Today, I have spent over four hours in the car. I have in that time actu­ally not trans­ported myself any fur­ther than back and forth to one sin­gle meet­ing, that took place about 90 kilo­me­ters from my Mum­my­Mug office in The Hague. So, the aver­age 2 hours that I spent dri­ving each way to get there mean I aver­aged a stun­ning 45 kms per hour. On the high­way. Wow. Now, that is the real­ity of liv­ing in the Nether­lands: a great but very, very full lit­tle coun­try, that clogs up every day with queues even though the land­scape is criss-crossed by four or six lane high­ways. And how could we not have these queues, with more than 17 mil­lion peo­ple crowded together here in the polder land­scape? We actu­ally have a pop­u­la­tion den­sity com­pa­ra­ble to that of Bangladesh.

Quite a stark con­trast to Swe­den: my region in Swe­den, Sma­land, has about the sur­face of the Nether­lands, and boasts  a mere 500,000 inhab­i­tants. And that, folks, is a pop­u­lated area of Swe­den. Well — to make up for it, we have at least 17 mil­lion trees though.…

So today, my car was my best friend, and it really deserves a pre­sen­ta­tion I believe. It is a Volvo (of course), a true clas­sic, box-style 240 sta­tion wagon, with nearly 300,000 kms on the teller and is cour­tesy to my brother-in-law, who could not part from his beloved Volvo when upgrad­ing to a newer model. As I can­not afford much more than a bike, really, hav­ing spent all my money on Mum­my­Mug pro­to­types in the past three years, I was very happy to get the chance to take it over.

Because although I must be bru­tally hon­est and admit I do drive this par­tic­u­lar car because I can’t afford another (if I could choose freely, I sup­pose I would go for some­thing with air­con­di­tion­ing, a func­tion­ing radio and power steer­ing. If I could choose REALLY freely, I’d choose an Audi TT.)

But — apart from the sheer func­tion­al­ity, that it starts, moves and tak­ing me to my meet­ings, and apart from the obvi­ous loud and clear state­ment it makes about my Swedish her­itage, it does have tremen­dous char­ac­ter. It’s kind of sail­ing on the road, gen­tly bounc­ing a bit, plough­ing for­ward with dig­nity among all the newer mod­els on the road. it seems to be say­ing: here I come, and I am not mak­ing any excuses! The seats are gen­er­ous, the vis­i­bil­ity great. It is BIG — feels big while dri­ving it, and feels totally absolutely enor­mous when try­ing to park it: yep, I do admit I some­times cir­cle around to find a really eas­ily acces­si­ble simply-drive-in-with-your-nose-first park­ing place, because I will not even think about manoev­er­ing it back­wards into a tiny spot along the road, surely mea­sured made more for a Smart rather than this REAL car.

Oth­ers do recog­nise this too: today, while fill­ing up the tank, a guy get­ting out of a new Volvo (of course) at the pump next to mine gave me (well, the car then!) an appre­cia­tive nod and said: ‘Mooie bak!!’ So you see, it even earns me respect with the guys.

And most impor­tantly: there is some­thing truly bitter-sweet about dri­ving around in this old car. A proud and almost rebel­lious feeling.

Because I know that I drive this par­tic­u­lar car, right now, because of the very a con­scious choice to go for it with Mum­my­Mug. And thus to put the money where it really belongs: in the core of the busi­ness. And to stick with it, no mat­ter how long it takes to reach the goal.

And to feel that what does it mat­ter, if I don’t drive the most lux­u­ri­ous car in the world? What does it mat­ter when I have the fan­tas­tic priv­i­lege instead of fol­low­ing the real dream of cre­at­ing my own business!

Let’s just hope that the car makes it through the next annual inspec­tion, so it also can stay on the road. Either that, or that Mum­my­Mug is on the mar­ket in the mean­time, so I can finally lease that Audi.… ;-)

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