onsdag 28 april 2010

A very Swedish vice

Though I'm half-Swedish and living in Sweden, I don't like to admit to being typically Swedish. In the Eighties, Sweden was a trying place to grow up in (the endless moralising, the smugness, the pride in "the Swedish model", the craze for doing just about everything "in a group"). I used to be thankful for my German passport - not that I knew much about German culture and society, but Germany (West Germany in those bad old days) had the advantage of not being Sweden.

But the fall of the wall changed things here too, and I have made peace with my mother country. After all, in some ways I AM rather Swedish. I would never carelessly leave half a glass of alcohol undrunk. I don't particularly long for angry debates at work around coffee-time - I'd much rather find a subject where everyone is more or less in agreement. And I'm hooked on the Eurovision Song Contest - even more on the Swedish part of the competition than on the European one.

The Swedish contest is tellingly called "The Melody Festival". Swedes love it. For weeks, the runners-up are selected in competitions all around the country, and they finally meet in a grand finale in Stockholm. The winner becomes the Swedish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. It is all very slickly and professionally organised. The voting system seems to get more inventive for every year, though in the end The Swedish People (or rather those TV viewers who vote like mad and more than once) tend to get their way. I don't always agree with the outcome, though when the time comes to watch the other countries' efforts I mostly end up thinking that the Swedish contribution is jolly nice after all and ought to do well. Except it doesn't - in fact, it's been ages since Sweden was anywhere near winning Eurovision. You have to hand it to the Swedes, though, they don't let that depress them for long. They're good sports - in this instance, more so than the nation who came up with the "good sport" concept.

The time has now come for a series of programmes where all the entries for the Eurovision Song Contest are shown and commented on by an "expert panel". It used to be a Nordic panel, but somewhere along the way our Nordic neighbours gave up on us, and now the only one left of the old gang is a charming and knowledgeable Finn - the rest of the panel are all Swedes with connections to the pop scene. They're pretty sensible on the whole, but I must say the songs so far are not much to write home about, which admittedly is part of the fun. Unusually, though, I don't like the Swedish winning song at all (it's the vibrato - it gets on my nerves, but apparently no-one else's) so there must be something better on offer. Moldova's sounded quite good.

söndag 25 april 2010

Georgiana who?

So why Georgiana Podsnap (obviously not my real name)?

Georgiana is a character in "Our Mutual Friend", which happens to be one of my least favourite Dickens novels. But then I'm a huge Dickens fan, so I normally find something to enjoy even in the novels which for some reason irritate me, like this one. The two main plots do little for me. I especially loathe Eugene Wrayburn, a lazy and arrogant so-called lawyer (though too well-born to be bothered to do any actual work) who amazingly enough gets the girl, in spite of his initially dishonest intentions. The silly chit's other suitor, the serious and hard-working school-master Bradley Headstone who wants to make her an honest woman from the word go, is sneered at and emotionally tortured by the ghastly Eugene until he quite understandably snaps. The plot about the missing heir John Harmon is slightly more engaging, but still includes scenes where supposed goodies behave downright nastily.I wouldn't mind all this if Dickens hadn't made me put up with all kinds of cautionary tales where the villain gets clobbered and I have had to recite through my teeth "Dickens is a moralist, what do you expect..." And then a book comes along without a moral compass, and who benefits? Eugene Wrayburn, that's who.

Anyway, back to Georgiana, one of the characters I do like. She is a gawky eighteen-year-old girl, daughter of the opinionated Mr Podsnap, and dragged into society very much against her own will. Then she meets and is mesmerised by Mr and Mrs Lammle, a fashionable-seeming couple who in fact haven't got a bean between them. They married each other in the belief that the other person was rich, and now they're trying to make the best of things by conning likely-looking high-society victims. Mrs Lammle becomes Georgiana's new best friend in no time at all, and the gullible girl is full of admiration for the Lammles' marriage, which they take great pains to present as idyllic. Interestingly enough, though, she also has a guilty crush on Alfred Lammle, who is the closest the novel gets to the clever and devious social-climbing villains Dickens was so good at but didn't create many of in his later books. Like Georgiana I'm very taken with the Lammles: there are no flies on the strong-minded Sophronia Lammle, and Alfred with his bushy red (of course) whiskers has enough ghost-of-dickensian-villains-past style about him to be attractive, even if he doesn't measure up to Dickens's best baddies. To sum up, if you want a character who symbolises villain-groupieism, then Georgiana Podsnap is it. She had some excuse, though, as she was only eighteen. Imagine a Georgiana more than fifteen years older and no wiser (but with a much nicer family!) and that would be me.

torsdag 22 april 2010

Blog blackout

Once at school, our teacher asked us to write down exactly what went through our heads, without phrasing it neatly or taking anything away. It was meant as a demonstration of the flow-of-consciousness style, and in theory it should have worked beautifully. Except my mind went blank. Having been told to think of anything and write it down, I could think of absolutely nothing. So my jottings ended up consisting of "I must think of something I can't think of anything oh what shall I do". Not something a modernist author would leap at.


Blogging turns out to be a bit like that. You are enticed by the friendly instructions to create a blog, it's no big deal, really, why, you can use it as a "personal diary", can't you, it doesn't really matter if anyone reads it, and no, it's not in the least bit sad. Everyone's doing it. Besides, you have loads of opinions and thoughts which you have already shared with your long-suffering family about a hundred times, so why not get them off your chest and into cyberspace?


And then you get to your first blog entry, and suddenly the same self-consciousness creeps in as when I tried to write down my thoughts all those years ago. What now? Well, I've created the thing, haven't I? That's enough for one evening.