For heaven´s sake what the hell is going on. The entire UK seems to be in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Now I wouldn´t go as far as saying everybody has gone stark raving mad as there seem to be a large number of sane voices on Twitter telling me otherwise. Without a doubt though there is enough mad input from a great number of people, politicians not excepted, that makes for a very scary feeling. Tuning into the UK with serious talk of food and medicine stockpiling in the event of a “Hard Brexit“ as well as large sections of the community being labelled as traitors for expressing their views makes me feel I am in the middle of an Orwell or Huxley re-run. After having pinched myself a number of times to ensure the whole thing is not a nightmare which of course it is but not my own personal one, I feel somehow that this will end as nightmares do, by us all waking up. Until then or latest in 4 weeks no more on Brexit from me.
Over the past 5 days I have been involved in a nightmare of a different kind which unlike Brexit is not self inflicted. For quite a while now the weather in Sweden has been dry and hot with weeks of sunshine and temperatures normally associated with holiday destinations in warmer climes. Mixed feelings of appreciation coupled to nagging concerns of global warming and the long term effects on peoples lives these extreme temperatures have led to some very frighteneing short term effects in the way of enormous forest fires. With the entire countryside in practically the whole of Sweden as dry as a tinderbox, a fire of the smallest kind easily becomes a monster spreading over thousands and thousands of acres of forest where the tree tops as well as the undergrowth are bone dry. As a member of an FRG group (Frivillig resurs grupp) under the auspices of the Swedish Civil Defence authority I recently spent 5 days in Färila and Ljusdal, the scene of Sweden´s largest ever forest fire. The work assigned to our group consisted mainly of administering vast amounts of volunteered resources both people and material. Primarily this means listing offers of help via a telephone call, an e-mail or communicated via the Municipality of Ljusdal´s website. Organising a group of volunteers to set up a tent camp on the football field of Färila school, the headquarters of the co-ordinating team, was one of our very first assignments. Some of these tents were later occupied by a French contingent proudly hanging their “tricolore“ next to the blue flag with the yellow stars. I stopped to think for a minute. The pilots in that tent as well as the Polish, German, Danish, Finnish and Portugese firefighters may or may not have very much in common with the locals in the county of Hälsingland whose forest, properties and maybe even whose lives they are saving but they share the values that have made that flag the symbol of co-operation amongst the nations of Europe putting an end to fighting each other, instead working together for the sake of our common future.