Monday, January 7, 2013

Background Info

This is going to be a blog about having a baby. It's also going to be about living in Sweden.

It's also going to be about being an immigrant, specifically one in Sweden who's wife is about to have a baby.

I'm English, I moved to Sweden about six months ago. When we arrived, neither of us had jobs to go to and I spoke no functional Swedish beyond hello, goodbye and The Horse is Eating A Carrot, courtesy of Rosetta Stone.

We'd planned on moving for some time, my wife is Swedish and was keen to escape the self-perpetuating financial nightmare of Recession Britain. We discovered we were pregnant one month before the move.

This is our story.

(cue moody music and sweeping opening credit sequence, probably something by Coldplay or Radiohead. 

Over this plays footage of us landing in Sweden. 

We're driving up and down inside a bleak freight terminal dock in Göteborg. It's early dawn. Everything is either grey, warning-sign red or an alcoholic dockhand looking for a good time. We're looking for the way out. 

After driving up and down the same stretch of what proves to be a poorly-signposted railway line for some time, we end up stuck in front of an unyielding barrier. My wife goes and finds an efficient man in a hardhat. He explains only lorries can leave by this exit and wonders how we got there. I wave at him cheerfully from the window. He nods to her sympathetically and gives her directions.

Meanwhile, an queue of impatient truck drivers with terrifying Scandinavian facial hair is forming behind our van. Bewildered and sweating with that very British horror of having mildly inconvenienced some total strangers, I make a perfect eleven point-turn and take us back the way we came.

Some time later, we manage to find the exit and escape. 

I hope this arrival is in no way an omen for our forthcoming childbirth.)


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