Category Archives: Travel notes

My flight out of Skavsta left at 21.55, and I was tired enough to think it worthwhile to stand queuing for half an hour to get a decent seat to sleep in. I had headphones on and a Swedish book … Continue reading → Continue reading →

You will all, I hope, be as glad as I am to hear that the doctors in Växsjö have managed to sew back on the nose tip and ear of the Dutch lorry driver who had them bitten off last … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I cannot resist a story in Dagens Nyheter about a fight in a Dutch lorry which was parked in Växsjö, a small and not overwhelmingly interesting town in Småland, a large and not overwhelmingly interesting region of southern Sweden. In … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Svenska Dagbladet has a review of a book about European demography, Barren States, in which I found the following anecdote: In Russian, mothers are also young: a woman of 27 is considered too old to give birth vaginally, and encouraged … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Last night I discovered that there are lots of small Swedish towns where people have recorded their lives on youtube. These are places where boredom is the fourth dimension. In Lilla Edet, for example, where I lived for three years, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I am transcribing a tape of a gold prospector talking about his adventures in the arctic mountains of Norway. We’re talking in Swedish, but his first language is Finnish. Most of it is sparkling clear, and the sound quality is … Continue reading → Continue reading →

A middle-aged woman is facing forty years in prison in Connecticut for having spyware on her her school’s computer: Mrs Julie Amero has just been convicted on four counts of “risk of injury to a minor or impairing the morals … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I none the less must post a link to this amazing PDF of the large-scale architectural models built of ice by a retired physics teacher in his garden in Gällivare over the last fifteen winters. They tower above his Volvo. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

A wholly glorious story in this morning’s Svenska Dagbladet. Eleven villagers from the hitherto unremarked settlement of Fjuckby, north of Uppsala, have written to the government petitioning for it to change its name to something less reminiscent of “sex-related activities … Continue reading → Continue reading →

(Tasteless). According Svenska Dagbladet there is a row going on in Finland over pictures taken on the Russian front during the war (in which Finland was for a while, unwillingly, an ally of Germany). These have been kept secret ever … Continue reading → Continue reading →