there was a troll’s face, his tongue hanging out like a panting dog and his nose mischievously shaped like a grotesque phallus.
It’s a type of humour you probably recognise, popular in rural Sweden, where farmers craft crude figures such as a man relieving himself, a thin curve of wood chiselled to represent the arc of piss.
Rotate the knife on your palm, backwards and forwards—
Spinning it like this—
Faster! So you can see both figures at the same time, the troll lusting after the woman, the woman unaware she’s being watched – the two blurred together. The implication is clear. The fact of the woman being blind to her danger heightens the sexual pleasure of the troll.
The knife was a gift, a strange gift, I’m sure you’d agree, given to me by my neighbour the first time we met. Despite him being only a ten-minute walk from our farm, that meeting didn’t take place until we’d lived in Sweden for two weeks – two weeks, and in all that time, not a single introduction from any of the nearby farmers. We were being ignored. Instructions had been given not to approach us. In London there are countless neighbours who never speak to each other. But anonymity doesn’t exist in rural Sweden. It isn’t possible to live that way. We required the consent of the community to settle in that region, we couldn’t sulk in our corner of the countryside. There were practical considerations. The previous owner – brave Cecilia – had informed me that our spare land could be leased to local farmers. Typically they’d pay a nominal sum, however, I was of the opinion that we could persuade them to provide the foodstuffs we couldn’t produce.
Deciding that two weeks was long enough, I woke up one morning and told Chris we’d knock on their door if they wouldn’t knock on ours. That day I took great care over my appearance, selecting a pair of cotton trousers since a dress would’ve implied I was incapable of manual labour. I didn’t want to play poverty. We couldn’t admit the extent of our financial problems. The truth might make us seem pitiful, and they’d interpret the information as an insult, deducing that we’d only moved into the region because we couldn’t afford to be anywhere else. Equally we couldn’t give off the impression that we believed we could buy our way into the community. On the spur of the moment I took down the small Swedish flag hanging from the side of our house and turned the flag into a bandana, using it to tie back my hair.
Chris refused to accompany me. He couldn’t speak Swedish and was too proud to stand beside me waiting for a translation. To tell the truth, I was pleased. First impressions were vital and I was sceptical they’d react warmly to an Englishman who barely spoke a word of their language. I wanted to prove to these farmers that we weren’t hapless foreign city folk who placed no value on tradition. I couldn’t wait to see their faces light up when I spoke to them in fluent Swedish, proudly declaring that I’d been brought up on a remote farm, just like the one we now owned.
The farm nearest to us belonged to the largest landowner in the region and it was with this particular farmer that Cecilia had struck an arrangement to lease the fields. It was obvious that I should begin with him. Walking up the road I arrived at an enormous pig barn, no windows, a bleak steel roof with narrow black chimneys jutting out the top and a smell of pig shit and pig-fattening chemicals. Qualms about intensive farming were not going to win over the locals. What’s more, Chris had stated clearly that he couldn’t survive as a vegetarian. There was very little protein in our diet and almost no money in the bank, so if this was our only source of meat, aside from the salmon, then I couldn’t afford to turn it down on the basis of food ethics. A moral position would make me seem superior, fussy and, worst of all, foreign.
Their house was situated at the
It’s a type of humour you probably recognise, popular in rural Sweden, where farmers craft crude figures such as a man relieving himself, a thin curve of wood chiselled to represent the arc of piss.
Rotate the knife on your palm, backwards and forwards—
Spinning it like this—
Faster! So you can see both figures at the same time, the troll lusting after the woman, the woman unaware she’s being watched – the two blurred together. The implication is clear. The fact of the woman being blind to her danger heightens the sexual pleasure of the troll.
The knife was a gift, a strange gift, I’m sure you’d agree, given to me by my neighbour the first time we met. Despite him being only a ten-minute walk from our farm, that meeting didn’t take place until we’d lived in Sweden for two weeks – two weeks, and in all that time, not a single introduction from any of the nearby farmers. We were being ignored. Instructions had been given not to approach us. In London there are countless neighbours who never speak to each other. But anonymity doesn’t exist in rural Sweden. It isn’t possible to live that way. We required the consent of the community to settle in that region, we couldn’t sulk in our corner of the countryside. There were practical considerations. The previous owner – brave Cecilia – had informed me that our spare land could be leased to local farmers. Typically they’d pay a nominal sum, however, I was of the opinion that we could persuade them to provide the foodstuffs we couldn’t produce.
Deciding that two weeks was long enough, I woke up one morning and told Chris we’d knock on their door if they wouldn’t knock on ours. That day I took great care over my appearance, selecting a pair of cotton trousers since a dress would’ve implied I was incapable of manual labour. I didn’t want to play poverty. We couldn’t admit the extent of our financial problems. The truth might make us seem pitiful, and they’d interpret the information as an insult, deducing that we’d only moved into the region because we couldn’t afford to be anywhere else. Equally we couldn’t give off the impression that we believed we could buy our way into the community. On the spur of the moment I took down the small Swedish flag hanging from the side of our house and turned the flag into a bandana, using it to tie back my hair.
Chris refused to accompany me. He couldn’t speak Swedish and was too proud to stand beside me waiting for a translation. To tell the truth, I was pleased. First impressions were vital and I was sceptical they’d react warmly to an Englishman who barely spoke a word of their language. I wanted to prove to these farmers that we weren’t hapless foreign city folk who placed no value on tradition. I couldn’t wait to see their faces light up when I spoke to them in fluent Swedish, proudly declaring that I’d been brought up on a remote farm, just like the one we now owned.
The farm nearest to us belonged to the largest landowner in the region and it was with this particular farmer that Cecilia had struck an arrangement to lease the fields. It was obvious that I should begin with him. Walking up the road I arrived at an enormous pig barn, no windows, a bleak steel roof with narrow black chimneys jutting out the top and a smell of pig shit and pig-fattening chemicals. Qualms about intensive farming were not going to win over the locals. What’s more, Chris had stated clearly that he couldn’t survive as a vegetarian. There was very little protein in our diet and almost no money in the bank, so if this was our only source of meat, aside from the salmon, then I couldn’t afford to turn it down on the basis of food ethics. A moral position would make me seem superior, fussy and, worst of all, foreign.
Their house was situated at the
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