Scandinavia: an Ongoing Problem

In Norfolk, I have often vaguely hoped that the many war planes flying out over the North Sea indicated that our long-delayed invasion of Norway had at last begun. This is because, like most of my compatriots, I resent Norway and, indeed, all of Scandinavia. Throughout my entire life, I have been told that things are better there. In Sweden, we used to be assured, everybody had sensational sex all the time. Later we were told that the Scandinavian economic path was the brilliant Third Way between capitalism and communism. Now, television tells me, public services there are much better run than ours and, thanks to excellent school lunches, Finnish children are miraculously thin and nice and compared to our own sweet lard arses, scowling and torching up gaspers behind the disused bike sheds. And today I wake up to the news that the Swedes are in the midst of an Indie band boom. Well, let's be clear, Abba were over-rated and only the British - and, occasionally, the Americans - do proper guitar bands. Burning with resentment, I was about to torch a Swedish flag outside the embassy when I discovered, half way down the article, that these Swedish so-called 'Indie' bands are proliferating because of government arts funding. Only the Scandinavians could have come up with an idea so insanely po-faced, so patently ludicrous, so grotesquely smug, as goverment funding for 'Indie' bands. False alarm, recall the invasion barges.