Hi, it's Steve Lovell. I hope wherever you in the world, this finds you safe and well with those you hold dear. As we all know, minigolf has the incredible power to unite us all and during the time of Covid-19, this is heighetened. I've spoken to a few friends around the world to ask them the same three questions about the situation we face.


How badly has Covid-19 affected your country?


When do you think you could be playing minigolf again?


Have you managed to do any minigolf activities at home, like Puttathome or made any obstacles?


First up is Jens Bergstrom of Sweden.


My name is Jens and I live In Gothenburg, Sweden. I been playing minigolf for almost 20 years. Lately, I have spent many hours on adventure golf courses.


Covid-19 has caused and is causing big unemployment here. Also, among the elderly, we have been very unlucky to have a big ratio of death cases. Sweden is also one of the countries with the biggest ratio of people over 70 years old. Fortunately, we have a good economy so that the government and the opposition has had a lot of solutions for both companies and employees. For example, I have only worked 40 percent of my normal working time but getting paid 92 percent of my normal salary. As we have had an open solution based on personal responsibility, I think we can soon come back to almost normal production for many factories within a few months as it looks like.


We are already practising on our courses but there will be no national or regional competitions until after June. Here in Gothenburg, we are having small town competitions to practise. No money involved, just coming together and playing, which is great.


I have had no minigolf activities at home but we are lucky here in Gothenburg that we can have these small competitions and also that customers has noticed that we are open but we can only let in 50 persons as that is a restriction during this crisis when we must keep social distancing.


Thank you to Jens for his time to talk about his experience. You can see Jens in the middle after winning the Welsh Open in 2017. (Picture courtesy of the British Minigolf Association)