Ten Years of Sweden

This year I'll have been living in Sweden for ten years. That's a full quarter of my life. So when I found myself on a Stockholm trip this month I took the opportunity to stay in the same hotel as I did the very first night I spent here ten years ago.

On my first visit in 2016, the hotel check-in was one of my first ever conversations in this country. I still remember how pathetically relieved I was when they could speak English. On this visit in 2026, the hotel had installed a touchscreen check-in kiosk to optimise away that human interaction. And funnily enough it didn't work, so I still got to check in the old fashioned way anyway. Futuristic!

In the six years since I got out of Stockholm, the tunnelbana's added a mobile ticket system. Mobile ticket adoption is damn near 100%, but I still like the RFID travelcards. The Civil Defense Ministry should probably evaluate the impact on Sweden's crisis preparedness of those (American) phones becoming a single point of failure for every facet of Swedish society. Queueing in Pressbyrån to put credit on one of those cards makes me feel like a badly disguised time traveler from the 2010s at this point.

Feeling out of touch in Stockholm makes me wonder how out of touch with life in the UK I must have become by now. I got out just before the Brexit referendum. Never experienced lockdown either. They've gotten through five different prime ministers. And there's a really bad homelessness crisis which means places I used to hang out now have tents all over them.

A lot of that strikes me like the Wikipedia plot summary of a film I've never seen (or maybe just Children of Men). The island has stopped being "home" at an emotional level. If Reform take power in the next election, further family visa restrictions are likely to close the door permanently on any realistic prospect of return.

The barriers erected by Brexit sure haven't helped. The reduced reliability of mailing a gift. The increased rudeness of the airport passport cops. More than that though has been the realisation that most of what I thought of as "homesickness" was more like nostalgia for being 22 years old. I don't actually want to go to the pub that often now.

My Swedish has come a long way now too. Got to say though, nine times out of ten, Swedish loses to English on expressiveness. Words like "availability" and "accessibility" both being "tillgänglighet" means a room full of native Swedish speakers will sometimes throw in the English translation to clarify.

One of the rare cases of Swedish having the richer vocabulary is "osolidarisk". That's a negated adjective form of the word "solidarity". Its general meaning is "a person or action lacking solidarity" and it's maddeningly difficult to translate idiomatically without bulldozing the collective emphasis.

Take "Det är osolidariskt att köpa en Tesla under pågående strejk". The best I can do is "Buying a Tesla during the strike shows a lack of solidarity". But that shifts the whole centre of gravity of the sentence from the collective to the individual. The Swedish sentence is a relational statement about group cohesion. You're undermining our shared moral framework. The English translation waters it down to an individualistic warning about damaging your personal brand. What if someone thinks you're a wanker?. You'd have to double the word count to avoid that problem.

At this point I've lived in Malmö longer than anywhere except the Wirral. Another 15 years or so here and even that drops to second place. Meanwhile, seeing the kids grow up here slowly paints over my genuine homesickness centered around childhood memories of places in the Wirral.

For example, snow is rare enough in the UK that ownership of a sled is fairly rare. We sure as hell didn't have one in my family. So when we went sledding down a fairly big hill a few weeks back, it wasn't just the kids experiencing it for the first time. It was fun enough that I might even be excited next time we get heavy snow.

Stuff like that is magic for making a place feel like home.