1st of September (Malmö, Sweden)

It’s the 1st of September. AND it’s a Monday! I genuinely thought it was illegal nowadays to allow traumatic occasions like the first day of autumn to collide with a Monday!
People get worried and scared, and possibly a little bit hostile (personally I was close to chasing the neighbours dog down the street!). But most of all, they get confused!
This is the day when you wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if you saw people dress in bikinis and wellies at the same time as wearing a fur coat. They can’t help it. It’s not their fault. We don’t know what to expect. Should we bring an ice scrape to work or buy an ice cream – the choice suddenly isn’t obvious.

On a day like this the Swedish government chose to test the emergency alarm system. It has to be done four times a year (it used to be 12) at the first Monday of the month at three o’ clock. It’s a tradition from the second world war (that we weren’t participating in), in order to make sure that in case we were under sudden attack (we’re a neutral country) we’d know about it immediately (we wouldn’t – we would just be convinced it was another test).

I’ve hated this signal since I was a kid. I mean, I can’t even stand the sound of a hover for God’s sake! This signal is of the sort that makes glasses break and eardrums haphazardly explode without warning! And it’s located pretty much just by our house!

Our neighbour has just got a new dog. Cute. But it has got a bit of a phobia for noise. If it (he, let’s call it a he. “It”, sounds dumb. And a bit insulting. It’s (he’s) a mammal after all, come on..) hears a police car driving past, he goes wild and starts howling. Hell, he goes nuts just from the sound of a magpie shitting on the fence!

Until now his arch enemy has so far been the church. Not for religious reasons but for the noise the bells make when it’s time for mass.
The church is now eliminated as a problem. Because he, as well as the rest of us, won’t be able to even HEAR it for the next 3 weeks! (Although he did just have a bit of a panic attack over a phone ringing three houses down the road, to be fair…)


This signal has been haunting me for the larger part of my life. And even so I’ve never managed to find out where it’s actually coming from. I know that it’s located very close by, but not from where (it sounds like it’s coming from the church, or the water tower across the road, but those are just wild guesses). And today I began to feel a need, an urge, to find him (yeah, I know he’s just sort of a horn and therefore doesn’t really qualify as a mammal, but everyone calls him “Fred” so what the hell..)

And that’s where I am in my life right now…this is my aim, my focus. TO hell with work and obligations. I’m gonna find that horn and I’m gonna throw a selection of ripe fruit and vegetables on it (him). And then I’m gonna laugh.


I’ve always known I was an anarchist at heart…