Mothers, Milk, and Malmö FF

Yesterday was mothers’ day in Sweden and mum and I went on a little ‘close to home’ tourism trip. It is a curious fact of life that interesting things located too close to one’s life and home are usually the ones neglected – just as it is much harder to notice dust that sits on one’s own furniture... Some sort of partial blindness and peculiar selection. A further embarrassing example is that on my travels in Europe I have visited many of the great and famous art galleries – yet somehow, during the years in Dublin I never went to the National Gallery. Never. I worked just around the corner from it. Too close.

We attempted the Art Gallery of Malmö, a place which we have of course visited many times before but which, as a small museum, almost only houses temporary exhibitions. Something new every time. It was, to our great chagrin, closed, and propelled us in the direction of the parks. Rain lurked in the dark sky (a fact that had caused us to abandon early plans involving the outdoors) but we decided to look up the newly created ‘Linnaeus garden’ in Kungsparken, only one of the masses of initiatives marking the tercentenary of the great man’s birth. This anniversary has largely passed me by; my acquaintance with Linnaeus being limited to reading some of his travel narratives. They, on the other hand, are a pretty good read – the man could concoct a cracking metaphor for things he observed in nature. The garden was nice, if small, an sandwiched in between a rose garden and a school garden: an initiative which has allocated a little square for the pupils of various schools to cultivate stuff in.

The fresh air of the park was eventually substituted for the stuffiness of the Castle museum, which welcomes its visitors with an enormous giraffe in the reception. This is partly to confuse tourists, of course, but mainly to introduce the lower floor animal exhibition of living as well as stuffed creatures. We only visited one exhibition in the building before succumbing to the stuffiness (how did those animals die? I have a theory) and seeking fresh air and food. The exhibition was all about coffee, and very interesting. It explored everything from the actual coffee beans and the working conditions of those who provide us with our beloved morning (and lunch and afternoon and evening) drink, to the role coffee has played in revolutions and recipe for a Swedish ‘Kaffegök’: Put a penny in the bottom of a cup, fill it with coffee until you can no longer see the coin, then fill it with aquavit until the coin reappears… There was also a lovely collection of paraphernalia surrounding coffee culture throughout the ages.

Fortified by a little walk and some lunch (pizza) we went to a fairly new coffee shop, one which only uses fair trade coffee. After the exhibition it was the only option, really – we really wanted coffee, and we really wanted it to be fair trade… The café is a trendy one; long gone are days when fair trade and organic food was for hippies only – now it’s chic. It sells. And as long as the produce used is genuine that is a very good thing, at the end of the day perhaps the only way to change people’s habits into sustainable ones is to make the sustainable ones…trendy. We live in a rich country, after all, and if it becomes trendy to pay a little more for organic/fair trade produce it may actually boost long-term change. Maybe.

By the time we had finished our lovely lattes (a phenomenon which has palpably increased the milk consumption in the country – hmm…) and had tired of the somewhat psychedelic décor, we decided it was time for a new project. And went to a football game. By that time the weather had improved well past immediate rain threat, so we made our way to Malmö Stadium to watch our boys in blue take on Gefle. The sun shone a little over the first half, but disappeared again for the second – and that goes for the game as well. Bright start, Malmö controlled most of the game and got an early goal, only to lose momentum and finally end with a 1-1 draw. I love the hardcore Malmö support, singing their little blue hearts out non-stop for 90 minutes and managing to mask the fact that the 26000 capacity stadium only had 9500 people in it… Marvellous way to spend a Sunday evening, despite the draw.