My ABBA Day

My ABBA Day

The Morning Soundtrack No One Asked For

My ABBA day started like many of my other unremarkable mornings: slightly disoriented, mildly hungover on existential dread, and with a song inexplicably looping in my head. The culprit? Tiger by ABBA. Not Dancing Queen, not Waterloo, but Tiger. Woke up mid-chorus, singing lyrics I hadn’t heard in at least three decades like they’d been hiding in my DNA, just waiting for the right moment to pounce. Why Tiger? No clue. Divine intervention? Agnetha whispering to me from the cosmos?

Anyway, I reached for my laptop, typed “ABBA Tiger” into YouTube like some bizarre morning ritual, and hit play. That was it. That was the moment the day was claimed. My ABBA day had begun. And let me tell you, once you hit play on Tiger, there’s no going back. You’re on the Swedish rollercoaster now.

A World Tour From Space

Let’s zoom out for a second. Imagine Earth. Big, blue, fragile little marble. Now zoom in, past the clouds, past the borders, over Europe and across the Alps, until you find Italy. Now a little further, into Florence. There. You see it? The cluster of piazzas, terracotta rooftops, tourists pretending they understand Renaissance art. Zoom in even more until you spot my modest apartment near Santa Croce, right above an internal courtyard where you can hear every cough, clatter, and domestic argument from ten surrounding flats.

Inside, it’s 6am. The world is asleep. My neighbours are quiet. And I am absolutely blasting ABBA.

A Love Letter to Scandinavian Obscurity

I didn’t stop at Tiger. No, once the portal was opened, the whole catalogue came crashing in. Dancing Queen. S.O.S.. Money, Money, Money. Fernando. Even Super Trouper, which, let’s be honest, no one understands but we all pretend to. As each song played, I found myself thinking about ABBA not as a kitschy pop group, but as cultural unicorns. These people hit a level of fame that most of us can’t even fantasise about,and then they just disappeared.

They left. At the height of their fame. Walked away from the cameras, the fans, the madness. No PR stunt. No farewell tour. Just “We’re done, thanks,” and off they went to go be Nordic somewhere.

Agnetha in particular fascinates me. She vanished like a blonde ghost. Refused to speak English. Refused the fame. Just flat-out peaced out of the global spotlight. And I find myself, at stupid-o’clock, admiring that more than I probably should.

Nostalgia Hits Like a Freight Train

I looked at those old videos, the sequins, the awkward dance moves, the unapologetic camp… and I saw something that broke my heart a little. Innocence. Joy. The kind of lightness that’s nearly impossible to find now, when everything is filtered, monetised, and hashtagged.

Has our world always been this chaotic, or did we genuinely lose something? Did we trade sincerity for followers? Did we swap melody for algorithms?

I started thinking about how we now live in a time where people film themselves crying on TikTok for views, where news is measured in retweets, and where empathy is some kind of endangered virtue. I thought about all the crap ABBA managed to avoid by disappearing. They never had to navigate Twitter mobs or YouTube comment sections. They just got to live. Obscure, peaceful, and away from the circus.

A Cosmic Perspective With a Side of Cynicism

Let’s pan back out. Past my laptop, out through the open window, beyond Florence. Let’s leave Earth’s atmosphere and see our pale blue dot from space. A solitary orb floating in a violent, freezing universe. Look at it. Beautiful. Small. Alone. And down there? People are taking filtered selfies in public bathrooms while the planet burns.

Scientists are busy trying to unravel the mysteries of quantum entanglement, bending their minds around the idea that two particles can affect each other across vast distances. Meanwhile, influencers are screaming at fast food workers on Instagram live. That’s the split screen we’re living in.

Florence Shrugs

Back in my apartment, pasta water boils in a nearby flat. Laundry gets pegged to sagging clotheslines. An old man waters basil plants and side-eyes my windows like I’m the lunatic. And maybe I am. Because I’m playing Tiger for the fifth time. Not quietly, either.

I know my neighbours are judging me. I can feel it. They probably think I’ve lost the plot. And maybe I have. But in a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control, I needed a day where ABBA was the only soundtrack. Something familiar. Something that didn’t ask anything of me except to listen.

So I turned the volume up, made myself a coffee, and gave in to the madness. Because sometimes the only way to survive reality is to drown it out with disco pop from four Swedes who left the party before the lights came on.

And honestly? I think they had the right idea.

End scene.

Want to see what I’ve been up to lately? Check out my Bromance category, or even my Memoir & Real Life one. Trust me, it’s not nostalgic in the least.