President in exile...

I gather that I am not the only one to find something irresistibly comic about Jonas Himmelstrand describing himself as the ‘President in Exile of the Swedish Association of Home Educators'. President in exile, indeed! It puts one in mind of some old black and white Hollywood film; anybody remember The Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Coleman? In order to appreciate the full bathos of the situation, it is necessary to know something of the place where this fellow is now living, namely the Aland Islands. Actually, my former wife was Swedish and I lived in that country for some years.


The Aland Islands lie only about thirty miles off the coast of Sweden; roughly the same distance as the Isle of Man is from Liverpool. Technically, they are Finnish territory, but to all intents and purposes they are a Swedish province which by an accident of history is under Finnish jurisdiction. They are self-governing, issue their own stamps and, best of all, Swedish is the official language. I’m not at all sure in what sense Jonas Himmelstrand is exiled there; there are regular ferry services to the Swedish mainland and even an airport. He travels the world on business and is welcome to return to Sweden whenever he wishes. There is in fact quite a community of Swedish home educators there, who also claim to be in ’exile’.

Actually, Mr Himmelstrand is doing fine in Aland. He is able to run his company from there as well as if he had remained in Uppsala. It is as though I moved from Essex to the Isle of Wight and then claimed that I had been driven into exile! When somebody says that he has been exiled, you naturally assume that he has left behind his native country and is perhaps living in reduced circumstances abroad. This is not the case at all and I can only attribute Jonas Himmelstrand’s description of himself in this way to a mixture of pomposity and self-importance. The fact that he runs a setup called 'The Happy Company' and signs off with 'Creative regards'  tends only to confirm me in this initial view.