It’s warmer than you think

One of my silly habits is to read quotidian blogs from the Swedish provinces. I absolutely don’t want anything that tells me large news when I do so. The Archers would be far too exciting. I just want a pleasing background sense of other lives being lived that are completely strange without being in the least unusual. It makes me feel like a friendly alien presence. Perhaps it’s a realisation of a childhood dream of mine, that I could fly in darkness across a landscape of small, comfortable farms, and listen at their windows without being ever noticed. Or perhaps it’s just a way to feel warm: this morning, May 24th, I came across a photograph of a back garden in Lapland taken last week: in the foreground, a brand new trampoline; in the background, a drift or pile of still unmelted snow. Admittedly, it’s the last patch left in the garden, but it is also late May.