, if you are to really look at what it says. The old idea of having seasonal cleanings, the ones where you turn the house upside down, drag everything out into the garden, devote a whole day, or weekend, to thoroughly scrub every nook and cranny of your place, well, yeah, keep the dream alive is all I can say. Perhaps something changed in our cleaning habits when the vacuum cleaner became a standard object in every household, perhaps we don’t find the time to do these gigantic clean outs any longer or perhaps we just can’t be bothered. As I often say when the dust balls tumble down the hallway like spinifex on the prairie and I’m pinned to the wall: ‘A little dirt has never hurt anyone.’ Which really just means that I can happily accept my lacking cleaning-gene that obviously wasn’t passed down from my mother.

But if I have to clean, which does happen, I like to make it as graceful an activity as possible. And this doesn’t include crawling around on the floor on all fours with a brush and pan to pick up unidentified objects. Oh no, I do this activity in style using yet another very smart Swedish product, the long handled brush and pan. It’s so simple it’s almost stupid. If it wasn’t so smart. What more can you ask for, functional and good-looking.

www.funkis.com

Homo Cyclius

While Swedes have seen the cycling light many light years ago, we are still struggling here in Australia to come to terms with the bicycle as a mode of transport, not just a leisure activity that includes a car ride, with bike on bike rack, to the park.

Bike riding in Sydney is up there with extreme sports like base-jumping. You are basically risking your life, willingly. People call you a fool for venturing out in the street jungle full of predatory machines such as cars. AND should you be so irresponsible as sticking a kid in the child seat, you could risk loosing custody of your own offsprings. This misconception could possibly be traced back to some clever car manufacturer, who knows. But let’s get one thing straight, bike riding is great. For so many reasons. And I’m not going to tell you which those reasons are; you just have to find out for yourself.

And while Sweden didn’t invent the wheel they invented bikes such as Skeppshult's wonderful machines. Second best I’d say. They are available in Australia, but you might have to pop to Victoria to pick one up.

www.cykla.com.au
Skeppshult Bikes

The Big Chanterelle Myth

It’s been a good year, an amazing year. At least, so I was told.
2009 was the year when you couldn’t help but stumble upon chanterelles in the Swedish forest. They were EVERYWHERE. No exaggeration. Even if you didn’t try to pick them you seemed to come home with pockets full of them, simply by passing through a bit of nature. ‘Greta just popped out, and lo and behold, five litres of chanterelles while picking up the newspaper from the letterbox in the morning. ‘. Amazing. ‘Janne goes out every afternoon and scoops up more than he can eat and bring to work for charitable distribution’. Unheard of. No one gives away litres of chanterelles unless they are some other look-a-like but seriously poisonous fungi found in the moss.

So to put it mildly, my expectations in the chanterelle department of success was, as far as I was concerned, a given. It was more a question of HOW many amazing litres would I be able to brag about once I came out of the woods alive after my fungal expedition. Well, my chanterelle glee soon enough turned to chanterelle desperation, before finally settling on chanterelle failure. I found one. Not two, but one. And I covered the geographical landmass of an average county. Either they were all hiding from my terribly untrained eye or as my mother gently remarked: ‘someone must have cleared this place before you’. Sure, had it been the size of an average city park. Sure. But I’m talking an area the size of Tasmania. SURELY ‘someone’ couldn’t have cleared it all before me. And aren’t they meant to grow back?! And I have to admit, that single one I found was so pathetically small that any chanterelle picker worth their woven basket would have left it to grow. But hell, I couldn’t come back completely empty handed. The shame would have been unbearable.

So my theory is that the chanterelle myth strongly resembles the fish myth, you know the one that got away? Because, seriously, has anyone ever seen these 8 gazillion litres of chanterelles that people seem to effortlessly amass? Do you actually confront someone after they told their proud and happy forest story and insist on being shown the freezer box in the basement just to verify the truth factor? That kind of behaviour results in less Christmas cards. No one likes to be doubted, especially not in the chanterelly kind of way. So you just say ‘wow, that’s amazing’ and then the story is legitimate. It’s the truth, at least as far as you’ve been told. No proof shown, no proof needed.

Still, my single premature chanterelle teamed up with a small bunch of other chanterelle misfits and became a little taste sensation of a nibble before dinner. Butter, salt, white pepper and onion. And of course that rare species of a thing called chanterelle. Together they made my day, the delicacy of rarity is a fine thing to taste. And as I’ve always said, ‘better one chanterelle on the fork than six litres unpicked in the forest’.

Why do we need a Swede?

Why do we need a Swede? They are pretty handy to have.
Just ask the Balkans. Or the Iraquis. Or the UN. When you need someone to drop in for some peace negotiations, or look for weapons of mass destruction, and you are really scraping the barrel for objective choices, searching high and low for people out there without too many stains on their national reputation. Or stains on their intern’s dress.
There is an answer. Go safe, go Swede.

A couple of favorite political pin-up boys to stir into the pot of dealing with messy situations around the globe are Carl Bildt and Hans Blix. Both did what they could with various results. Still, no damage was done to the reputation of the Swede.
Slick and smooth is all I can.