h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why are all of you so obsessed with what swedes drink? I think this whole bush-thing is not entirely fair towards the subject country. We eat a lot to you know. (Well, not that much but hey...)

Sweden to me is blondes and vodka; but I'd be delighted to hear more.

Mayhap I am being a bit unfair, writing the way that I do.
But I see it not as if though I am insulting all my fellow citizens(and myself) but rather like self-irony and there is no harm in that(at least none intended).
Besides, Swedes drink a lot. The average French person drinks more per year but we drink in a completely different way in Sweden.

As Lou Reed once stated:
It's cold, everyone's drunk and everything works!

And Lou Reed should be respected in any way. You are right that selfironi is not a bad thing. I have a fair amount of that myself. Sweden can suck sometimes, nobody denies it. And swedes drink a great deal for sure. Much thanks to odd alcoholpolitics. We also have things that we should be proud of, such as... well... hmmm...
Help me out here someone! Anyway I'd say that you can live a whole life in sweden and still be happy. When our famous summer arrives, we forget all about the long long winter and go to a place called "hultsfred". There, everybody is happy and crawls in mud.

hultsfred should be the subject of a guide entry. It sounds interesting.

I'll have to dissapoint you, Hultsfred is just another music festival that I imagine take place all over the world. I've never actually been there myself so I can't speak for it. Trying to make sweden interesting in writing is hard and you have to cheat a bit, i guess.

Crawling in mud is perfectly normal behaviour if you have suffered from too many swedish winters. You would to, believe me.

As a gardener, I spend a good deal of my time crawling in mud.

are you really a gardener?

Yes, indeedy. I once showed my hands to Christopher LLoyd to prove it.

I once heard a chinese saying that was something like this:

If you want happyness for an hour, by a drink.

If you want happyness for a month, slaughter a pig.

If you want happyness for a year, get a wife.

If you want happyness for a lifetime, be a gardener.

I've heard that too. When things are growing well, it's hard to imagine anything more satisfying.

No, if you want a lifetime of insanely pulling up weeds become a gardener. (I don't really believe my last sentence, but I thought I'd throw it in anyway so I could get political If you want a lifetime of happiness find a planet where they know the meaning of the word peace.

I'll doff my cap to that! And if they have a machine for pulling up weeds...so much the better!

Why not a planet where all girls are blond and everyone drinks vodka?

Because this is the nineties and you have to duck when you say something like that. Anyway, my tastes in women and alcohol are more varied than that ... although I wouldn't say no ...

Who is Christopher Lloyd?

Christopher Lloyd is an author and columnist. His garden is Great Dixter in East Sussex, UK; which was designed for his father by Edwin Lutyens (Gertrude Jekyll's partner). He is notorious for his 'outrageous' colour schemes and for irreverent innovations, such as ripping out his celebrated rose garden and replacing it with a surreal mixture of big leafy, tropical and tropical looking plants.

http://www.sissons.demon.co.uk/dixter.htm

JTG