This evening was always going to get quite messy.
It was my first night in the far north of Sweden and things were getting stranger by the minute.
To my left at the dining table of a house in Vuollerim, just shy of the Arctic Circle, a very drunk sixty-something man with grey hair, thick bottle-bottom glasses, and a beard so dense and impenetrable it might have been harbouring a small family of Arctic hares, was ranting about the pointlessness of modern culture in general and movies in particular.
– I don’t watch television and I never watch movies – if you want adventure, take an adventure yourself, he said.
Nothing new there, you might think – some people are always moaning about something. But Jens was no ordinary pensioner. He was a senior member of a film crew for an upcoming high-budget family epic, which had been filming in the area.
– But you’re working on what will be the biggest Swedish film of next year, I said.
– How can you not like movies?
Jens, his eyes the size of planets behind his thick glasses, looked at me as if I’d asked him why birds fly.
– I come from the north – here we do things, we don’t just watch.
And with that, he yelled across the table at another dinner guest:
– Pass the wine: don’t drink it all yourself!
Well, he was taking the “doing” part seriously – he was certainly not going to just watch other people drinking.
How did I get there, in June in the thawing north of Sweden, around a dinner table surrounded by inebriated film-makers and locals, nearly 3,000 kilometres from my hometown of London?
By a truck, driven in shifts from London by my friend John and me. The truck contained the worldly possessions of my girlfriend and I. We were leaving the frenzy of London life, and wanted to do it properly – no half-cocked move to the English countryside or even southern Sweden. We wanted beauty, isolation, and otherness. We wanted northern Sweden.
Well, John and I had got stuck right into the otherness, that’s for sure.
The pipes at our rental house had burst, so it was uninhabitable. A couple of phone calls later we’d booked ourselves in at the Hotel Vuollerim.
Vuollerim
We were lucky – a visiting film crew had nabbed all but two of the rooms.
When we’d arrived, the American receptionist had talked us into attending what she rather quaintly called a house-jumping dinner party that night. It was a local tradition, she said.
She said it was a great way to meet locals. Each course was served in a different local’s house. It sounded fun, but I was a little suspicious. In all my research on Norrland, I’d never read about house-jumping dinners. It sounded like a sales pitch.
But the dinner was enjoyable. The food was heavy on northern produce, so lots of fish such as arctic char and even a reindeer carpaccio starter. Most of the film crew were charm personified. Even Jens, who, before he'd got too pickled, told me why they’d chosen the far north to film.
– The light is different to anywhere in the world, and the scenery is breathtaking. It’s perfect for film-making.
The next day John and I, nursing monumental hangovers, were moving boxes. We asked our local helper, Anders, an 18-year-old student with a typically dry-as-dust northern sense of humour, if house-jumping dinner parties really were a local tradition.
He raised one eyebrow, grinned, and said:
– House-jumping dinner parties? What do you think? Do they sound northern?
This article is a column and the opinions are the writer's own.