This month I haven’t managed to read as much as last, but this is partially a good thing, because the books I have read have required slow, thoughtful reading – the kind where some sentences cause you to look out into infinity for a long time.
I started on several books, and at least one of them will be devoured in the fullness of time, but I will hold myself to my self-imposed rule and only report on the two I have finished in February, both by the same author, Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and expert on mosses, and she combines her scientific knowledge with a native American’s approach to the natural world, which is deeply touching. The first book by her that I read is called Gathering Moss (4/5), and is a collection of essays on all things moss-related. It is very poetic at times, and makes you want to bring a magnifying glass to otherwise forgotten corners of the garden. I learnt a great deal from it and would recommend it to anyone interested in nature, but it is the second title that hit me like an iron rod.
At 85 pages this is a booklet rather than a full-sized book, and yet The Democracy of Species (5/5) is very, very powerful. It is one of those books that, like The Inner Life of Animals, I will carry with me for a long time, hopefully forever. The message is that Western culture, through the way in which our thinking and our language turns matter and animals into objects, has reduced nature to resources to be exploited, rather than intricate pieces in a vast, interconnected net of subjects, all bound together by our reciprocal gifts to one another. The concept of the Honorable Harvest, where you take only what is offered, and give something in return, is a practical reflection of what an alternative – and truly sustainable – approach looks like.
It is a title that I will buy over and over again, to gift to anyone and everyone, as it is the embodiment of perhaps the most important message of all. Read it.
Most good intentions have fallen by the wayside by February, they say. I’m afraid they are right. I haven’t been able to keep up my ambition to spend 30 minutes per day on each of my languages. At all. Same for piano.
I have kept up the training/walking tho, missing only three days of workouts to a tummy bug.
Zero sugar has been less successful, if not a complete disaster: 24/29 days.
I did two trips, one to Antwerp and one to Bruges, to make good use of my museum pass, and I managed three books:
The Wheel is Spinning but the Hamster is Dead (Sharp) – Christmas gift. A lot of funny expressions from various languages. Mildly entertaining, but frustrating, as the original language version was only given sporadically. 3/5
Siena (Stevenson) – another gift. A history of the city. Not bad, but not great either. Possibly better if you know more Italian history already. 3/5
The Wood Age (Ennos) – an overview of the importance of wood to humanity through the ages. Interesting and informative, with unexpected gems. 4.5/5
As per usual, I set a number of goals and ambitions for myself this year. I’ll keep myself accountable by reporting back briefly at the end of each month. So: Four non-fiction books, one city trip (Ghent). Workouts and 10k walking every day. Finding the time and energy to practice each of my languages (and piano) on a daily basis proved more difficult, but I’m persevering. Saunas: check. Also (virtually) no sugar, except for a couple of occasions when it would have been impolite to decline. So overall a very successful month.
The books:
The Nutmeg’s Curse (Ghosh) – how colonialism begat global capitalism which begat the climate catastrophe. Some very interesting insights. (4.5/5)
The Atlas of Unusual Borders (Nikolič) – a light (-hearted) look at the more curious borders of the world. Informative. (3.5/5)
The Daily Stoic (Holiday) – Stoic wisdom through the ages, to be imbued daily. I couldn’t help but read it in one go. (4/5)
Deep Sea (Copley) – a collection of essays on the largest part of Earth: the sea. Brief, and to the point. Apparently it’s one in a series of similar books. (4/5)
20 minutes of French, German, Dutch, and Danish per day.
Ditto piano.
Starting to think it will take a miracle to manage all these lofty goals. Well. So be it. It’s a year that sounds like it belongs in a Science Fiction novel, after all. Nothing is impossible in sci-fi. Engage warp speed (and discipline)!
And so the year is coming to an end. The vague ambition I initially had – to read a non-fiction book per week – proved to be unfeasible, much as I suspected.
A lofty goal is still useful, because even though I didn’t reach that number, I did get a lot further than last year, when I set a target of 25 books (and managed exactly that). With the last two titles, the total is 45 for 2023. I haven’t kept track of the number of pages, but with a conservative average of 250 per book, that would mean 11,250 pages read, which is plenty in my book 😋*.
So which were the last tomes of the year?
The Song of the Cell (Mukherjee) – a long and learned exposé of our cellular knowledge, and how increased understanding has changed medicine, ethics, and quite literally how we view the world. (4.5/5)
The Future of Geography (Marshall) – another title by a favorite author; a history of space as the next arena of human conquest, exploration and conflict. (5/5)
And that’s it. Hope some of the reviews have inspired you to pick up a title or two. The entire list is below. Well met in 2024!
Kvinnor jag tänker på om natten (kankimäki)
The magic of thinking big (Schwartz)
Zero to One (Thiel)
Jewels – a secret history (Finlay)
Gathering moss ((Wall Kimmerer)
The Democracy of Species (Wall Kimmerer)
What we owe the future (Macaskill)
Colors (Finlay)
Mountains of the mind (Macfarlane)
Creativity (Cleese)
80,000 hours (Todd)
Deep Work (Newport)
The startup of you (Hoffman)
Learning how to learn (Oakley)
Doing Good Better (Macaskill)
Poltava (Englund)
Under the skin (Villarosa)
A Thousand Brains (Hawkins)
Learning in the zone (Magana)
Bad Science (Goldacre)
Dollars and Sense (Ariely)
The Art of Learning (Waitzkin)
Pathogenesis (Kennedy)
The Richest Man in Babylon (Clason)
A message from Ukraine (Zelensky)
Ultra Processed people (van Tisseker)
Born in blackness (French)
Beyond Order (Petersen)
Renegades (Obama/Springsteen)
Factfulness (Rosling)
La Tapisserie de Bayeux (Lemagnen)
Trésors d’Océans (Mourot et al)
Servants (Lethbridge)
Ordinary Men (Browning)
Antwerp – the Glory Years (Pye)
More Than You Know (Mauboussin)
Democracy Awakening (Cox Richardson)
Gut (Enders)
Invention and Innovation (Smil)
Choose FI (Mamula)
The simple path to wealth (Collins)
Divided (Marshall)
Daring Greatly (Brown)
The Song of the Cell (Mukherjee)
The Future of Geography (Marshall)
——-
*It could have been more, too, but I made the deliberate choice not to count any book I didn’t finish, and there have probably been close to a dozen of those.
November marked a watershed in my reading habits. Having lugged a 1200-page book around Paris for several days, I finally caved and bought a Kindle. It doesn’t have the same feel as an actual book, of course, but it weighs very little, so it is useful when traveling. The jury is still out on whether you read differently on a device, but I read the first three books this month using the Kindle, so it can be done:
Choose FI (Mamula) – a treatise on how and why you should aim for financial independence, and what that might entail. 3/5
The simple path to wealth (Collins) – a book in a similar vein, it boils down to this: spend less than you earn; invest your savings; avoid unnecessary costs. 3.5/5
Divided (Marshall) – by the author of Prisoners of Geography, this is a collection of astute analyses of various rifts and divides around the globe – from Israel/Palestine and Trump’s wall to India/Pakistan and Hadrian’s wall. Highly informative, yet easily accessible. 4.5/5
Daring Greatly (Brown) – a popular psychologist’s look at how to live more fully by being more vulnerable and authentic. Contains some worthwhile pointers. 3.5/5
And so we move into the home stretch. One month to go in 2023. I fully intend to follow the example of Iceland, where traditionally the holiday season is marked by gifting and reading books. There are worse ways to spend the cold months…!
Plenty of travel in October, with trips to Turkey, Luxembourg and France, which normally means I get a lot of reading done, and yet I didn’t manage more than three books:
Democracy Awakening (Cox Richardson) – an important book, chartering the rise of fascism and autocracy in the US, and the fight against those ugly phenomena. 5/5
Gut (Enders) – a charming book about our innards. It’s not all shit. As it were. Funny and enlightening in the darkest of areas. 4/5
Invention and Innovation (Smil) – the author of “How the world really works” takes on innovations that never were, or never were as good as touted. Not nearly as good as HTWRW, but still erudite and interesting. 4/5
(The main reason I don’t have more books to report on is that I started on a whopper of a tome, 1260 pages long. I will continue on that while also reading shorter ones in parallel – if I don’t I risk having zero books read by the end of November…!)
I went to Ölüdenitz on the south coast of Turkey in order to paraglide. It’s known as a mecka for gliders, with five different take-off sites, perpetually perfect weather, and a long beach on which to land; what could go wrong? Well, everything…
I arrived at midnight with my backpack and nowhere to stay, after two flights and two bus rides, thoroughly worn out. The place looked as I had feared – nothing but bars and night clubs and faux English pubs, plus loads of lodgings. I didn’t look around, but went for the second hotel I saw – nothing fancy, but there was a pile of paragliding equipment as high as I was, which I thought boded well.
The next morning the place was full of what looked like frequent flyers, but no-one seemed to be going anywhere. Turns out there was a big bike race on, so flying was forbidden. Not obvious why? They had multiple helicopters covering the race, and Mr Chopper is not a paraglider’s friend. I was kind of ok with that, because that would give me the day to find an instructor that could take me on. Or so I thought. Not a single one was interested. All they do is tandem flights – taking tourists for a quick top to bottom and then selling them photos and videos of the ride is a lot more profitable than actually teaching someone how to fly. So in spite of there being paragliders everywhere I was grounded (I don’t have a licence to fly on my own – hence the need for an instructor…).
🎵 Up there is where I belong…! 🎵
My backup plan was to hike the Lycean Way – a relatively new path that follows the coast of the peninsula – but it was simply too hot; 27 degrees in the shade and muggy as anything was more than I could take. So there I was, stuck in a tourist hellhole, with no prospect of doing any of the things I wanted. I went for a swim in the Mediterranean at sunset and pondered my options: stay here for the week and hope something materialized, or change my plans entirely.
The next morning, as paragliders started to appear in the sky, I went for another swim, and then got a flight to Istanbul for that evening. No sense in prolonging the misery.
Arriving in Istanbul late in the evening I got a taxi to the hotel I had found, got fooled by the driver into paying 20% extra (“bank fees”), and arrived only to be informed the room was double-booked, and would I mind staying somewhere else? Not an auspicious start. Turns out “somewhere else” was a huge apartment right next to Galata Tower (which, in competition with the bridge across the Bosphorus, is THE symbol of Istanbul), so that was ok. The prayer tower four meters from my bedroom window that called believers to prayer at dawn the next morning? A little unexpected, but a very efficient wakeup call. 😅
And so I set out exploring Istanbul. I have been once before on a work trip, some 25 years ago, so had seen Hagia Sofia and the Top Kapi, which I was happy about, because the lines to those attractions were such that I could have spent the rest of the week standing in them. Instead I went for long, meandering walks through the Old Town, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the city. Impressions: dirty, chaotic, crumbling, hilly – oh, so hilly! – and cat-infested. There are cats everywhere, but they are looked after – people feed and water them, construct special houses for them, and there is even a system that lets you collect trash and get cat food in exchange – because one saved Baby Mohammed from a snake once; not a bad deal for the three million (!) felines that currently inhabit the city.
How to keep rats away from the garbage?
The smell of roasted chestnuts and cobs of corn fills the air of the bazaars and the maze of streets, where – in Arabic style – the vendors and their wares spill out into the streets. The olden way of business prevails here: all shops specialize in one thing, and they all congregate with their brethren (very few sistren to be seen), so that one street sells nothing but tools, another plastic toys, a third music instruments, and so on. How they make it work I don’t know: Imagine being an umbrella salesman in a street of umbrella salesmen – in a city where it doesn’t rain for at least six months per year… They don’t seem bothered tho. Mostly the men sit around and drink tea out of tulip-shaped glasses, and smoke acrid cigarettes. Quite possibly this has the effect of curing them (not of illnesses, but in the mummifying sense), because they all look to be about seventy, regardless of actual age. Wiry porters carry immense loads on their backs or on little carts, blocking the roads even more than the rest of the throng.
What’s surprising to me is how many of the old houses are actually gorgeous – a wonderful Turkish take on Art Noveau. It’s sad to see how many of them are in disrepair and/or hidden by shabby constructions of later date, but a hundred years ago this must have been an amazingly beautiful city.
Art Noveau Turque. Maybe.
There’s plenty of architecture of greater age that is even more impressive, of course. I had an amazing experience last time I was here, descending into a subterranean roman cistern, where I was suddenly alone in what looked like a half submerged cathedral, with nothing but ambient light and Pavarotti for company, making it more of a religious experience than I have ever had in an actual church. And so I foolishly set out trying to repeat that. It wasn’t to be. I saw three cisterns, one without water, one tiny, like a flooded basement, and one that was something like my original, only this one was filled to the brim – with tourists. Nothing like queueing behind selfie-takers to get you to commune with the divine, eh? After this photographic wankery I decided to steer well clear of any other major tourist attraction.
Roman reservoir. Still quite impressive.
Instead I saw several of the less touted mosques, and found them all beautiful. Who knew ostrich eggs were used to fight cob webs on the immense candelabra, or that the acoustics of the domed ceilings were improved by incorporating water vessels into the construction at angles that offset the bouncing sounds? An added bonus: the relative calm of the mosques’ grounds means that cats favour them – in one I’m suddenly ambushed by six kittens, who quickly turn me into a fairground for their play. Allah akbar, indeed.
Vase tree. And some building.
I see the Swedish General Consulate behind barbed wire and armed guards – a reminder that my country isn’t popular in this part of the world right now; a far cry from when Swedish varjag warriors were seen as an elite, and were made into a special bodyguard unit for the Caliph. Luckily my hotel is owned by Kurds, so we bond over the shared experience of being outcasts.
Swedes behind bars.
I drink amazingly good coffee in swanky cafes, and marvel at the patience of the poor (?) fishermen on Galata bridge, who stand in the heat all day for a bucketful of sardines. There are other marvels: the sight of women’s clothes, ranging from full body burquas to, frankly, astonishingly vulgar, as seen in the nightlife outside my hotel, which happens to be next door to both night clubs and what on medieval maps would have been called Gropeacunt Alley. There is also the many patients of cosmetic surgary to gawk at: nose reduction and lip expansion jobs for ladies, hair redistribution for gentlemen. Istanbul can really be a transformative experience…
The food is predictably good: Anatolian breakfast is a sumptious affair with twenty-odd accoutrements, accompanied by endless cups of tea, and fresh pomegranate juice. Sumptuous! Cheap and cheerful canteen-like restaurants serve healthy Turkish cuisine, like filled peppers, grilled aubergine and lamb shanks, and if one is thus inclined there is baklava on offer on every corner.
Turkish delight. And Anatolian breakfast.
And so I spend my days roaming the city, haggling over tulip bulbs and pashmina shawls in the bazaars for the fun of it, taking a boat ride around the Bosphorus, trying to imagine all the people and ships that have crossed through here since time immemorial (the cataclysmic earthquake that opened the strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean is what supposedly gave rise to the Noah mythos, after all, and the Illiad played out at the opposite end of the channel). I even cross over into Asia, just to be able to say my holidays spanned two continents.
Asia to the left, Europe to the right, just to confuse you.
It is not what I had hoped, but it’s a good trip nonetheless. My initial plan – to experience the Turkish wilderness in the air, on land and in the sea – came to nothing, and Istanbul/Constantinople/Miklagård might be an acquired taste, but it’s many incarnations and contrasts and history make it endlessly fascinating, and a wild experience. Mashallah!
What happened? One minute it’s still summer, the next autumn is in full swing. My September was marked by a return to work, which has thankfully been more relaxed than it was this spring, and a nice hiking vacation. However, neither is to blame for my poor track record in terms of reading – for that, I have two explanations (if not excuses): bad books and poor discipline.
I find it hard to keep reading if a book is underwhelming. Even just whelming books are a struggle, so I tend to leave off and move on to the next one. This month I decided to keep going regardless – which is a kind of discipline, I guess – but that also meant that I struggled to bring myself to read as regularly as I usually do. Other temptations suddenly became more alluring, and I spent altogether too much time death scrolling, playing Wordfeud…
Anyway. To sum up, I only got through two books this month, and here they are:
Antwerp – the Glory Years (Pye) – it’s a ramshackle account of the city in its heyday, taking a hodgepodge of events, describing them in oddly structured sentences, without any overarching structure, to compose the worst history book I’ve read in a long time. 1.5/5
More than you know (Mauboussin) – the subtitle is “finding financial wisdom in unconventional places”, and it is justified, in part. It could equally be “contriving to make connections where there ain’t really none to be had”. It’s not horrible, but it certainly isn’t as great as it is made out to be. 3/5
Meagre? Yes, perhaps, but I’m not a machine. I have to remind myself that I have already read 36 books this year, and can’t always keep the same pace. Besides, autumn beckons, and then winter is coming – good times for books. Stay tuned.
I came to the mountains without much of a plan. I was on my own, so could do exactly as I wanted. All I knew was that I yearned for beauty, hiking, and solace. The alps usually deliver, and the Dolomites (roughly the Italian part of the mountain range) are particularly well known for their beauty, so I was fairly certain I’d get the first two.
Solace might be a different story, as for me it’s a part of the world I associate with the end of my marriage, so I was prepared for a few bad memories to resurface. What I hadn’t realized was just how commonplace bad memories are in the region. It was the scene of intense fighting during the Great War, when Austro-Hungarians and Italians wrestled over dominion of the Südtyrol region in valleys and on mountains all over the Dolomites. The former lost to the latter, and Südtyrol passed into Italian hands, but not before battle upon battle had been fought here, with intense suffering as a result.
Even now the scars are there, and the language you use will greatly affect the reaction you get, depending on the mother tongue of your conversation partner. As a local woman in her seventies confided to me (in German): the older generation doesn’t want to learn Italian, because of what happened.
She said it as if it (the first world war) had happened only last year, not over a century ago, but then the very land here still bears the marks to remind people. A case in point: the victorious Italians set about changing all the place names, but the old names still linger, in minds and on maps. And so it is that I set out from Dreizinnenblick/Vista Panoramico Tre Cime to hike up a long, picturesque valley to what is arguably the most recognizable of all features in the alps: Drei Zinnen, or Tre Cime, a constellation of three enormous rocks, that are the poster children of the Dolomites. To me they don’t look like crenellations (German) or chimneys (Italian) so much as three crooked old grave stones, leaning drunkenly on one another.
In a way they are, too, because many a man has perished in their shadows, either trying to climb one of the various routes up the rocks themselves, or in the aforementioned pitched fights. I felt as if I were about to join the ranks of the victims; my heart rate oscillated somewhere between ER and morgue when I finally made it up to the rifugio that sits across from the three giants. I was quite surprised therefore when I saw a lot of people strolling about up there – all the more so because I had set out early, and had hardly seen a single human all the way up the valley. It turns out that on the other side of the Big Three a paved road takes you all the up to the foot of the rocks, and so day trippers come up by coach or car and have a wee bit of a walk around. To me – fainting and damn near going into cardiac arrest – it felt like they were cheating: that’s not how you commune with the mountains!
Refugio vs Tre Cime
Thankfully, not many of those visitors elected to stay the night, which was a stroke of luck for me, as even as it was I only just managed to get one of the very last bunk beds in the rifugio/Hütte (although late in the season, reservations (and cash!) are of the essence, it seems.). After six hours’ hiking, 21km and 2,000 vertical meters, I ate everything in sight, and then promptly fell asleep around eight, still wearing my clothes.
The next day I set out earlier still, traversing the sella (saddle, i.e. mountain pass) that sits behind Rifugio Lavaredo in order to descend back down to Dobbiaco via Val Campi di Dentro. Up there was where I first encountered the remnants of real fortifications. I had seen a couple of man-made caves the day before, but here I stumbled upon a fortress hewn out of the bare rock – trenches, underground storage space, machine gun nests, walls, and perhaps most poignantly of all, a lonely little cairn. It was nought but a small pile of rocks with a cross made from a couple of sticks bound by rusty barbed wire, sitting across from the Tre Cime as a forelorn monument over some long gone nameless poor bastard who died here. It seemed so futile, somehow, to lay down your life in order to prevent someone you don’t know from crossing an imaginary line drawn on a map, only to be forgotten by all, a lonely rock pile being the only memorial to your anonymous existence. Was he Italian or Austro-Hungarian? No way of knowing.
The Cairn of the Unknown Soldier
I mentioned where I was to a friend, and it turned out that her great grandfather had been a Kaiserjäger, a member of an elite company who fought in these very parts. Even if you survived, how could such an experience not scar a man for life? And who can tell what this meant for future generations? I find it fascinating and depressing in equal measure. And so I was in a pensive mood as I passed across the pass, past several similar gunners’ nests, where once your efforts for climbing this far would have been rewarded by having your neighbours lying in wait to shoot you in the face. Today however, the only blood on the ground was Alpen-Bärenträube (lit. Alpine Bear grapes), a low growing and intensely red plant that brought a bit of colour to the rockiest stretches.
Then, as I descended further down into the valley, the trees grew higher, the undergrowth more verdant, and I followed a dainty brook all the way to the valley floor. In the middle of the forest I came upon the spooky old ruin of a former spa hotel, where once the upper echelons of society came to ”take the waters”. This they did from the five springs in the vicinity that (in spite of being very close together) were once – according to helpful signs – thought to cure a variety of vastly different ailments. I choose to fill my CamelBak with natural mineral water from two of them, the combination of which may well cure me of liver diseases, ulcers, chronic (!) gastritis, skin ailments and a variety of gynecological disorders, if the signs were to be believed. Pas mal! Thus fortified, I made it back to “my” hotel, where I again ate like a champ, then passed out like a chump.
Day 3 the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Where previously there had been clear blue skies, there were now ominous-looking clouds, but as the forecast said there would be very little rain, if any, and I had my magic potion from the day before to ward off most ailments, I still set off, this time going from Cimebanche/Im Gemärk up another valley to an area optimistically called Prato Piazza (Flat Space). From there it was onwards and upwards, skirting a massive peak coloured red by iron oxide, called Croda Rossa (Red Cross), or “the bleeding heart of the Dolomites”. I noted with surprise and great satisfaction that my own heart was neither bleeding nor fluttering like a kolibri any more. The trail was long and hard though, the massif looking like a giant dragon lying on top of the mountain, so it was with some trepidation I continued. The dragon didn’t wake, but the path did lead past areas of massive rockfall, where such immense quantities of stones had fallen from the heights as to create whole fields of red boulders (I later learned that the rockfalls can be sufficiently powerful to register as earth quakes!). Moving across one of those and hearing rocks starting to bounce down from high above you in the clouds is an experience that will make you feel very small and vulnerable, for sure.
When the path suddenly needs rerouting…
The same goes for passages where you turn a corner to find that the path takes you on the outside of sheer cliffs, where a chain bolted into the rock is the only thing to hold on to, and one misstep means certain death. The payoff is of course the immense vistas and god-like viewpoints you experience far away above the valleys, but I’m weirdly glad I was alone – for the simple reason that I’m not sure I could bear to watch someone I care for scrambling across those abysses. I remember my father forever calling us back from precipices when we were in the alps when I was a kid – I understand him now.
Find Wally!
Eventually I make it back down again, all the way to “the most beautiful lake in the alps”, Lago di Braies, which is truly gorgeous, but by this point the rain was hanging in the air, I’d been out for seven hours, I was exhausted, and my annoyance at the sightseeing day trippers was such that I just got on the first bus and went back “home”.
Prettiest lake in the alps?
(Incidentally, the people of “my” hotel must think me mad, because I check out every morning and come back (nearly) every evening; it’s because my guidebook (Walking the Dolomites) keeps insisting that my itineraries are 2-3 day affairs, which means I’m carrying everything I need for a week on my back wherever I go. In spite of this I manage to cover enough ground to be back down again every evening except the first one, hence my strange behaviour. Had I known I could have left 85% of my kit in the hotel, which would have saved me quite a few calories…)
The next day it is pouring down. The thing is, when it’s raining in the mountains you are literally in the clouds, so there is little chance it will let up. I grind my teeth and put on all my rain kit, and make my way to the start of a trail up to something called Val de Fanes (the Valley of the Fanes people – local fairy folk). Unfortunately, my local map doesn’t cover this area, and the guidebook is quite sketchy, so I’m in terra incognita. There are two sights on the way up into the land of the faeries that I know I want to see, however: Cascate di Fanes, the highest waterfall in the Dolomites, and Ponte Ulto (Ladin for High Bridge), crossing a chasm of similar magnitude to that of the waterfall – 70 meters. I hiked up to the edge of the canyon to see the waterfall crashing down on the other side. I then made it down to the bottom only to realize that the path back up again on the other side was a via ferrata, which really requires proper climbing gear. I made an attempt of it, but as it was pouring with rain and everything was slick and slippery I reluctantly decided I had no choice but to turn around.
Water, water, everywhere…
So back down the canyon I went, and then all the way back up again on the other side, back to the same waterfall, reached by another via ferrata (this one slightly less murderous, but still intimidating in the rain). So I saw the waterfall every which way you could, and the bridge as well (less impressive), but after the lengthy detour I had already used up about half the day, and since I didn’t know how far it was to the Valley of the Fairies, I eventually gave up. I had hiked for hours in the rain through the sodden pine forest, ever upwards, and in spite of my rain gear I was soaked through (condensation being just as efficient as actual precipitation in that regard), my muscles were stiff and cold, and I didn’t want to continue into the unknown. I was done.
By the time I made it back to the valley it’s late afternoon, and the hotel owner informs me that they haven’t turned on the heating yet, so there is no way to dry my clothes. It’s the mountain gods’ way of telling me this is it. The next morning I get on a train and leave the mountains behind. I make it to Milan and spend the next 36 hours soaking up the atmosphere and madness of the Milano Fashion Week instead – as contrasts go it couldn’t be any further from the solitude, sorrows and solace of the mountains.
It’s the first of September, and outside the rain is absolutely pouring down, making it hard to believe that summer was ever anything but a dream. But August was long and full of leisure time (even though I spent two weeks learning French in Brittany), so books got read:
Factfulness (Rosling) – funny, erudite, eye-opening. Everything you could want from a book. The fact that the author wrote it on his death bed just makes it more poignant. 5/5
La Tapisserie de Bayeux (Lemagnen) – explaining what goes on in the famous tapestry (that isn’t really a tapestry) in French and English, this is an excellent primer for history buffs. 4/5
Trésors d’Océans (Mourot et al) – too limited in scope, while trying to be too many things. Not a treasure at all. 2/5
Servants (Lethbridge) – a look below stairs, charting the lives of the oft overlooked people that were so quintessential to English society. It’s somewhat higgledy-piggledy but interesting. 4/5
Ordinary Men (Browning) – the story of a group of German policemen who were thrust into the Endlösung, and how they reacted when faced with the prospect of killing thousands of Jews. 3.5/5
And there we are. Eclectic as always, but a good tally overall. Bring on autumn, with long evenings in front of the fireplace…!
I rolled up in Bayeux after a long time on the road, which seems apt, since Bayeux’s most treasured possession, the tapestry that bears its name, is a long, rolled up tome.
Much like its birthplace, the Bayeux tapestry spent most of its existence hidden away. And yet survived damage of all kinds. It’s a wonder it still exits. It’s also a wonder it ever existed in the first place, since it is unique in this world: 70 meters’ worth of interconnected, stitched tableaus, depicting William the soon-to-be Conquerer in his trials and tribulations in the preparations for, and execution of, said Conquest, both of England and of Harold, the man whose job he took.
Why was it made? We cannot be entirely sure, but whoever made it, and for whichever purpose, it was a stroke of genius. It is, amongst many other things, the world’s first comic book. Like the adage has it: the winners get to write history, but if it’s a history book for an illiterate audience, you need something more easily accessible, so what better way to tell a story then to stitch one scene after another in your story unto something akin to a giant toilet roll?
In fact it works exceedingly well. The main characters are easily distinguishable, and as you proceed along the rolled out roll (it isn’t really a tapestry in the more classical sense) you’re sucked into a tale of derring-do and action that doesn’t end before Harold catches an arrow in one eye on the Hastings battlefield and is consequently hacked to pieces (pension plans for deposed medieval kings being even worse than that of contemporary Americans), and England is Norman ever after.
Some speculate that Odo, bishop of Bayeux and cousin of William, had it made not only to support his relative’s claims to the throne but also to strengthen his own standing, as he is featured prominently throughout the saga, but we simply don’t know. It is well worth the trip at any rate.
After having enjoyed the retelling of how Britain became Britain, I went up the road for the retelling of another invasion, which explains amongst other things how Britain remained Britain: this one much more recent and – crucially – going in the opposite direction. It seems that half of Normandy is about the D-day experience and the consequent reconquest of Europe towards the end of the second world war, but few places describe it better that the war museum in Bayeux.
It’s not a big museum but it follows the same principle as the tapestry – describing the events preceding and during the invasion in harrowing detail, with plenty of imagery to help the visitors understand what it was like. Unlike the much vaunted, recently opened “D Day Experience” with its flashy 3D movies and experiences immersives, not to mention the innovative (?!) idea to tell the story through the clothes (!) of various soldiers (« I am Private Jones’s bullet-riddled jacket », « I am Sergeant Smith’s soiled tighty whities »), this museum gets the job done without being weird about it – much like the soldiers themselves, I imagine.
And so the first day of my one man invasion of Normandy comes to an end. I rest my weary feet and can’t think of anything better than to enjoy a good galette and a hearty cidre – much the same way I imagine G.I.’s have felt down the ages, from 1066 to 1944. Glory and fame may be eternal, but an army marches on its stomach, after all.
Summer. Time for travels, family, sun and outdoor activities, and reading. Nothing quite like sitting in a café, on your terrace or lying in your mom’s hammock with a good book. And so I did:
The Richest Man in Babylon (Clason) An old classic, using parabels to describe what is important in planning your finances. It gets a tad repetitive, but that’s because it was initially published as stand-alone brochures. (4/5)
A message from Ukraine (Zelensky) Speeches given by the President from right before the Russian invasion until a year ago. A must read, for the excellent quality of the speech writing, and for the heart and humanity underwriting it. (4.5/5)
Ultra Processed people (van Tulleken) An important book on ultra processed food and the industry behind it, and how the latter used the former to take humanity away from what we should really be eating. (4.5/5)
Born in blackness (French) An exposé of the importance of Africa in the development of the modern world, with particular emphasis on the slave trade. The only thing I miss are more personal accounts. (4/5)
Beyond Order (Petersen) In/famous-from-Internet Jordan B Petersen holds forth on how to live your life. There are gems here, but you have to sift through a lot of verbiage to get to it. (3/5)
Renegades (Obama/Springsteen) I hesitate to call it non fiction, but… it’s a written version of a podcast featuring the two American icons. Nice, chatty – and ultimately not very much content. (2.5/5, +1 per author you’re a huge fan of)
And that was my July. Holidays are good like that. ☀️
People like reading lists, they say. The problem is they (the lists) tend to get a bit same-y after a while (people do, too, arguably), so the trick as a writer is to come up with something new and exciting. Here is one you likely never saw before: 5 top ways to get hurt traveling!
Traveling gives me a great deal of joy, it is true, but it’s fair to say that ain’t always the case. So in ascending order of pain and hurt and general discomfort, here are the five worst experiences connected with my travels over the years:
5. Went kayaking off the wild east coast of Sardinia, wearing lots of sunblock but no good sunglasses. Fierce sun, wind and reflections on the water combined with intense heat to create a witches’ brew of salt and chemicals that got into my eyes, rendering me effectively blind, as I was utterly unable to keep my baby blues open – something of a problem when one has to navigate dangerously bad mountain roads to get back to base. In the end I drove at a snail’s pace, stopping over and over to pry my peepers open enough to rinse them with water. It took a night in absolute darkness before I could see normally again.
4. Went diving in the Andaman Sea on a live-aboard boat. That’s a small ship that is out in tropical heat for a week, with everyone living in close quarters. Long story short, I caught something that developed into high fever right as we were disembarking; flying home from Thailand via London with 39+ degrees’ temperature in cattle class was literally a nightmare – I was hallucinating, and so weak they had to get me a wheelchair to go from one plane to the next. Once home I slept more or less straight for 48 hours before finally recovering.
3. First time paragliding in Spain. One of the first attempts to get airborne properly, running down a gentle hill, I managed to rip a muscle in my groin just as I was lifted into the air. The pain was excruciating, but the forward movement and physics kicked in and I continued upwards, which meant I had to fly and land for the very first time while trying not to black out from the agony. To this day I don’t know how I managed. It took months of grueling exercise to regain something like normal function in my leg.
2. Another diving excursion, this time to the Seychelles. Made the rookie mistake of having local food that was probably washed in local water. Within a few hours our stomachs were rumbling, and before long we were two people writhing in gut-wrenching pain, before embarking on a night of horrors, as our bodies went into overdrive trying to purge themselves of the foreign germs; trust me, there is no feeling quite like switching back and forth between projectile vomiting and having your intestines go full fecal Jackson Pollock on the one shared toilet, whilst your friend is knocking on the door to be let in to have their turn, NOW.
1. A romantic trip to Granada and Alhambra might not seem like an obvious winner of this list, but my companion on this sojourn was someone I was very much in love with, and she had agreed to go only as a way to end our relationship on a high note, as she felt we weren’t right for each other. So while it was a lovely experience, and the sights of Alhambra a wonder to behold, it was still with very mixed feelings I went on it. And at the end she did what she had said she would, and ended things between us. She broke my heart, and it took years to mend.
So there you are. A Top 5 List like no other. Honorable mentions go to Barcelona and Amsterdam, where I broke my PBs for marathons – painful experiences in and of themselves, but disqualified because they also gave me a lot of masochistic joy. Hope you enjoyed. If you think you have my travel horror stories beaten, let me know in the comments!
The Swedish Presidency of the EU came to a grand finale this month, with lots of work, controversies, trips abroad and high level meetings and summits – and a bizzare episode which saw me taking a whizz in a small bathroom while the Swedish prime minister was brushing his teeth over the sink next to me. Such are the vagaries of life as an interpreter, I suppose.
None of it distracted me from my reading, however. Four books made it onto my list this month:
Bad Science (Goldacre) – an eye opener on the shortcomings of media, Big Pharma, snake oil merchants and others with regard to how scientific data is used and abused. (4.5/5)
Dollars and Sense (Ariely) – on money management. I honestly cannot remember a single thing that this book taught me. The title is probably the best thing about it. (2/5)
The Art of Learning (Waitzkin) – an autobiography more than anything, it charters the author’s path from chess wunderkind to martial arts champion. Some interesting insights into meta learning. (3.5/5)
Pathogenesis (Kennedy) – This was gifted to me, and I loved it! How germs have shaped the course of history. Insightful, surprising, learned and easy to read – everything a book should be! (5/5)
And now, finally, holidays! Time to do some serious reading…! 😄
Well, it’s the first of June, and it feels like summer has been here for weeks already. I keep trying for four books per month in order to get one read every week, and I don’t quite manage every month, but this time I did. Hopefully long, light June evenings on the terrace will help me improve, but for now, here are the titles I read last month:
Poltava (Englund) – the first book I’ve read in Swedish for a while, and what magnificent Swedish! It describes the destruction of the Carolinian army in Ukraine in gory detail, but also provides a look at the psyche of people back in early 1700’s, and how foot soldiers can be made to make the ultimate sacrifice for little or no reason. Seemed topical. 4.5/5
Under the skin (Villarosa) – a harrowing, unflinching look at what it means to be Black/Brown in the US, specifically in regard to health care, and with special attention to the compounding effects of intersectionality. Not an easy read. I knew it was bad, but not that bad. 4/5
A Thousand Brains (Hawkins) – an interesting insight into the brain and how it functions, this also offers an exposé of what intelligence is, and what it can mean for our species. Fittingly, it’s thought-provoking. 4.5/5
Learning in the zone (Magana) – this book purports to describe habits of meta learning. It does not. This is the worst jumble of pseudo-scientific goobledigook I have ever had the bad luck of encountering. Awash with cryptically contorted nonsense-statements and with precious little on offer in terms of actual advice, this book serves one purpose only: providing a zero on the scale on which to measure good books. 0/5
Despite a lovely sojourn in Italy where I didn’t get any reading done, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still managed my apparent quota of one book per week – and that’s not counting the three others I began but didn’t finish! Anyway, without further ado, here are my books of April:
Deep Work (Newport) – on the importance of putting in enough focused time and effort into any project in order to reap the most benefits. Ties in nicely with books like Discipline is Destiny and Learn Like A Pro. (4/5)
The startup of you (Hoffman) – no surprises concerning the content here; the author proposes to plan your life and work as if you were a startup company. Not a great book, but some lessons even so: It’s always Day 1. (3/5)
Learning how to learn (Oakley) – the second title I read by Oakley. I hadn’t realised it was aimed at kids, but regardless of that it isn’t as good as Learn Like A Pro, so I can’t recommend this, unless you have tweens. (2/5)
Doing Good Better (Macaskill) – an interesting title, written by the man who authored What We Owe The Future, who is also the co-founder of 80,000 Hours. It covers much the same territory as the latter, i.e. how best to spend your time and money, and provides a lot of food for thought. (4/5)
There you go. I’m going to branch out and try some other stuff in May – time to move away from all these do-things-better books, and into other areas. Here Be Dragons?!
It’s Easter 2023, and Naples is in the throes of twin religious ecstasies; not only is the re-birthday of Jesus coming up – in the Catholic heartland this is obviously a big deal – but even more importantly, the resurrection of Saint Maradona is all but assured, with local soccer team SSC Napoli poised to win the National Football League for the first time in 30 years. It’s not overstating it if I say that the Neapolitanos have painted their town red in the advent of this event – or rather blue and white, the colors of their heroes.
Every street is hung with banners, plastic stripes, flags, and sheets; entire buildings and assorted infrastructure have been repainted to manifest the locals’ worship; effigies of the players are as numerous and as venerated as the many shrines to more traditional saints that can be found on every street corner.
Bunting and soccer saints and ruins
(It’s strange (to me) to see how such copious sums of money are expended on these two religions when the population is clearly utterly impoverished, but I guess the explanation is the same as the rationale behind why poor people play the lottery: they are in dire need of hope.)
The abject poverty of the city is accentuated by the faded grandeur of bygone days; most buildings are centuries old, from an era when the city and its denizens were obviously very well off, but now they are dilapidated and crumbling, covered in grime, filth and graffiti. At least the latter is quite creative at times.
How to improve gorgeous architecture?
All this to say that, with the addition of the many people out and about for the holiday, plus the habitual madness that is Neapolitan traffic, Naples is quite the cacophonic assault on the senses – it has to be experienced to be believed. As a result of that experience we avoid the city for the most part, using it as a base from which to see Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Pompeii is the larger site, more famous and as a consequence it’s overrun with tourists. It’s a complaint as old as the site itself – apparently Goethe was shocked to find it crowded when he was on his Grand Tour (the all but mandatory trip of Europe that young noblemen were supposed to take back in the day to better themselves (and/or avoid scandal at home)). I doubt he had to contend with hordes of school children, pensioners and Chinese, however… Add to that that many of the houses are – perhaps understandably – closed for maintenance (in spite of what the audioguide claims) and it is a wee bit disappointing, however evocative a stroll through the old streets may be.
Under the volcano – Pompeii
A couple of interesting side notes: the local Amphitheater was closed down for years because the citizens rioted after a particularly intense gladiator bout. Clearly the mad infatuation with sports is a long-lived local tradition (and I will not speculate as to whether the same holds true for the penchant Pompeiians had for frescoes of Pygmy al fresco fornication, often in boats and watched over by hippos and crocodiles – you can count on the Romans to be pervier than most!)
And secondly: years prior to the eruption that buried Pompeii, the city suffered a severe earthquake that caused a great deal of death and destruction. Why is that relevant? Well, 30-some years ago, Naples was subjected to the same treatment, leaving 2,500 people dead, so if that’s a harbinger we might be in for another eruption. Worse still, some experts speculate that the shape of it indicates that the entire Bay of Naples is in fact a caldera, or super volcano, compared to which Vesuvius would be akin to a matchstick next to a log fire…
Under the volcano – Herculaneum
But be that as it may: Herculaneum proves to be the opposite of Pompeii’s pomp; smaller and closer to the volcano, it was submerged under ash and pumice rather than lava, which meant that the buildings were better preserved, so the site is more intact. It also benefits from its relative anonymity, so there are but a handful of other people around. Bliss! I lose myself in the labyrinth, stumbling into temples, brothels and pizza parlors (where the Romans presumably awaited the Coming of the Tomato, brought by Columbus 1500 years later, to complete the recipe). Combined with a visit to the local Museo Archeologico (where all the finds from the two sites are kept), this in itself would be enough to justify the trip, but there’s more:
We leave the Bay of Naples behind and set out for the Amalfi coast, on the other side of the isthmus that forms the lower part of the bay. It’s a mountainous coastline along which lie various fishing villages where the houses climb each other and the steep cliffs like swallows’ nests. It’s an improbably difficult terrain to navigate, where every flat surface is constructed by erecting stone terraces, but once there was a road connecting them, the villages all turned into chi-chi tourist destinations.
Houses like barnacles
Much like Pompeii, the more popular ones are considered a “must”, meaning that the main arteries in Positano, Amalfi and Ravello are clogged with tourists, and stores selling rubbish bric-à-brac, like so much cardiac arrest-inducing plaque. Thankfully, as soon as you get off those streets the situation becomes infinitely more bearable. Better yet, stick to hiking in the mountains above it all, where breathtaking views and vertigo pull you along.
Et in Arcadia…
The best experiences in this area are undoubtedly two: the first is the Sentiero Degli Dei (Path of the Gods), a footpath that connects the hamlets of Nocelle and Bomerano. So-called because it was supposedly used by the gods when they wanted to head down to the ocean for a bit of sub-aquatic how’s-your-father with the Sirens (of Ulyssean fame) that inhabited the little islands off the coast, the winding path certainly makes you bucolic: wandering it you feel like Pan in Arcadia – terraced orchards and espaliered vines showing off the fertility of the volcanic soil; wild myrtle, rosmary and thyme filling the air with their scents, and the bees and butterflies that do their bidding; the meandering coastline laid out below your feet all the way to Capri, and the enormity that is the ever-changing seascape of the Mediterranean glittering and rippling to the horizon and beyond. Who wouldn’t want to roam here in an endless spring?
…ego.
The second highlight is Villa Cimbrone, on top of the precipice at the end of the hilltop village of Ravello, perched high above the sea, where a young English lordling decided he would create a modern version of a Roman emperor’s country vila (think Tiberius’s Villa Jovis on Capri but minus the slave-throwing contests). It’s safe to say he succeeded. The villa is now a fancy hotel, but the gardens are open to the public, and since they were laid out by Vita Sackville-West they are a wonder to behold in their own right. However, the prize for most breathtaking view goes to the terrazza dell’Infinito, or belvedere, a hidden gem at the end of the garden, 300 meters above the water, which Gore Vidal (who lived in town for twenty years) claimed was the best in the world. And I’m not about to argue with that.
The bust view ever
And so the trip comes to an end, as trips do. Extra mention must be made of La Lepre B&B for going above and beyond in Naples – special Easter breakfast, local delicacies brought in because they happened to come up in conversation with our hostess, complimentary wine, impeccable servicemindedness, the list is long – and the most unmissable restaurant in town, A Figlia d’o Marenaro, whose Zuppe di Cozze is now and forever more the gold standard against which all sea food will be measured – and found wanting. Mamma mia!
March was busy, so I felt good about getting as much reading done as I did. I use the pomodoro method, planning my free time in chunks of 30 minutes, so I’ll spend 30 minutes walking/weeding/reading/playing the piano/whatever and then move on to something completely different – it works because you can do these things in a more focused manner this way than if you flutter back and forth between things. It, too, comes recommended. But I digress: this month’s books are
Colors (Finlay) – another cultural history book by a new-found favorite. Warmly recommended – as someone said, I was color-blind before I read this book! (4/5)
Mountains of the mind (Macfarlane) – one of the best natural history authors around, and somehow I had overlooked his first work. Brilliantly evocative, it explains the modern-day fascination with mountains and puts it into a historical context. (4.5/5)
Creativity (Cleese) – it’s a booklet rather than a book, but given that it is an interesting topic and is written by a comedic genius it is still worthwhile. 5/5 for quality, 2/5 for quantity – he could have put some more work into it.
And speaking of putting time in to work:
80,000 hours (Todd) takes its title from the amount of time a typical person has at their disposal during their career. This book discusses what constitutes your ideal career and how best to plan it. Interesting ideas and approaches to an oft overlooked decision-making process. (4/5)
Next month will be filled with hard work, travel and visitors, so we’ll see what happens, but I’m hopeful I’ll be able to stay the course; see you then.
So instead of rattling off all the books in one go at the end of the year, which isn’t inductive to readability for you, nor encouraging me to stay on track, I figured I’d report on my reading once per month. So without further ado, these are the titles that took me through a rather soggy and dark January:
Women I think of at night (Kankimäki) – an antology of biographies on various impressive women, all role models to the author. The biographies are interesting, the author’s autobiographical musings less so. (3.5/5)
Zero to One (Thiel) – an innovative entrepreneur’s world view. Quite inspiring and readable, even if it’s not super-relatable all the time – unless you’re Elon Musk, in which case I want to go to the moon. (3.5/5)
The magic of thinking big (Schwartz) – an old book, which shows in part, but the message is as eternally important as ever. (4/5)
Jewels – a secret history (Finlay) – after her book on fabrics I had high hopes for this. I wasn’t disappointed. Anecdotes and facts akimbo – a real gem! (4.5/5)
And that’s it. Don’t suppose I can keep up the rate of one book per week, but I will try. Do let me know if you read any of the titles!
I went to a summit at the start of the Swedish EU presidency. It was a different kind of trip, because naturally the Swedes wanted to show off their wild and wonderful homeland, so off we all went in a chartered plane, to Sweden’s northernmost town Kiruna, way above of the Arctic circle, whence to discuss the presidency agenda and priorities.
It’s different there because this far north the nights are long in the winter (20 hours plus) and the only hope for natural light rests with the magical – but fickle – aurora borealis, or Northern lights. So when we arrived at four in the afternoon, to be greeted by the chairman of the Sameting (parliament of the indigenous Same people) and other local dignitaries, all decked out in impressively serious and furry winter gear, it was in pitch darkness. The Commissioners were whisked off to the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, while the skeleton crew of foot soldiers (myself included) was shipped to a rather more mundane hotel inside the security parameter of the conference centre.
Not that I’m complaining. We had a minder assigned to us, and actual hotel rooms waiting when we arrived – unlike some of the security detail (there were hundreds of policemen flown in for the occasion), who rumor had it were lodged all over, in old military barracks and even bunk beds in local garages; not a pleasant place to sleep when it’s -10C, but still preferable to standing watch outside the premises in the snow throughout the night, as some did.
It’s easy to forget how quiet it gets when a place is covered in snow. All noises are dampened by it, and so as we took a ride through town it was eerily silent. It wasn’t just due to that, tho. Kiruna is a mining town, situated literally on top of the world’s biggest iron ore mine, and because the latter is expanding, the former has to move; the old part of town is being evacuated so that mining operations can be carried out right underneath it, and that means most of the houses are vacant, staring emptily at us as we drove around. It’s effectively a ghost town.
That feeling of otherworldliness is further enhanced by the sight of Iron Mountain (Malmberget) across the valley, covered in lights and smoke in the darkness, like a vision of Mordor (mining goes on 24/7, as there is little point to adhere to a normal working day when you’re miles below ground). Add to that the fabulous wooden church that looks more like a temple to Norse gods than to their middle-eastern counterpart, and you get the feeling you’re in some Tolkien/post-apocalyptic/Viking/snow zombie crossover story.
The next day couldn’t be more different: while the Commissioners have a chance to hob-nob with the King of Sweden, open a satellite launch site, and other media-friendly events, those of us who weren’t allowed near the Ice Hotel last night are now given a guided tour of the venue, and it doesn’t disappoint: it’s like a very different kind of fairy tale, one where you are transported to a world of ice – the rooms, the furniture, even things like chandeliers and glasses are made out of ice, and the designs and decorations are incredible; the hotel is rebuilt every year, but they save the best rooms, so over 30 years they have accumulated an incredible array of weird and wonderful rooms (not all of them conducive to a good night’s sleep, it has to be said!). The overall impression is one of a winter wonderland (in the Elsa-from-Frozen-meets-C.S.-Lewisian sense) and the setting – all forests and snow covered vistas plus the frozen river (from which the building blocks of the hotel are taken) – doesn’t do anything to diminish this.
It’s easy to see why it’s popular, but since the sun barely makes it over the horizon (at noon it is fully visible for less than an hour) it is soon dark again, and the politicians get down to business. They spend the afternoon hammering out a work program and looking at various high tech business displays, and then there’s just enough time for a joint press conference of the Swedish PM and the Commission’s President before we all hurry back to the plane and travel back south.
Our 24h adventure is at an end. As we rise into the velvety darkness I peer out for a last chance to see the aurora, but there’s nothing there. Reason enough to come back? Maybe. I find myself next to one of the Commissioners, and discuss the possibility of bookending the presidency with another meeting at the height of summer; he is keen to see the midnight sun but less so about experiencing midge-infested marshes. I tell him how the indigenous people spend a night in early summer sleeping naked in the marshes, getting stung enough to aquire immunity, yet he seems unconvinced by my implied solution. My one attempt at direct lobbying is apparently a failure – but who knows? We’ll see in July.
Last year was a year of reading for me. Specifically non fiction, to learn more about any and all things. Terentius, African slave and later Roman playwright claimed that “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto“, or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” I’m not quite there, yet, but what better way to ensure that changes than to read? So, without further ado, here are some mini reviews of the (rest of the) books I read last year:
Monuments Men (Edsel) – the story of the men who saved untold treasures from the Nazi looting effort towards the end of World War II. A little fragmented but interesting. (3/5)
Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg) – took a while to get into (very Merkin) but it’s a classic on the topic for obvious reasons. (5/5)
A Life on our Planet (Attenborough) – harrowing and profound, inimitable and joyful. As autobiographies go, they don’t get better. (5/5)
Remarkable trees (Harrison) – a run-through of exotic and astonishing trees with lovely illustrations. (4/5)
The Golden Atlas (Brooke-Hitching) – various stories about maps, map makers and the explorers that filled in the blanks. Very interesting. (4/5)
Human Compatible (Russell) – Artificial intelligence and how to ensure it doesn’t go Skynet on us. (4/5)
Pixar storytelling (Movshovitz) – a schematic of what makes Pixar movies great. (3/5)
Undaunted Courage (Ambrose) – Lewis and Clark’s expedition across the American continent retraced. (3/5)
All of the Marvels (Wolk) – The entire Marvel universe analyzed – all 200 gazillion pages. 2/5 unless you are a super fan, then 4/5.
Citizen Soldiers (Ambrose) – Band of Brothers but covering many more people – and a little less interesting for it. (4/5)
Life 3.0 (Tegmark) A.I. and humanity and how to make them compatible, take 2. (4/5)
How the world really works (Smil) – a cold, hard look at the world. A good companion piece to Attenborough. (5/5)
Map stories (Matteoli) – similar to the Golden Atlas, but suffers from poor translation. (3/5)
T Pratchett: a life with footnotes (Wilkins) – the P.A. of Pratchett tells of the latter’s sad demise. 4/5 if you’re a fan – and otherwise, what’s the point?
Quid Pro Quo (Jones) – erudite run-through of how much Latin still influences modern languages. (5/5)
Eureka! (Jones) – ditto for Greek (4.5/5)
Learn like a pro (Oakley/Schewe) – tips and trick to get better at studying. (4/5)
The secret lives of garden bees (Vernon) – cute book about all those other bees that also need protecting. (3/5)
Discipline is destiny (Holiday) – very good book on how to structure your life in order to achieve more. (5/5)
Playing with FIRE (Rieckens) – one couple’s quest to get financially independent and retire early. (3/5)
Veni Vidi Vici (Jones) – how the Roman world still influences us. (4/5)
The world of ice and fire (Martin) – not strictly non fiction, but written like a history of Westeros. Monumental. 4/5 if you’re a big fan, otherwise maybe don’t.
Fabric (Finlay) – the cultural history of various kinds of cloth. More interesting than it sounds. (4/5)
And there you have it. I hope there’s something of interest there, and if not, feel free to point me in the direction of books you think I should read. I have every intention of keeping up this habit, so tips are always welcome!
A good friend called me the first week of January and said, hey, didn’t you use to write a big summary of the year that was and all your ambitions for next year? Yeah, I said, but I don’t really feel like it – I have a cold and a fever and don’t have the energy. Plus last year was a real shit year.
But then I thought about it. What’s the point of setting goals if you don’t hold yourself accountable? Noone else will, and there are always excuses, but owning your actions (or lack thereof) should be top of everyone’s ambitions. So…
Last year I had lofty ambitions. Then – after years of vague symptoms and low energy levels that I had put down to aging and Coviditis (the general inertia brought about the pandemic, even in those who weren’t hit by Long Covid or worse) – I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which had lingered for so long it had caused neuropathy. One initial antibiotic did nothing to alleviate matters, so then I went on another one, and then another. All in all I was on antibiotics for close to six months, with all the inherent fun that brought. I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say it did nothing to improve my overall life quality. In the end it was worth it though; I now feel more energetic than I have in a long time, in spite of the harshness of both the disease and the cure.
The road back is long, and there is no guarantee I will regain full capacity, but just knowing I have fought back feels good. So I didn’t get to the point where I can run 10k yet, but I did accomplish other things:
I went to France twice, once to the Opal coast and once to Paris – both lovely outings; I went to Spain and had a good time in spite of being unable to paraglide; I took the kids to Crete (which was wonderful), and went cayaking with my brother in the Sörmland archipelago (dito), went hiking in the Ardennes, in Luxembourg and around Monschau in Germany, and saw the Christmas market in Aachen. All in all not bad for a convalescent.
I stuck to my plan to be more disciplined in my piano playing, and managed to learn a number of new tunes (if not one per month, as originally planned), and I read non fiction voraciously, totalling close to 40 books by the end of the year.
So I need to look beyond my ailments and see that you can get things done, can LIVE, even with limited energy. That’s not to say that I don’t hope for a better 2023 – I do! – but it’s useful to gain perspective. Don’t let the buggers get you down!
One of my ambitions for this year was to read at least 25 books of non-fiction. I figure that exercise works on the brain much like on any other muscle – push it, and it will develop. So, in order to encourage others to follow the Way of the Librarian, here is a short overview of the books I’ve read thus far this year:
Life Leverage (Moore) – a self help book to get more out of life, based on efficiency, a creative mindset and economies of scale. Quite good, actually. 4/5
Consider This (Palahniuk) – Palahniuk is an extraordinary writer, and this book on writing doesn’t disappoint. 4/5
Take a Thru Hike (Mills) – on the joys (and tribulations) of long distance hiking. Not great. 3/5
Awol on the Appalachian Trail (Miller) – a personal account of thru hiking the AT. Not in the same league as A Walk in the Woods, although it covers the same ground. 😉 3/5
Leaders Eat Last (Sinek) – I like his TED talks, but his books are not reaching the same heights, to my mind. Still good. 4/5
The Emperor (Kapuscinski) – fascinating eye witness accounts of life in Ethiopia under the last emperor. 4.5/5
Shah of Shahs (Kapuscinski) – similar concept to The Emperor, but set in Persia/Iran, and unfortunately not as complete. 3.5/5
Utopia for realists (Bregman) – a look at ways in which to reinvent society to better cope with our new reality. Thought-provoking. 5/5
A Burglar’s Guide to the City (Manaugh) – written by an architect, I loved the idea of getting into burglars’ mindsets, but unfortunately the author doesn’t quite deliver. 3/5
Walking the Bowl (Lockhart) – an account of street life in Losaka, Zambia. Horrid, and unputdownable. 5/5
When we cease to understand the world (Labatut) – a somewhat fictionalized account of some of the greatest brains of our time, and their achievements. Fascinating, but would have been better without the fictionalization. 4.5/5
So there it is. An eclectic mixture, but mostly enthralling stuff – to me at least. Hope something on the list speaks to you as well, gentle reader. Oh, and none of this affiliated sales crap – I just put in links in case you wanted to head straight to the book store. I don’t stand to earn a penny from this. Eek!
For the second time in a row, my efforts to go paragliding in Spain have been twarted by unexpected rain storms.
Having returned to Algodonales where I first learnt about flying, I was hoping to be airborn every day for a week, and instead I found myself in a cold apartment staring out at a mountain ridge shrouded in unrelenting rain clouds. I don’t know if I should take heart from locals saying this is such a rare occurance as to be unheard of, or whether I should try to appease some local weather gods that I have somehow upset?
Luckily I had packed a bunch of books, so even if I was forced to stay grounded for the most part I still didn’t waste my time. And after a few days cooped up inside, my fellow would-be pilots and I did do some nice excursions in the area, enjoying the lushness of spring (at least the downpour helped with that!). First we ventured to the nearby mountaintop village of Zahara (It takes its name from the Arabic word for either crag or orange blossom – both highly applicable – but it has nothing to do with the desert), which looks like something out of Ferdinand the bull, and whose cobbled, winding streets have been hugging the hillside since times immemorial.
There is also a local nature reserve centered around a steep ravine that is favoured by large scavenger birds, so instead of following vultures in the air I sought them out in their lair. We saw at least three nesting pairs up close, their large dragon-like silhouettes sailing out of the mist in complete silence, sometimes as little as five meters away. I’m not easily impressed by birds, but these are as graceful as they are intimidating, forever sailing on thermals whilst watching every move in the world below. Thankfully they didn’t take after the Belgian blitz-buzzards, so we didn’t get attacked, but we all kept a mutually weary eye on one another.
The bottom of the gorge was sadly (and predictably) swollen with water, so we couldn’t traverse its entire length – possibly just as well, as my heart was racing like a hummingbird’s by the time I made it down. Instead we opted for an excursion in the opposite direction the next day, hiking up through an abandoned quarry to the summit of an isolated hillock, on top of which was an ancient Arabic watch tower. Even with a low cloudbase the surrounding landscape was visible for miles and miles, so it was not difficult to see why the Moors chose this site – any advancing army would have been spotted days away. Unfortunately, we could perceive equally clearly that the rain in Spain was not mainly on the plain, but everywhere, again and again, as far as the eye could see.
So with all hope of flying having been dashed I repaired to Seville for the last couple of days. It is a splendid town, epitomizing quintessential Spanishness, wearing its Moorish inheritance on its sleeve whilst showing off the incredible wealth that flowed into the kingdom with the discovery and exploitation of the New World. Everywhere you go the architecture displays both those influences, and nowhere more so than in Real Alcazar, the royal palace, and its splendid gardens. It is easy to see why Game of Thrones filmed many of the scenes from Sunspear here – the sensuous beauty of formal gardens filled with ubiquitous Seville orange trees and interlocking fountains, against the backdrop of a palace of Arabic ideals tempered by Iberian terracotta colours, with peacocks strutting like catwalk models through the landscape – it is quite difficult to surpass in elegance and sophistication.
Not that later generations haven’t tried. Right across the palace sits the vast creamy sandstone opulence that is Seville’s cathedral – large as a football field, cavernous on the inside and decorated like a wedding cake on the outside, its bell tower (once a muezzin’s prayer tower) unabashedly adorned in arabesque forms, even as its bells toll (loudly and repeatedly) to reawaken the Catholic faith.
The old town that surrounds the castle grounds is minute, but so maze-like that it is quite easy to get lost in its jumble of entangled alleyways, that occasionally spit you out onto unsuspected, intimate little plazas. Most of the old houses are built in the Medina style on the inside, with an open courtyard centered around a spring, whilst the outside is resoundingly Spanish – heavy gates, wrought-iron balconies and whimsical turrets with only the occasional tulip-bulb window hinting at the interior – and all of them have been painted in warm colours, so the overall impression is like a Spanish version of Chania, in Crete.
Also in the middle of town there is the Plaza de España, an enormous open space encircled on one side by an opulent bow-shaped castle structure – more theatrical backdrop than real building – and surrounded by a moat, whose arched bridges bring to mind Venice; it sits at one end of the immense Maria Luisa park, filled with temples and water features, formal fountains and informal paths, all hidden away in the lushness of palms, jaquarandas and the ever-present orange trees.
The last day of my week, wouldn’t you know it? The skies are blue, the sun is back, and Seville is awash with tourists even this early in the year, hinting at how busy it will get in high season; even now the horse-drawn carriages and tapas bars are doing brisk business. I take in the old bullfighting ring (now thankfully a museum), the weird mushroom structure (akin to Les Halles in Paris in its modernist madness), and the Golden Tower on the Guadalquivir river, below which is moored a full scale replica of the Nao Victoria, the first ship to circumnavigate the world. It looks ever so small and unimpressive, and yet on such flimsy foundations were built the first truly global empire, which in turn made all these riches possible.
All in all Seville is an interesting spectacle, quite splendid, and would have made for the perfect romantic weekend. But although I’m glad I’ve seen it all, much like was the case in Barcelona, I’d rather have been flying. The only flight for me this week will be the Ryanair one home. Third time will be the charm!
I went to Paris the day after Putin/Russia invaded the Ukraine. It felt almost perverse to go off to enjoy spring in the City of Light when the forces of darkness wreaked havoc in another part of Europe, but it was planned and paid for, so off I went.
It was a perfect weekend for strolling around, and boy did we walk, my Parisian friend and I. But try as I might to shake it off, the spectre of destruction seemed to follow me everywhere. On the other hand there were also signs of human ingenuity and the indomitable spirit that turns bad things into good.
We went to see Notre Dame, still a building site with no access for the public after the devastating fire three years ago. And yet hundreds of craftsmen are working to catalogue, repair and restore every last bit of debris and rubble, aided in no small part – and I love this! – by the fact that a team of computer game developers had mapped every inch of the church prior to the fire, in order to recreate Paris anno 1789.
Across the water from Notre Dame I drag my friend into Shakespeare and c:o, the most Harry Potter-y store I know outside of Diagon Alley. The bookstore has been run by the same proprietor for five decades, and now his daughter has taken over. Come hell or high water, Covid-19 or Amazon.com, this L-space-bending Mecca remains open and enchanting, books door to ceiling. Heck, books form walls and pillars and caves in here, creating snug reading corners where you can enjoy a book inside a fort made of books.
We explored the Pletzl (or small place) area of Le Marais, which is the Jewish quarter in the Old Town. Everywhere you go there are searing reminders of the thousands of people who were brutally expelled and transported to death camps because it was a crime to be born into that faith, and yet while Nazi Germany is an ugly memory this is now once again a bustling, colourful part of the city where people queue up outside of minuscule restaurants and bakeries to enjoy their falafels and poppy cakes. I partake of both specialities and can vouch for their scrumptiousness!
As I bask in the sun, wolfing down my falafel, three young women stop by to bum a cigarette off another man seated on the same bench as I. He doesn’t have one, so the one who asked the question turns, looks at me for the briefest of moments, only to say ever so politely: « ça n’a pas la peine de vous demander: vous n’avez pas la tête d’un fumeur; vous mangez des pommes et faites du vélo, vous » . (No point in asking you: you don’t look like a smoker; you eat apples and ride bikes, you.) My friend collapses with laughter. So much for me being mysterious and interesting…!
Best falafels in Europe!
Then we venture outside of the center to see some other lovely examples of how the old and ugly can be recast as things of beauty: the Belleville area with its Lilliputian garden city, and the Buttes-Chaumont park in the 19th arrondissement that used to be an open air quarry, a nasty gash in the landscape. It has since been turned into a green park with the most dramatic garden design imaginable, centered around a lake at the bottom, surrounding a rocky outcrop of an island, on top of which sits the Temple of the Sibyl. It’s like something out of a painting of Arcadia, risen quite literally from the bottom of a pit pf despair.
The same can (almost) be said for La Petite Ceinture (the little belt), which is an old railroad that used to connect the city’s main train stations. When the advent of the Metro made it obsolete the railway fell into disrepair, but it was later turned into a pedestrian zone from the elevated viewpoint of which walkers could take in the city high above the congested roads. It was so popular that other cities like Brussels and New York copied the concept, but alas, it proved popular with lessans abris (homeless people) too, and now parts of it is once again closed to the general public. The current mayor has big plans, however: she intends to ban cars in the city centre altogether, so hopefully this remnant of a coal-powered era will soon be an integral part of pedestrian Paris.
Be that as it may, as news of Ukrainian résilience et resistance is cabled across the world I find reassurance in these examples of how good triumphs in the end. It may not be as pithy as ”Russian warship: go f**k yourself.”, but rebuilding and recovering is what humankind does best. If Paris can survive fires and Nazis and unfettered capitalism, and bounce back greener, wiser and more beautiful, then the same can be true for Kyiv and Moscow. Hope springs eternal.
It took 26 months of quarantines, lockdowns, social distancing, home schooling, no work, too much work in weird modes, toilet paper hoarding (remember that?), mask wearing, protests, antivaxxers, ever-changing rules and regulations, and three shots of vaccine, but I finally got Covid-19.
First off, I should say that I have been lucky. No fever, no difficulty breathing (which would be horrible), just cold-like symptoms paired with fatigue and occasional heart palpitations (scary, but apparently not lethal), so holding out to get Omicron rather than the earlier variants seems to have been well worth it. (And, to quote a friend, “if it hadn’t been mild after three shots I’d turn antivaxxer myself!”).
I’m also happy to report that the Belgian health system works, overall. I got symptoms Thursday evening, did a self test in the morning and had it confirmed at a local pharmacy within a couple of hours (in the backyard, so as to avoid contaminating other customers), then got an online notification in the afternoon. A quick call to my boss and my family GP, and suddenly I was on sick leave for eleven days.
And so began the time of my life with Corona, confined to my house and garden. The first couple of days I was too tired to do anything much apart from worrying that the disease might get worse. I went from my bed to the sofa and back, pretty much. Since I couldn’t go grocery shopping and didn’t have the energy to cook I subsisted on toast, musli and instant noodle soup – all thankfully available in abundance. Something else to be thankful for: I never lost my sense of smell or taste. Although I will say that eating the same instant noodle soup four days in a row can make you wish you had lost your tastebuds.
After the first few days I did get better, and was desperate to get out, having stared at the walls for too long. However, with the weather being what it is the garden wasn’t an option, as it resembled a rice paddy more than anything (Remember the first spring when life in the time of Corona meant the virus had us all lounging outdoors in glorious sunshine? No such luck.) It was so wet I thought I saw goldfish from the pond make little excursions, but I might have been mistaken. Equally desperate for some sort of physical interaction, I snuck out early mornings to visit the deer that live in an enclosure at the edge of my village. Turns out they enjoy old carrots and broccoli (which was all I had in my fridge by this stage) and I could even hand feed them.
It sounds silly, but those mini-walks made a difference. I can see why prison inmates feed birds – it’s not that the birds represent freedom, it’s the fact that you are doing something for another living being. Not being allowed to see anyone was much harder than I thought it would be. Thank goodness for WhatsApp, Skype, Facetime and Signal, but it’s just not the same. I’m a very tactile person, and not being able to hug my kids was the worst part of it all. As for online chats, the children had school, and in what little time that remained after class and homework they didn’t want to talk for long to their snotty, sleepy dad who wasn’t doing anything fun anyway.
In a way this was a scary premonition of what life in retirement might be like: limited energy, little social contacts, and no real goals or ambitions. That thought alone was enough to keep me working towards my new year’s resolutions as much as I could. I meditated, stretched, played the piano and chess, planned trips and investments, and read three books. But then of course on my second to last day of isolation Putin decided to invade Ukraine (again), so maybe war will break out and I won’t have to worry about retirement at all…
We went to the French coast this weekend, friend F and I. He needed to blow the cobwebs away, and I needed a change of scenery, so this was a perfect mini adventure.
We drove to the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, half an hour southwest of Calais, which we would use as a base camp for our excursions. This turned out not to be a very original idea, as the oldest part of town is built on the grid the Romans established for their army camp, as they set out to invade Britain!
Not much remains of that endeavour, but the city wall still stands intact, high on a hill, reinforced over the millennia, making Old Boulogne an imposing citadel. The rest of the town seems to have gone downhill quite literally, as the further down toward the coast you get, the shabbier the buildings, right down to the waterfront, where ghastly high-rises from the 50’s and 60’s bring to mind Kaliningrad-sur-Mer.
Be that as it may, it is a good starting point for our hike up the Opal coast (the stretch between Boulogne and Calais), and the coast itself is lovely. The tide is out, the sky is high, a pale winter sun is shining, and there is a hint of spring in the air and in our steps. There aren’t many people about, just a few joggers and dog walkers. What there is a lot of, however, is wind. 40km/h wind with gusts reaching almost twice that. At times it feels as if you could just fly away, and I am thankful that I wasn’t tempted to bring my paraglider along – the gulls are clearly enjoying themselves, but I would be no match for the elements.
We hike up the coast, the sea and the heavens competing to see who is the most blue, past twee seaside villages nestled in the dunes. I did expect it to be pretty, and I’m not disappointed. What I wasn’t prepared for was the abundance of World War Two bunkers still in existence. Every kilometer or so we pass these sunken concrete monstrosities, some of which are still accessible. We break for coffee at one and I venture inside. Cramped, cold rooms with a lot of debris give an idea of what life here might have been like for German soldiers; low ceilings and an absence of light give me my first World War Two wound, as I crack my head on a low piece of concrete.
Of course, guarding against perfidious Albion goes back a lot longer than Nazi Germany; the emperor Claudius erected a lighthouse/garrison on a rocky islet just off the coast here, and Calais was the last British outpost on the continent – both lighthouse and British possessions were still around well into the Middle Ages, so maybe the bunkers have the tacit approval of the local populace?
We make good progress at any rate, but the wind keeps getting stronger, and F’s feet are not happy, so we cut our hike short once we reach the one village where the one bus of the day can take us back to whence we came. Instead of trudging more kilometers through the sand there’s an opulent lunch in a local fish restaurant, followed by hot showers, siesta and an even more opulent dinner. Hiking in style, as it were.
The next day the weather gods seem to have a score to settle with the whole continent, so we explore the vaults of the ancient basilica and then the medieval fortress, both of which now hold eclectic museums. In both cases, the buildings themselves prove to be the most interesting bits. We stroll around the city walls, and try to imagine the citadel in its heyday, when Charles Dickens bumped into Napoleon III and Prince Albert having a chinwag here, in what must have been the most Victorian moment of the whole Victorian era. Today, however, the rain drives everyone away, including us, so we get in the car and drive to Calais.
In Calais one last memento of the strained relations between the continent and their island neighbors awaits us, in the shape of a monumental statue by Rodin. During the Hundred Years’ War the city fell after an eleven-month-long siege by the English. Edward III was annoyed with the citizens for their “obstinate” resistance, and was going to kill everyone who had survived. In the end, his wife – who apparently tagged along on her husband’s mini adventures – managed to get him to change his mind, but not before the city’s noblemen had been forced to walk barefoot through the city with nooses around their necks. The statue in front of the Hotel de ville shows half a dozen of them, in their moment of despair.
With a history such as theirs, it is perhaps easy to see why France and the UK seem to have difficulties getting along after Brexit. Maybe Macron’s attempts to mediate in the Ukraine is brought about by a fear that Londongrad will otherwise take the opportunity to stage an attack on the mainland Eurostar station, thus to preempt any further migrant invasions, in the ultimate effort by BJ to make people forget about Partygate? Or maybe I just need to find a new mini adventure to go on? Watch this space.
…and for most people, this would be the crucial point at which your new year’s resolve begins to falter. I am by no means immune to this syndrome, but as we have noted, apart from breaking it down into smaller tasks, and holding yourself accountable is the main thing, and sharing with people is a large part of that, so here we go, in no particular order:
Fitness/health/weight – I made a pact with a friend to try to lose weight, and we are both doing ok. I’m down 1.8kg in two weeks, which I’m very happy with. Workouts are hampered by pinched nerves, but I’m persevering.
Piano – I’ve learnt one piece fairly well and am trying to find something new that tickles my interest.
Books – one book read, several others under way. Life Leverage by Rob Moore is to be recommended, and A Life On Our Planet by David Attenborough also, if for very different reasons.
Finance – I made a couple of investments, but as inflation rises, apparently stock markets tend to suffer (news to me!), so who knows? I also elected not to continue a subscription to fool.com as their recommendations performed worse than the market average last year.
Trips – had to cancel a trip to Germany this weekend due to a tummy bug. Will try to go one of the coming weekends, depending on pandemic.
Most people are familiar with the concept of a Catch 22 – even those who haven’t read the novel by Heller know that it’s a somewhat absurdist law, literally catching you out, forcing you to do something you don’t want to and/or refrain from doing something that you do want, no matter what.
Life can be a little like that; who hasn’t felt trapped in a job or a relationship because you didn’t see a way out? Regular readers know that I like the idea of achieving, of experiencing, of expanding and improving. Or maybe it’s the opposite that scares me; stagnation, resignation, wasting what little time we have. Either way, I often feel that I don’t do enough, and I think that many might feel the same. There is a bit of Catch 22 in this, too; you don’t do anything to pursue your dreams, because pursuing them risks exposing them for what you fear they are: dreams.
But: big dreams stay dreams because you don’t divide them up into manageable chunks. You want to circumnavigate the world, but you don’t because it’s too difficult a thing to plan and execute. You want to get rich, but you have no idea how, so you don’t even try. You want to sing like Adele and write songs like Ed Sheeran, but since you probably can’t you don’t even sit down at the piano.
However, break it down into smaller pieces, and suddenly it’s feasible. I have a colleague who is traveling the world one country at a time, and he makes it look easy; he went to Machu Picchu over a long weekend, he did Australia (the civilized corner) in a week. Granted, it’s costly to travel like that, but what I take away from it is that you can see a lot more if you do many little trips than if you sit around dreaming about going on an extended world-cruising, continent-hopping holiday that somehow never materializes. I don’t think I want to go to South America for three days (I fear the jet lag alone would turn it into a mescaline trip), but the principle is sound.
The same goes for anything, really. Take finances: I never really had a plan for money beyond avoiding going into red, but I’m slowly starting to change that. And it’s the same thing there: you can’t turn into a finance wiz overnight, but you can read up on, and invest in, a LOT of things that over time will (hopefully) net you substantially more money than if you just leave whatever is left at the end of the month in a savings account.
As for healthy living, again, no one can expect instant fitness – it takes more than one gym session to get ripped, alas, and more than one healthy meal to live forever, cruel and unjust as that is – but if you set a weekly goal of not eating anything unhealthy except on Sundays, say, and working out a little (20 minutes, the length of a sitcom) every day, then it doesn’t seem quite so impossible to attain.
It IS important to be accountable to someone tho, as this increases the likelihood you’ll go through with your ambitions. So, here are my goals and how to reach them in -22:
– I will do a minimum of one trip per month to places I’ve never been – city weekends, short hiking hols, bonsai road trips, what have you,
– I will try to double my savings over one year. I have a figure in mind, but even if I don’t reach that I will actively try to improve my knowledge in this field,
– I will get fit – defined as 80kg body weight or less, and/or fat percentage of 18, and use the above mentioned template as my starting point,
– I will read at least 20 non-fiction books, or a little less than one every two weeks, on top of the Blinkist ones I’m already reading, and report them to my fellow jolly readers,
– I will learn a new piece of piano music every month, for a total of twelve.
I have other ambitions too, like more paragliding, bee keeping, sauna building, gardening, chicken keeping, et cetera, but these are easily visualised, and easy to quantify and report back on, thus keeping me (hopefully) on the straight and narrow.
Here’s to seizing the day, and making 2022 a good catch!
This is supposed to be a travel blog, but over the last two years there hasn’t been a lot of traveling, as you might have noticed.
I wanted to remedy that, but in the light of ever changing rules and regulations I didn’t want to hop on a plane to somewhere whence I might not be allowed to return, or forced to quarantine if I did, so instead I packed my car full of all the things I could think of that might come in handy (I’m more of a Thelma than a Louise) and set off with the vaguest of ideas about doing my own Tour de France, as I have seen embarrassingly little of the country.
At this point I wasn’t sure where I’d be allowed to go, or if the Covid pass would work, so first I went to the Belgian Ardennes (it’s on the way, after all). I repeated one of my favorite walks around the conflux of the two rivers Ourthes, at the Barrage de Nisramont, gloriously autumnal and devoid of people, and pretty on a scale that normally doesn’t apply to Belgium.
Then I went to Bastogne, and took in their excellent museum on World War II and the Battle of the Bulge, which raged through this area. It’s particularly poignant because it describes first hand what civilians had to live through – not only the immediate terror of war being waged quite literally in one’s backyard, but also the long lasting implications for societies where some chose to side with the invaders, and others with the resistance. Even long after the war, people still settled scores.
Not wanting to get caught in the crossfire, I drove on to Luxembourg, to hike their excellent trails. The joke was on me, because when I got there there was hunting underway everywhere. I still managed to get a couple of really nice day hikes in, through the lush sandstone ravines, where colossal cliffs form veritable mazes, around and through which the paths wind. The fact that the rugged rocks sometimes look like petrified trolls made me feel as if I was in a Tolkien story.
And speaking of children’s stories: After Luxembourg I set off for France, driving through Germany for a bit to get there. My next stop was to be Colmar, south of Strasbourg in the Alsace/Elsaß region, another of those bits of Europe that seemed to be forever changing hands whenever wars were waged – it’s stayed French after WW2, of course (thank you, EU), but it retains a very German look and feel. In fact it was like stepping onto the set of a Grimm fairytale movie, or would have been, if my arrival hadn’t coincided with an incongruous anti-vaxxer demonstration(!).
(It’s odd to me that people behave this way, don’t you think? No one writing horror stories – from Grimm to present day zombie apocalypses – ever imagined people fighting for their right NOT to protect themselves from the Big Bad Wolf/Virus. But I digress…)
Anyway, the demonstration/mass spreader event was soon over, and I spent the rest of the day happily marveling at the oddly organic, right angle-escewing architecture of the city, where every house leans on the next, like a bunch of oversized, 500-year-old, drunken revelers. No modern architect would build like this, and more’s the pity. Streets run hither and thither, little courtyards and alleys reveal their secrets gradually, so that the third time I passed a spot a tight passage appeared out of nowhere between two sagging facades, drawing me in to a small square with a wishing well. It felt truly magical.
Next day I visit the local art museum, Unter den Linden (set in a former nunnery), and then venture up into the Vosges, to Keysersberg (or “-beri“, as the French spell it, unable as they are to pronounce the German “G” sound!), a village high on an outcrop that has served as a lookout for barbarians ever since Roman times (they called it Mons Caesaria), with more of the same Disney-esquely twee houses; if Hansel and Gretel came skipping down the street arm in arm with Pinocchio and Cinderella it wouldn’t look out of place. I don’t think anything can top this around here, so I get back in the car and drive on – to the Jura massif.
It’s another three hours before I get there, and it’s beginning to dawn on me that I will never be able to do a full tour of France. But I’m driving through a beautiful landscape, as dramatic as it is bucolic, so maybe that doesn’t matter. Dusk will soon be falling, however, so it’s a relief to arrive at the b&b I’ll be staying at, only… the owners are not home. I have to try to find something else, and quick. These roads aren’t easy to navigate even when it’s light out, so it’s with some trepidation I set out again through a large forest, but as luck would have it, those pesky Romans got here before me, too: the 2,000-year old road is ramrod straight – it even has the original milestones left (pillars, more accurately), marking their, and my, swift progress.
I finally pull up next to a very old farm building – the kind where the animals are kept underneath the living quarters of the farmers. Luckily there are horses in there, or I would have thought the place abandoned. There are no people around tho, but I wait and eventually they show up, and invite me to warm myself by an enormous hearth, while the lady of the house rustles up a three course meal in no time and sits down to share a glass of red or two with me. Hands down the best living quarters of the trip, and only because the other place dropped the ball.
The next day I hike two gorges in Jura – one famous for its enormous cave system, the other for its many beautiful waterfalls. The cave is unfortunately closed for winter; I would have been fully prepared to bribe my way in, or even go in on my own, like Tom Sawyer, but there is no-one around, and the entrance is ten meters up a sheer cliff face with the stairs pulled up, drawbridge-style, so that will have to wait for another time. The waterfalls in the other gorge are as pretty as can be, however, and I have them virtually to myself, so my Jurassic experience is still a good one (even without so much as a hint of dinosaurs!).
On I go, further south still, always chasing the elusive sun, of which I see nothing but the merest glimpses. I go through Switzerland and finally arrive in Annecy, another gorgeous city with a beautiful Old Town. Here I stay longer, having given up on my initial idea of a full circular route around France, but more importantly because Annecy is a paragliding Mecca!
A friend of my sister has tipped me off about a paragliding school, where I roll up first thing in the morning, not particularly hopeful about my chances – it’s late in the season after all, and the clouds over Annecy as persistent as everywhere else – but within an hour I’m in the air, testing my dormant skills at take-off, navigating and landing! I spend three very happy days here, gradually getting back into the swing of things, and on the last day I clock up four good flights in the morning, flying out over Annecy and the lake and mountains, soaring like an eagle. How I have missed this!!
But all good things must come to an end, and so I reluctantly get back in my car. I do want to come home to see my kids, and not have to live out of a knapsack, but it’s a long way home. I drive as far as Dijon in one go, then decide it’s probably dangerous to continue (I have five hours’ driving left, it’s raining and darkness is falling). So I book a room online – rather too quickly – and find myself being invited into a semi-derelict building next to the motorway where junkies and homeless people probably shack up. Now, I’m ok with jumping off mountains, but this is too much. There’s a Holiday Inn up the road, and even though I normally abhor such establishments, there are times when a bland room with a bland breakfast seem quite heavenly. I check in, shower for a loooong time, then sleep like a baby – and I don’t have to share hypodermic needles with anyone!
Next day there is time for a visit to the impressive art museum of Dijon, housed in the palace of the dukes of Burgundy, and some quirky stores in the town centre, but my heart isn’t really in it any more. I drive on to Champagne where a couple of tips from friend Florian enables me to stock up the car with quality bubbly from small, local producers that never find their way outside to the rest of the world, and then I press on, eager to finally get home!
So. I was on the road for just shy of ten days, drove 1,200km, saw more things and had more experiences (nearly all outstanding) than I could have hoped for, and managed everything from paragliding school to discussing champagne vintages and vaccine policies and expressing my thoughts on proprietors of opium shacks who want to pass them off as romantic gîtes – all in French! I’d say that qualifies as a successful road trip. And even though I didn’t complete a Tour de France, I still feel that I was on my way to discover the country – c’est pas mal non plus.
Last year during the lockdown, the garden was my refuge, my oasis, my paradise, and yet there was something missing. And so to mark my 50th circumnavigation of the nearest star (and what a strange thing that is to celebrate) I decided to get myself something that I have dreamt of for as long as I have lived here: a swimming pond.
What is a swimming pond, I hear you ask, obligingly. Well, it isn’t a pool, first of all. You aim to create something that mimics the functioning of a lake to the largest extent possible, so as to have a real, beneficial effect for the local wildlife, that can use it as a habitat (think frogs, newts, water fowl, koi, the kraken) or a drinking hole (everyone else, to feed the kraken). But of course the idea is to be able to enjoy it if you happen to be hooman, too, so how do you combine the two?
The idea is to have a natural, self-cleaning system instead of having to add chlorine or similar. Water is pumped through a combination of aquatic plants and porous lava rock, and so is kept filtered and aerated much the same way a lake or a brook is. The difference is that in order avoid having to swim through too much muck, the plants are kept in a separate compartment inside the pond basin. Excess rain water is stored in two underground cisterns, and on days when heat causes evaporation the system automatically uses that stored water to ensure a stable water level.
So, that was the plan. After a couple of failed attempts I found a company, Ecoworks, that specialises in these types of ponds, and who sounded professional. There were several planning meetings where loads of ideas were tossed about, and eventually out. Instead of islands, Japanese bridges à la Monet, or waterfalls, we decided on a simple oval shape with a round wooden terrace at one end.
(In a way, that is a rather nifty description of life at 50: the more outrageous notions might never have come to fruition, but hopefully what you are left with instead is a harmonious, graceful entity – and if there is an occasional wistful yearning for islands and waterfalls, well, that is life, right?)
And so, after some hiccups (the first measurements were wrong, and the guy who was subcontracted to do the digging bowed out as a result) the project got underway in August. I was mightily stressed out by the sheer volume of work that needed to be done, and frankly concerned about the impact heavy machinery would have on the rest of the garden, but I needn’t have worried – the builders were pros, and friendly to a fault.
As load after load of soil was carted out of the garden and the lawn turned to muck, the project began to take shape; the outsized cisterns were sunk in the ground and covered up, the enormous, made-to-measure rubber liner was somehow wrangled into place, the plant scheme decided upon and executed, and finally this enormous moat was filled with water from the garden hose over a period of four days, and it all worked smoothly, in spite (or because) of last minute adjustments here and there.
The lesson here: if you have a dream project, the time for doing it is NOW. And if it doesn’t scare you, you ain’t dreaming big enough. Also – and this just might be universally applicable – chances are your dream project will look like a big muddy hole in the ground right up until it finally comes together.
And so we arrive at today. Mid October, mid life, a cold day and me with a cold to boot, but I wasn’t going to miss the premiere. If I can live the second half of my life in a way that reflects my pond – straddling the natural world and modern technology, adding beauty and doing good for the local flora and fauna (including my darling children) – then I shall be content. After all, if life is a beach, it is nice to be able to go for a swim, and sometimes you have to splash out on yourself…
I woke up to an unusual occurrence last night. Two o’clock a banshee cry unlike anything I have ever heard comes from right outside my bedroom window. Now my bedroom is three meters off the ground, and outside is a pergola covered with roses, so it’s not an obvious place for a nightly visitor; needless to say I am quite startled, as the caterwauling yowling resembles a blend of mad makak monkeys, a cat in heat on helium, and (incongruously) the clucking of a content cock – all individually unlikely to be perched outside, and even less prone to assemble as a nocturnal group to spontaneously perform an impromptu serenade for me on the barbed branches – or so one would have thought.
So I get up and move cautiously towards the window, but whatever it is immediately senses my presence, and the rambunctious ruckus stops – apart from some of the contented clucking and chirping, for some reason. The rose thicket is, well, thick – too thick for me to see anything, so eventually I wander back to bed in dazed amazement and with more than a little adrenaline. Happily there are no further concerts in the night.
Weird? Yes. Spooky? You betcha. So: This morning I did some research, and it seems I was witness to a crime. In all likelyhood what happened outside was a stoat mating session, or rather stoat rape – the males (also known as dogs, bucks, jacks or hobs) apparently aren’t very woke, choosing instead to force themselves on as many females (aka bitches, does or jills) as they can during mating season, something which the latter often object to quite loudly (and damn right, too).
Since I have already had stoats take up residence in the engine compartment of my new car I know they are around – I had to install an expensive piece of ultrasound equipment to get them to stop nibbling on the interior lining. Also, it’s hard to imagine anything else choosing the top of my thorn-encrusted pergola as a spot for some good lovin’, so it’s likely them. The otherworldly cries were simply Jill telling Jack what a wastrel weasel he was, in a manner of speaking.
Long story short, I’m hopeful that before long the neighbourhood might be home to a caravan of stout stoats (bet you didn’t know that collective noun existed, eh?). They might be murderous rapist psychopaths, but then you could say the same thing for cats, and we invite them into our homes. Just don’t fuck with my car or outside my bedroom, would ya?
Last year was a good year for reading (if nothing else). If you couldn’t work/travel/see people for real, at least you could encounter other worlds/perspectives/minds through the medium of the written word. And so I did. Here are some of the best ones I read, in no particular order:
Mindf*ck – Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America (Wylie): the very scary story of how Brits and Americans were manipulated into supporting Brexit and Trump. A must read.
The Popes (Norwich): A concise history of all the incumbents who ever had the job of CEO of the most powerful organisation the world has ever seen.
Being a beast (Foster): The author immerses himself in the world of various animals – foxes, deer, otters, badgers and swallows – and tries to live life as they do. Odd but mesmerizing.
The hidden life of trees (Wohlleben): Reading this man’s take on the inner life of animals made me a vegetarian. While not quite as good this is still an astonishing book.
Waterlog (Deakin): One man’s quest to swim the different waters of Britain, this is an ode to the element, and a cultural history of the land to boot.
The wild places (MacFarlane): In search of wilderness in the British isles. Similar in many ways to Deakin’s book, it comes as no surprise that the two authors were friends.
The history of England, part 1 (Harrison): covers the period from the ice age to 1600. Very well written. I read it in Swedish but I believe it’s been translated.
Creating a forest garden (Crawford): While I have some quibbles with the content (or lack thereof) there is no doubt this book influenced me more than anything else I read this year.
Animal, vegetable, miracle (Kingsolver): Horrible title and cover design, but the quest of one family to be locavores (eating locally produced food) for a year is as eye-opening as it is heart-warming.
Gardens of the world – two thousand years of garden design (Pigeat): garden porn at its finest. If you’re not inspired to design landscapes after reading this I don’t know that you ever will be.
Economix – how our economy works (and doesn’t work) (Goodwin): If someone had told me I’d find a comic book about economics interesting I would have laughed, but I did. And it made me laugh, too.
Baustilkunde – alle Epoken und Stile (Reid): If you can’t travel, this books still lets you see all the architectural styles in the world. It’s part cultural history, part house porn, plus the drawings are fantastic.
How to draw (Spicer): I picked this up in London in January – little did I expect that I would find myself with so much time to practice, but what an excellent teacher it would turn out to be.
So there you go. An eclectic mix, and hopefully something for everyone. Whichever one of these you pick up I guarantee they will enrich your lives – and that’s not something you can say of many things. Happy reading!
As 2020 comes to an end – and good riddance! – a new year is upon us, and with it a chance to gather our thoughts and to figure out what to strive for over the coming months. Here are my loadstones as I attempt to navigate 2021, summed up in 21 words:
1. Vaccinate
Get a vaccination, as soon as you can. Make your neighbours and friends go get theirs. And their cat.
2. Travel
I can’t wait to travel again, once I’ve gad my shot. It’s less about going somewhere in particular, and more about regaining the freedom to roam.
3. Visit
Equally, I am longing to see people in the flesh. I’ve got folks I want to hang out with in Wales, Central America, Dalecarlia, Australia, North America…
4. Fly
It’s probably partly due to Lockdown, but I yearn to take flight! Drones, paragliding, heli… any mode will do!
5. Walk
Discover more local paths. Get to the mountains! And the forests. And the coast. And…
6. Swim
That swimming pond WILL happen. I imagine being able to slide inside its velvety warm embrace every day. Domesticated wild swimming, if you will. Heaven.
7. Read
While not every bookshelf is a secret passageway, every book is a window to a different universe. Go universe-hopping!
8. Grow
Tomatoes. Flowers. Garlic. Wild strawberries. An orchard? As a person?
9. Keep
Bees and ducks. The former are already here, but will need a more permanent home into which they can settle. The latter need to be bought.
10. Play
The piano. And chess. And music. Dance around the living room for the sheer, unfettered joy of it.
11. Write
Blog. Poetry. A book? Maybe compile my travel writing into one. Would anyone read that?
12. Spend
Life is short. Money is only a means to an end. Use it. Buy that thing you’ve been wanting!
13. Invest
But equally, look after your money. Make it work for you, not the other way around.
14. Experience
New things. New vistas. New tastes. New people.
15. Try
And try again. Don’t give up!
16. Be
It’s ok to take time out to just let the universe wash over you. Really.
17. Stretch
Your limbs. And your imagination. Thought Of The Day: Everything in the universe is one of two things – a duck, or not a duck.
18. Wonder
Does anyone actually read these things? 😉 I got 3,000 visitors to the blog this year, from all over the world, so I guess the answer is yes, but who are you?? You can’t all be my mum… let me know, ok?
19. Create
Make things. Drawings. Paintings. Canned goods. Flowerbeds. Revolutions.
20. Live
Here and now, in the real world. Spend less time on social media!
21. Love
Dare to tell the people you love that you do. And if you do love them, act accordingly.
That’s all*. Happy New Year!
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* Felt I missed out on something? Let me know in the Comments.
I always try to sum up the year that was. This time around, it’s both easier and more difficult than usual. Easier, because life has been reduced to the bare essentials in many respects, and more difficult because… well, you know.
Corona/covid came out of nowhere and walloped the world in the face, and the world responded by reeling around like a clown as it tried to come to terms with this new reality.
As the illness went from being an underreported event in a far-flung place to conquering the world, masks became ever more commonplace, as did questions about Sweden’s approach to Covid, which I felt supremely unqualified to answer. Social distancing was the catch phrase on everyone’s (hidden) lips, and then Lockdown was a reality. The inherent flaws of humanity (Loo Roll Riots) and its capacity for empathy (daily Healthcare Applause) were on full display.
In our case the kids and their mom went on holiday to northern Italy in February, just when things got started there, so they had to quarantine before most people. Throughout spring the kids struggled with isolation, an entirely new work interface, and teachers who seemingly had no notion of the burden they were placing on their wards. Luckily for us, there was little work for interpreters, because there was no infrastructure in place to hold large multilingual conferences via internet, so we could help the kids with their transition to distance schooling.
Summer holidays were different, shall we say. Having struggled to even get to Sweden, we isolated as best we could. Whether rafting with the kids and my sister and her family, or kayaking with my brother, I slept outdoors pretty much the whole time – either in a tent or in a hammock slung between a couple of trees. It was lovely, but very brief, as I didn’t get all the leave I asked for (in spite of there being absolutely zero work, my employer insisted on having people on standby…), meaning I had to return to Belgium, where I was forced to self-isolate, and so couldn’t work anyway, of course.
Instead, my mind turned to all the things I had been contemplating doing for a long time, and hadn’t got around to. August saw me take on a flurry of projects: getting solar panels installed, buying a hybrid car, getting bees, planning a swimming pond, constructing a duck house, volunteering at a wildlife rescue center, getting an e-bike, making jams and juice and canning fruit and sauces. It was good.
Then September came around, and a return to school and work, but not as we knew it. School was a strange hybrid, work even more so. Even after more than half a year, both organizations were clearly struggling to come to terms with the new parameters. There was still precious little work for me, so I planned on going to the French alps for a week of paragliding. It wasn’t to be. La rentree had the predictable effect of making cases surge again, and I had to stay home. This was a blessing in disguise, as our beloved cat Misty suddenly died; had I gone I wouldn’t have been there to bury her and grieve her passing with the kids – a poignant reminder of how many people lost loved ones without being able to be there! As it was we buried her in her favorite spot in the garden on the last day of summer. She left a painfully large void in all our lives.
And so we struggled on. Like everyone else we have tried to cope as best we can. In many ways we have been incredibly lucky, in that no one in our family has died from Covid. We still have our jobs. We haven’t been too affected by the many nasty (and under-reported) side effects of Lockdown and isolation, such as domestic violence, depression, substance abuse (ok, fine, sugar consumption levels have been too high). The garden has been an oasis and a constant source of joy.
It does sort of seem like a lost year in some ways, but at the same time I feel very strongly that the world needed this enforced pause to stop and take stock and reflect on where we go from here. I have certainly done so. And even though my ambitions for this year were largely knocked sideways, I have still managed to fulfill some of them: apart from the projects already mentioned I reconnected with old friends and made new ones – you know who you are! – and I did have some fantastic adventures in spite of the limits on travel. Forced to stay at home I did read a lot more than I otherwise would, and played a ton of piano – ninety-nine more years of solitude and I might even get good at it…
So there you go. A year like no other. Some good things, mixed in with a LOT of crap. But this, too, shall pass. Vaccines are coming, the Trump era is hopefully nearing its end (and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see him and his cronies go to prison!), and maybe, just maybe, we can build a better world on the ruins of this one*. If there is one thing that this year has instilled in me, it’s the need for everyone to pitch in and do what has to be done in order for all to prosper.
Here’s to making sure that things improve in 2021!
*Of course, we probably have not seen the last of it yet. Trump declaring martial law in 2021 seems unlikely but then so did Brexit in 2015, and now we have Russian oligarchs buying lordships in the House of Lords even as the country prepares to hurl itself into the abyss.
My good friend Anne suggested I contribute to a collection of haiku verses this summer, to ease the boredom of Lockdown. I jumped at the opportunity, and here they are, in no particular order:
Like most Europeans I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, that most American of holidays. Ironic, since they export everything else, and also because it’s one of the few things about their culture that is both genuinely theirs and genuinely genuine.
The orange menace – not on the list.
And yet, this year – this strange, divisive, scary year – I feel a need to give thanks more than I usually do. Perhaps because so many of the things we normally take for granted have been taken away from us, such as: will I be able to see my family? Will everyone I know be alive at the end of the year? Will I have a job for long? Will democracy prevail?
So. I am thankful. For so many things. For the fact that everyone I know has survived Covid so far, in spite of several friends having had scary experiences.
I am thankful for my kids, and their resilience – they managed the transition to distance schooling as well as can be expected, and I got a chance to spend more time with them (something for which they may or may not be thankful), teaching them and learning from them.
I am thankful I have got a job – I can’t imagine the stress experienced by people who were laid off in the middle of this crisis! – and that I live in a country with a functioning healthcare system.
I am thankful for my friends, old and new, who – although they are scattered across the world in places like Australia, Texas, Hungary, Wales and Massachusetts – have felt closer to me than ever.
I am thankful for the fact that Covid has helped improve my relationship to the children’s mother a little – forced to isolate from the world for weeks and months we had little choice but to socialize with one another, and it turned out to be ok.
I am thankful for having been able to see my extended family in person at least a couple of weeks this summer, and for the technology that enables me to see them on screen for the rest of the time.
I am thankful for Biden winning the US elections; that decency prevailed (just!) in a country I grew up thinking was good through and through, which in reality turned out to mostly be – much like their Thanksgiving holiday – about selfish overconsumption at the expense of others.
And finally I’m grateful for the fact that Covid will hopefully be defeated before long – would that the pandemic experience will bring about the change that is needed in this world! At least then all the pain and suffering hasn’t been for nothing.
(The one blog post I ever wrote that got thousands of hits was one that alluded to sex (but didn’t really have anything to do with it), so if you have been taken in by the title I apologize. The rest of you, read on:)
A cubist photo?
To say I have a bit of a sweet tooth is akin to saying African elephants are slightly buck-toothed. Not for me any other white substance; no Peruvian powder, no Bolivian blow, but good ole-fashioned simple sugar. Sucrose. I have a sugar habit that would make a hummingbird seem abstemious, and it is the one vice to which I unfailingly return.
In fairness, it is by far the easiest addiction to cater to – no restrictions apply, no eyebrows are raised in the supermarket when you load up with knock-off Snickers the way they would be if you were buying cheap plonk – and yet it is an addiction. Substance abuse. What else would you call it if you down a quarter of a kilo of chocolate in one sitting, or a quart of ice cream?
The effects of refined sugar on your body are devastating. It affects your heart, your sleeping patterns, your brain synapses… and that’s before we get to the horrible effect it has on your clothes – they all stop fitting! Suffice to say sweets are unequivocally bad news for you. If you know me a little you know I’m quite interested in living healthily, so this is anathema to me, and yet I haven’t managed to shake off the yoke of Candyland.
Cotton eye candy…
Of course, there are no Betty Ford-clinics for recovering sugar addicts. No posh hangouts with a safe, fructose-free environment for you to adjust to a life without sugar highs. Incidentally, the latter are the reason why refined sugar is so addictive; such grade-A product is incredibly rare in the natural world, so our bodies are pre-programmed to cram as much of it down our gullies as we can on those (originally) precious few occasions when an opportunity presents itself. The reward is a rush of endorphins akin to what you get when falling in love. And this makes sense when you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to steal honey combs and have to be double-quick gobbling it down before being stung to death by a black cloud of wild bees; it isn’t the least bit helpful when there’s an endless supply of it in your local supermarket (and no killer bees to prevent you from overindulging!).
In fact, resisting said temptation is an age old problem. All indigenous people go out of their way to get that sugar rush. Even the Original Sin was caused by sugar – Eve didn’t go for a starchy root vegetable or a protein-rich Egg of Knowledge in the garden of Eden, no, she and Hubby binged on fruit, which of course employ fructose to make themselves attractive to passers-by for propagation purposes (and information sharing, incidentally). My point is, the struggle is real.
So. I will sugar-coat things no more. Literally. My name is Chris. I’m a recovering sugar addict. It’s been ten hours since my last binge. From here on out I vow to live a life without refined sugar.
Fact checking seems all the rage these days for some reason. So I figured it would be appropriate to go back to the lofty list I made this summer to see just how successful or not that I have been in this regard. So without further ado, here it is, warts and all:
1. The bee hive I bought is still only half-assembled, but I’ll have it ready for spring, when my 10,000 new pets will need a bigger home. Can’t wait to have honey on tap…
2. E-bike is great deal of fun, but has been surpassed by its larger brother somewhat. Great for joyriding in the forest tho. Also highly recommended.
3. Home made apple juice was a great success. And stored very well at room temperature. Great way to use the entire harvest. Victim to its own success tho – drank the last of some 30 bottles this morn; so much for self sufficiency through the winter…
4. Hedgehog clearly established in garden. Plus: inspired relatives to create winter quarters for their ‘hogs. All you need is an overturned box, some leaves and (ideally) a narrow entrance so it can remain undisturbed.
5. Chokeberry jam is good. Grown-up taste with a hint of bitterness to counter-balance the sugar. Goes well with toast and/or cheese.
6. Solar panels installed. Geeking out occasionally when it’s sunny, following along with production in real time online. Feels good to be less dependent on other energy sources, not least because…
7. Yup. Got a hybrid car. A black Ford Kuga that looks and feels like a toy batmobile. Can’t recommend it enough. The utter silence alone compared to the old diesel monster (which I now think of as Bane) makes it worth it, and the joy of driving something so responsive is glee-inducing!
8. Geothermal heating seems a non-starter here in Belgium. Weird, since it’s so common elsewhere. If anyone has a different experience here I’d love to hear about it. I haven’t given up hope yet.
9. Volunteers at wildlife centers are an interesting lot. All in all it was a good experience, but with ever-more Corona cases and cramped quarters at the centre in question I decided to let this initiative lie dormant for the time being.
10. In all likelihood I’m getting a swimming pond. Because of Covid there is a long waiting list however, so won’t be happening before next summer, but hey, I need a good birthday gift for myself next year… 😄
11 and 12. Something else that won’t happen before next year is ducks, but the house is ready, so once new hatchlings arrive at the poultry place I’m going for it! Indian runner ducks, to be precise. The scourge of snails everywhere.
13. The garden is full of tits, robins and starlings. Some are already checking out the highrise ahead of next year’s mating season. Here’s hoping the occupancy level will be high as can be!
14. The hammock proved perfect for this year’s excursions; I slept in it just by the water’s edge in Södermanland, and brought it along for when I went kayaking with my brother in the Uppland archipelago.
15. The tomato growing boxes proved impossible to get home from Sweden, as they were much too bulky to take on a plane, but then a Danish friend heard me talk about them and got me one, so it’s on! Heritage seeds, UV lamp, check. Next season will start early.
16. There is nothing quite like kayaking. Quiet, seemingly effortless, at one with nature. The forest lakes of Södermanland were, at least. The Uppland archipelago turned into a hair-raising windsurfing adventure when we crossed miles of open water in windy conditions! The really luxurious way to do it is of course down river, which I did in the Ardennes. Highly recommended, as well.
17. Bees are still busy with the flowers in the garden – not least the ones in the new border I planted especially for them, so that’s gratifying.
18. Sadly, our beloved cat passed away suddenly in September, on the last day of summer, so the clothes line will only be used for washing in the future, unless a new kitten finds its way here…
19. The Ardennes are lovely. I’ve been a couple of times this fall; with the new car it’s a pleasure to go on excursions. I need to get a bike rack so I can bring no. 2 along!
20. Pantry is properly stocked. I may have used up all the apple juice, but I’ve taken to buying local produce and/or using what the garden gives more systematically, so now there’s jams, preserves, frozen berries and mushrooms, and even some locally produced venison. Winter may be coming, but I’m ready.
So there it is. I’m 19 for 20, which is a good score, I think you’ll agree. More importantly, it feels genuinely good to have done all these things, all of which will contribute to making my environmental impact less than it would otherwise have been. I can only encourage you to do the same; turns out it IS easy being green.
I’ve tried intermittent fasting in the past, limiting myself to eating during an eight-hour window every day for a month. It didn’t really work for me. I lost no weight and I felt hungry and/or stressed out about eating at the right time. So when I got a book on the Mosley method, which advocates limiting your calorie intake (to 600/800kcal per day for F/M practitioners, respectively) for two days per week, I was somewhat skeptical.
Turns out I was wrong. Fasting for one day at a time is way more feasible, because it will always soon be over, right? And whereas I would be frothing at the mouth to get at all the good (i.e. bad) stuff at the word go when using the previously mentioned method of “window eating”, going to bed hungry seems to ensure you aren’t particularly ravenous in the morning (odd, but true). This means all the things your brain dreams up for you to crave when fasting suddenly seem less desirable the day after, which is good news.
Looks fast, can’t be eaten.
The brain will try to make you eat tho, so it’s good to have your allotted calories at hand (and avoid having temptations at home). I eat one avocado and four or five boiled eggs when fasting, and that’s it, save for some cherry tomatoes or a couple of handfuls of popcorn for snacks. The latter are more to keep me occupied than anything else – it’s remarkable how boring it is not to eat. Since we are creatures of habit, chances are you will find yourself walking into the kitchen several times a day to get something to put in your mouth – that’s when a bowl of relatively healthy snacks come in handy.
Quite apart from all the supposed benefits of the ketosis these breaks from eating induce (and they are legion, on organs as varied as liver and brain, apparently), it seems the 5:2 method works to achieve weight loss, too. This wasn’t my primary goal, and I have continued to indulge in sweets and baked goods for the rest of the time, but even so I have dropped 3.5 kilos in three weeks. Not bad. Even better: I have done so without muscle loss, as ketosis means the organism switches to burning fat rather than carbs for energy.
The one drawback I can see with this method is that the above phenomenon leaves you quite tired and with low energy levels, as the switch to fat burning takes its toll – something which makes exercising quite hard. When I tried LCHF eating more consistently this occurred once, and then I stayed in fat-burning mode, but going back and forth is more demanding, so one should probably combine the two – eat few carbs and more greens and healthy fat on eating days, and add intermittent 5:2 fasting to the mix. That might be the fastest way(!) to seeing results.
One of my long-standing ambitions has been to keep bees – to contribute to the fight against bee death, to help the environment in general, and specifically with my garden. Then a friend sent me a link to a new kind of hive that looked really cool, and in a moment of madness I ordered one, so now I had to figure out what it would take to actually do it!
After some snooping around I found a woman my age who keeps loads of bees, and was willing to teach me and provide me with a start-up miniplus (a small nuc, or society).
Our initial meeting wasn’t promising at first – her husband was clearly no fan of bees, and the mere mention of her taking me on as her student had him leaving the room – but once we were in the meadow across from their home things started to look up. Alexandra was clearly in her element, and moved from one mini-hive to the next with the grace of a Tai Chi master. Me, I felt quite clumsy in my new astronaut outfit but it’s interesting and fun, and for the most part the bees are very good-natured, which helped.
A couple of times the hives that we check do react rather aggressively but more often than not the bees let themselves be handled without any apparent concern at all – Alex even reaches in with her bare hand and pushes bees out of the way to show me stuff, something which I wouldn’t have thought possible in a million years.
And there is a lot of stuff to take in: reading the size of cells to determine what kind of bee is being bred; learning what signs to look for to see if a bee is a worker or a drone, old or young, of one species or another; looking at the hive’s behaviour to see how the queen is faring (and vice versa), and so on. It’s rather daunting, and the notion of a full-sized hive feels quite overwhelming, but I guess all beginners start out that way.
After three sessions I am deemed to be ready to care for my own bees (or rather, to not make a complete mess of things), and so I find myself early one morning driving home with a styrofoam box in the trunk filled to the brim with 3,000 new friends. With the exception of bringing my newborn children home from hospital I have never driven this carefully, albeit for different reasons! If these guys get out inside the car it won’t end well, and no lullaby in the world will change that. But nothing happens, the bees stay calm inside their sealed-up box, and accept their new home without fuzz.
The change is noticeable immediately. I never lacked for insects in my garden, but now there are bees on every flowering plant. Oregano, thyme and rocket are still in bloom, and there is a buzz of busy bees there from sunrise to sunset. I take paternal pride in just watching them going about their day – bringing back pollen from my butternut squash (protein rich for their young), making honey (sweet carbs for those long cold nights to come) and generally flying about, discovering their new surroundings.
The work doesn’t end here for me, however: the hive needs protection from mice, woodpeckers, badgers, other bees and the dread varroa. Then the girls need sugar to help them build reserves ahead of winter – as much as six kilos of sugar water before the temperature drops, but not so much as to block the queen from laying more eggs – making winter workers the colony will also need to survive.
And speaking of the queen: she should have been marked before she came here, but wasn’t, so under the carefully watching eyes of my teacher I have to reach into the seething mass of bees, pin her down gently with a finger (the queen, not my teacher), extract her with my bare hands, and paint a dot on her thorax with a marker, all the while having bees all around and all over me. It’s quite daunting, and I have to be reminded to breathe several times during the process, but it goes well, thankfully.
When I’m done Alexandra laughs. I ask what so funny, and she admits she’s never seen a beginner do that on the first attempt. Most bee keepers would use extraction tools and certainly never take off their gloves when performing this operation, she adds. I stare at her, disbelief mingled with pride – it apparently pays to not know what is supposedly not possible when attempting the impossible. I look back at the frames where my newly crowned queen is being greeted by her adulating subjects – one of whom I could arguably be said to be – and I can’t help but laugh, too; clearly this – and I – was meant to bee.
If you are anything like me you might have pondered what you can do to make this world a little better, by reducing the pollution you cause, or by using resources smarter and more efficiently, or by helping local flora and fauna thrive.
When I came back to Belgium from my rafting adventure I was forced to quarantine for a fortnight, something that gave me the the opportunity to finally get on with projects that have been on my to-do list for quite some time. Ranging from tiny to quite big investments of time and money, these are all things that will hopefully help soften my imprint on Earth – even if they won’t turn me into an actual hobbit!
While some require a good deal of money I think they will all pay off in terms of improved life quality, and/or actual savings. Plus, with the exception of no. 2, 7 and 8 I don’t think the total cost is any greater than a family holiday abroad – and given that that isn’t going to happen anytime soon…
Anyway, I hope this can inspire you to do one or more things on my list, or something else entirely. Here’s what I did on my two-week staycation:
1. I ordered a bee hive and signed up for a beginners’ course with a local bee keeper who will also provide me with a nucleus.
2. I bought an e-bike so as to be able to travel without using my car or public transport. Bonus: I’m already discovering local spots that I had no idea existed!
3. I got an apple picker so that I can finally harvest my orchard properly, and a dryer and a fruit press in order to preserve the fruit. I might even make cider…
4. I set a (obviously non-harmful) trap to find out what stray dog or cat it was that had been crapping on my lawn. Turns out it was a hedgehog! Maybe a descendent of Spike’s?
5. I picked chokeberries for the first time (I have a bush in my garden that is weighed down with berries every year) and turned them into jam, using this nifty thing. Yum!
6. I signed a contract to have solar panels installed in the autumn – they will also power the bike and…
7. I looked into the possibility of buying a hybrid car. As it uses the battery for the first 75km I would use home-made electricity 95% of the time!
8. I contacted several companies about installing geothermal heating so as to reduce my carbon footprint – no sense in paying Putin for gas.
9. I volunteered at a local wildlife rescue shelter. Bonus: got to pet a peregrine falcon and a tawny owl on my first day!
10. I made appointments to discuss the creation of a swimming pond (to create a better habitat in my garden AND eliminate any excuse for not swimming daily).
A vision of things to come?
11. I went to a local poultry producer to learn what it would take to keep chicken and/or ducks.
12. I tore down the old swing set and am working on turning it into a duck house. You can see where this is going, right…?
13. I bought a bunch of bird houses to install in the garden, and hung feeders with peanuts and sunflower seeds in several spots.
14. I got a hammock (with mosquito net) and hung it in the orchard to be able to sleep outdoors. Can be combined with 16 for good effect.
16. I gave my mom a kayak – she lives by a lake, so hopefully she and all the rest of the clan will have great fun with it. Bonus: No quieter way to get around if you want to spot beavers!
17. I went to the local plant school and bought plants on the basis of which attracted the most bees and bumble bees.
18. I rigged a clothes line with a pulley to create a larger area of the garden where I could allow my cat to roam without risking any birds.
19. I bought a guidebook to hiking in the Ardennes – embarrassingly, I’ve not seen much of it. Time to change that. Backyard adventures!
20. I bought grocerices in bulk online. Zombie prep it ain’t, but it still feels good to have a well-stocked pantry, and to know I don’t have to shop food for a couple of weeks if needs be.
So there it is. More local, more sustainable, more ecological. Have I missed something obvious? What have you done? Let me know!
I had left it until late in the day to plan any activities with the kids for the summer hols, so when my sister suggested we come along on a four-day river raft in Wermland, I jumped at the opportunity. It didn’t start well.
We had driven deep into the forests the previous day and late afternoon we found the rafting outfit. We got our equipment in large, no-nonsense wooden chests, and pitched our tents by the shore in a meadow. Then we got the debriefing: a rundown of the logging history of the region (long and winding), the nature of the Klarälven river (ditto), the potential obstacles we might encounter (submerged sand banks, low-hanging trees, backwater maelstroms – all fun-sounding…) and a quick walkthrough of the knots we’d be using to tie logs together (Did we learn them well enough? We did knot.).
Then a harsh surprise: roll-call tomorrow at 0700 and a 0715 departure to the place up-river where we would build our rafts. That seemed uncalled for, until they finally divulged the reason why; constructing the rafts would take between six and nine hours! The web page made it sound like it was something you could do in an hour, tops…
Given that the seven of us were going to share a whopping three rafts, latched together into one mega-structure, there were no prices for guessing how long it would take us. The forecast for the next day? Nothing. But. Rain.
Not featured: rain and curses.
We woke to a steady drizzle, and drove for about an hour under incontinent skies before we arrived at the construction site, where piles of logs awaited us.
So there we are. It’s an intimidating sight. The stacks are as tall as I am, and the logs range in size from solid to massive, every one of them slick with rain. One 3x3m raft weighs about 1.5 tonnes, so we’ll be shifting the equivalent of three cars’ worth of timber into the river. Bonus: the heftier logs go into the bottom layer (of three), but the piles are a jumble of sizes, a real logjam, so getting them out is akin to a giant game of plockepinn, where every movement can make the logs shift and crush your hands.
We start lugging logs as best we can, dividing them into different sizes, rolling the heaviest ones into the water so we can latch them together. The rain keeps falling, and the kids are questioning our sanity. Did we really volunteer to do this? And pay money for the privilege? I am inclined to side with them, but we are committed to this now, so on we trudge.
The water temperature is a decidedly chilly 15 degrees, numbing our hands and feet; the current is just strong enough to make holding the logs together even more difficult. The clay of the river bottom retains an iron grip on our sandals, but the same clay makes the shore incredibly slippery, so once you wrench your foot free of the water you are likely to slip back down again – all while juggling 600-pound logs. Such fun.
No-one remembers any knots, but after half a raft we at least figure out that we can use the thinner logs to create impromptu rails, which makes getting the heavier ones into the water quite doable – the kids join in and roll tree trunks ten times their weight into the river, which they enjoy.
Timber!
By lunchtime we have finished one raft, and the food dries our dampend spirits, but we’ve got two more to go, so into the river we slosh once again. Other, smaller groups finish their rafts. They load up their kit under the tarpaulin tents and get on board, only to find that the weight of the vessels is now so great that they are instantly stuck. So there they are, stood atop their beached whales, trying to push off with the help of barge poles, effectively trying to lift themselves. Our dreams of Huckleberrying it down a Swedish Mississippi seem shattered, replaced by a robinsonade – we are clearly doomed to be marooned on this beach!
It’s a measure of the general exhaustion level that it takes quite a while for anyone to figure out that the way to get afloat is to get off the raft and lever it free by wedging the barge poles underneath it. Once that is done it is child’s play to set it adrift, but the ordeal isn’t over; several rafts only make it fifty yards or so before settling on a submerged sand bank – we’d been warned about those, true, but so soon? It didn’t seem fair, somehow…
By the time all other groups had pushed off and sailed down the river at what seemed an impossibly slow speed, we were still building our last raft. All in all it took us just under nine hours of backbreaking work, and no-one felt like getting on it when we were done. Instead we pitched our tents and crawled into our sleeping bags, wrung out and cold to the core.
After a fitful night (I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired, or slept so badly), we woke to another dark grey sky, had breakfast in the rain, and finally set off, making sure we steered clear of the first sand bank. Behind us, a timber truck was already offloading the next stacks of logs.
The tempo takes some getting used to. It takes us three quarters of an hour to drift around the first bend in the river. Klarälven is wide and stately, and moves at a decidedly measured pace – rafting here is not for speed demons!
The meandering course is caused by silt deposits that build up on the inside of the main water flow, where the slower speed causes particles to sink to the bottom, which in turn reinforces outward pressure on the water, causing it to press even more against the outside of the next curve. If that all seems a bit technical, all you have to remember is that there is a reason why real estate is cheaper on the outside of any river bend – sooner or later the waters will take it.
This also means that the main flow of the water will always be tending towards the outside of any given curve, and you want your raft to steer clear of the inside, where silt deposits will make sand banks all but a certainty. That’s the general rule, but it ain’t always the case, as we soon discover.
Because there has been a lot of rain lately the risk of running aground on sand banks isn’t great, they told us. Well, two hours into our river run we beat the odds and get firmly stuck. The water is shallow enough that we can stand on the bottom and lever the raft off, but then because we haven’t really gotten used to the (lack of) speed with which we are traveling we make a mistake – ahead of us is an island, and we had been warned not to try and get past an island on the inside, as that would see us marooned, so we pushed on into a narrow canal on the outside.
Of course, it turns out that this wasn’t the island in question (that one we will pass just fine – much, much later), and we have just forced 27 unwieldy square meters of timber plus a canoe into a very tight backwater squeeze. It takes us the better part of an hour to round this islet, using nothing but our stakes, and after that we paid better attention to the map and the flow of the current.
After this, things run a lot more smoothly. The rain stays with us, and we hide out under the tarps as best we can for the most part, only venturing out to push away from the shore line when we get too close, or when a fallen tree juts out into our path. There’s a learning curve to this, too, but gradually we pick up how, when and how hard to push to achieve the desired result. You want to angle the pole right or you won’t be able to push at all, and you want to time it so that there is no risk of the raft catching up with the pole, in which case it might very well snap it in two, something that my sister discovered first hand (mass and momentum are powerful things even at low speeds). Finally you don’t want to push too hard, because that will make the whole raft pivot, and cause the aft end to get raked by the very obstacle the front just managed to avoid. We don’t always get it right, and a couple of times we plow through trees that whip the length of the raft, but we come away more or less unscathed.
My nephew has brought fly fishing equipment and keeps casting in the rain, but to no avail. Luckily we have stocked up on lots of food, because there is not a fish to be seen. The guy at the base camp spoke of all manner of species that could be caught, but although we cover nearly 60km of the river in total there is not the slightest indication that there is anything fishy going on – apart from selling us fishing permits in the first place.
Thankfully the landscape is very pretty. The river runs (well, saunters) through deep forests, and it’s easy to imagine them full of moose, bears and lynx (all of which do exist here, even though they don’t show up on our radar). We spot a couple of beaver huts along the way, but otherwise there is little going on, possibly because the riverbanks are very steep, and there are virtually no spots where you could land, let alone pitch a couple of tents, so it’s a good thing we didn’t try to move out on the first evening.
As it is, it isn’t until late afternoon that we find a suitable meadow on a promontory, but as we realise it quite late, my brother-in-law and I have to jump in the canoe and pull the raft inwards. What we should have done, of course, was to paddle ashore with a long tethering rope that we could latch to a tree and let the raft be pulled to shore by the current, like a pendulum, but instead we paddle like mad and fight the stream all the way, scramble up and secure the taunt line to a grassy knoll; it’s touch and go – as we touch land we see the raft go past us – but in the end we manage: a near impossible task that ensures that our muscles ache just as much the following night.
The next morning couldn’t be more different. The sun is out and it’s warm. It feels luxurious. Even the kids thaw a little. We lounge on deck, reading, snacking, snapping pictures and doing small excursions in the canoe – sandbar islands being a favorite, not least in order to avoid having to use the toilet bucket. We’ve learnt to anticipate the movements of the river and the raft, and there are no incidents to speak of. I feel like all that is missing is a straw hat and a corncob pipe and I would’ve achieved rafting level: Huckleberry.
We even catch something while fishing: a tree. The lure snaps off when caught in a branch, but we have a bit of luck; in what must be said to be an act of desperation, the fisherman had used an enormous, neon-yellow fish lookalike – it’s easily visible in the shallows, so I manage to retrieve it with a quick rescue operation in the canoe.
The last day we feel like old hands, regular log jockeys. The weather is still lovely, if a tad too windy, but we raise our tarpaulins and manage to move on unperturbed. We pass several moored rafts, amongst them one with five nubile Danish women skinny-dipping next to it, and for a fleeting moment I feel like Ulysses when he encountered the sirens.
Alas, that kinship is reinforced a mere hour before we are to arrive at our destination, when we run the gauntlet of another homeric challenge; a long stretch of open water provides the headwind with enough run-up to push us into a bend where a backwater maelstrom awaits us. We push back like mad, but the waters are deep and the barge poles make little difference – except when mine gets stuck at the wrong moment and vaults me into the river! Even paddling with the canoe is futile – but at least it enables us to make land. In the end we have to resort to pulling the raft along the shore using ropes to get out of the ordeal, but at least the Scyllic breath doesn’t blow us into the Charybdis-like whirlpool, like it does another raft that’s right behind us. When we finally do get out, they are still turning helplessly in the backdraft.
Confident smiles all around, five minutes before Scylla and Charybdis.
With this Odyssey-like rite of passage finally behind us, we are quite relieved when we come upon the disassembly area. It’s hard work, too, of course, taking apart the whole craft, but it seems like nothing compared to putting it together. And it’s quite fitting – logs have always been sent down the river this way. Once freed of their shackles they will be collected downriver and used anew. If that’s not sustainable tourism, I don’t know what is.
Well, 2020 didn’t quite turn out as expected, did it? Between Covid, Trump and climate change it feels as if the Apocalypse is close at hand. But that’s not a reason to give up, quite the contrary!
So as per usual, I’m reviewing my annual goals, to see how I’m faring. Like a coach in halftime, I take a cold, hard look at my strategy, and try to rouse and coax my team of me, myself and I into action once again, so as to reach those lofty aspirations from December. How am I doing then?
1. Travel to new countries
Hah. Nope. Nothing. Not even close. But hey, there’s six months left, right?
2. Walk at least 10k per day
Yep. Did a walkstreak of 201 days before a heatwave and a headache put an end to that. Still, doing well so far.
3. Read at least one non-fiction book per month
Yes. The Body (Bryson), Landmarks (Macfarlane), and The living mountain (Shepherd) stand out as the best ones.
4. Get certified as a paraglider (at long last!)
Not unless you count GTA V…
5. Learn a new tune on the piano each month
I was doing ok the first couple of months but then I lost focus. I wonder why…?
6. Make new friends and stay in touch with old friends more
I guess. Again, not very impressive results, but given the circumstances making new friends was never going to be easy, was it?
7. Write a book
Nope. I think you need to be in a better space mentally than I have been to undertake something like that.
8. Learn to draw and paint better
Yes, a little. Not in a v organised fashion tho.
9. Recover from injuries, exercise regularly and don’t get injured again
This has overshadowed my year more than CV, even. Nerve issues aren’t going anywhere. Back pain also seems semi-permanent, and it’s a vicious circle, since the problems keep me from exercising, which then makes the problems worse… glad I managed to stick with the 10k at least.
10. Improve French
Baby steps. No concerted efforts here either.
11. Play chess
Yep. Did play a LOT in the beginning of the year. Now WordFeud has taken over completely.
12. Learn to crawl
Not been anywhere near a pool for obvious reasons. Looking into building a swimming pond in the garden tho.
13. Run 10k again
I’ve actually run for an hour, but at such a snail’s pace that I was nowhere near 10k. Still, there is hope.
14. Go kayaking
Well, the plan now is to go rafting, and maybe kayaking later on.
15. Go hiking
See 1. And 2.
16. Keep bees
Daughter is v much against the idea, and my dreams of playing hive host were dashed when my bee keeper acquaintance had all but one of their hives die over winter, but at least I’ve planted a large patch of flowers just for bees and butterflies.
17. Keep chicken
I AM going to take down the kids’ swings at some point, and I think their crow’s nest could make a neat chicken coop, so… maybe?
18. Drink no alcohol
At least one ambition that is going well. I’ve had a glass of bubbles on three different occasions and that is it.
19. Eat no sugar
A force is met by an equally large force going in the opposite direction? As good as the No Booze is going, the No Sugar rule is being disregarded with gay abandon, sad to say. This is my biggest failing so far, not counting the injuries…
20. Be kind to yourself when you (inevitably) fail 1-19 at some point
Well… Covid-19 changed things radically, and like everyone else I struggled to adapt to quarantine and lockdown. There was virtually no work, but on the other hand distance schooling kept me more than occupied some days. The lack of human interaction was depressing but also a relief. I got an ulcer worrying about the risk of someone in the family contracting the virus, when clearly I could have used my time more fruitfully.
On the other hand, I do think Ambition 20 is more relevant than ever – there is no sense in beating yourself up over not getting all the things done that you had planned, especially when life throws you a giant curveball.
As I said elsewhere, at least Corona forced all of us to pause and reflect on our choices. In my case, it has meant that I have finally placed an order for solar panels and an e-bike, to minimize my carbon footprint. I have also realized that I don’t need very much to be content, but a connection to nature and my loved ones is a definitive must. I don’t know how I would have stayed sane without it.
So… let’s go out there and make the second half of 2020 better with what we’ve learned from the first half, shall we?
There’s this book called Love in the time of cholera. If you haven’t already read it, do. I won’t tell you what it’s about, but there is a hint in the title. As for me, I had already realized that life hasn’t changed all that much for me in this time of Corona, with the ongoing lockdown and isolation, but an Italian friend’s question got me thinking about why that is the case.
There are several reasons: having no family nearby apart from my children and few close friends – those who are close live far away, if you see what I mean? – has meant that I’m used to spending my time on my own, and/or interacting with people via WhatsApp.
Having worked part time ever since the children were born I have become accustomed to spending a lot of time at home, and I am in the habit of scheduling my time to make sure that I get things done, so even before the lockdown my day would consist of an hour of French, reading, piano, gardening, workout, drawing, etcetera. I have a treadmill in the garage and a basement gym, so I don’t have to leave home for my fitness, and the garden provides plenty of opportunity for outdoor activities and fresh air – if anything I’m grateful that I now have enough time to keep up with the weeds… All this means that my daily routine hasn’t changed – on the contrary, it has meant I was readily equipped with a roadmap for how to navigate lockdown.
As for shopping, I’m happy to do most of it online. Groceries are a bit of a hassle to buy without venturing to the store, but I tend to buy in bulk anyway, so nothing has really changed in that regard, apart from there being fewer people (and goods) in Delhaize. I bake my own bread, so the sudden Belgian interest in yeast and flour is the only real drawback of the hoarding that I have experienced so far.
I do tend to travel a great deal, and that has obviously been interrupted by recent developments, but part of me rejoices in the fact that mass tourism is presently interrupted, and besides, spring has sprung and it’s lovely to behold in the little paradise thatnis my backyard – birds are scoping out nesting sites, sleepy bumble bees have started to appear, and every branch is covered with the first coating of tender green that heralds sun, warmth and growth. There’s wonder and wisdom everywhere if you are willing to look for it.
It might sound depressing, as another Italian friend put it, but I honestly think my lifestyle is quite harmonious. If anything – and I don’t want to sound flippant here; people are dying from Covid-19, after all – I think the world would be a much better place if we practiced lockdown regularly. Let’s close Earth for business a couple of months per year. Let people concentrate on what is really important in life – happiness, relationships, tending to the earth (worshipping it, as the Danes would have it) and all living things instead of chasing wealth and power. It would be a better world for all.
At the beginning of the year I set out twenty ambitions for myself. Little did I or anyone else know how different 2020 would be. Gone are the lofty travel plans – and yet the world in lockdown isn’t any less wonderful and rewarding. One of my ambitions was to walk ten kilometers per day, something which I have done religiously even when in quarantine – thank goodness for the treadmill and Netflix! – and since I started a little before New Years I have now done so for a hundred days, which means I have walked more than a million steps. Not bad!
The thing is, if one sets out to do something that sounds impossible (such as walking a million meters), it is a wise person that does it incrementally, literally one step at a time. But in times of crisis such as now, that kind of thinking isn’t sufficient. Instead, a million steps are taken all at once, in one great leap.
Some of those measures taken now will be the wrong ones, but I hope that the corona virus will prove a turning point for our societies, where the sum of measures taken to combat the plague, and their long-term consequences, will improve the way we live: less consumption in general, and specifically of meat, more appreciation for often over-looked professions, a fairer distribution of wealth, and more solidarity.
The virus made the leap from animals to humans due to extensive animal husbandry, the same phenomenon that causes rainforests to be leveled for farmland and the same phenomenon that has altered the Australian landscape sufficiently already to make it susceptible to ever larger fires. I’m convinced that on a planet with eight billion people we cannot afford to be carnivorous – the meat industry is killing us thrice over by causing coronary diseases in the individual, ruining the environment for everyone, and now by making us victims of diseases against which we have no natural defenses.
Its heartwarming to see wildlife making a comeback during this crisis, and pollution levels dropping. We know this is exactly what is needed for the climate and to avoid further mass extinction, and yet the governments of the world are all pumping out money to get the machine working again as soon as possible. I understand we might “need” this in the short term, but this might be our only real chance to create a different approach to “the economy”. Not all economic activity is necessary or good – much like the crisis is showing us all on an individual level who our real friends are when we are isolated, I think now is the time to let market forces show the economy what is really needed in our society. Hands up anyone who has a new-found (or perhaps more correctly, a re-discovered) respect for nurses, police, supermarket staff, garbage collectors and other groups of professionals that we tend to overlook, yet have a fundamental role to play in our lives?
Connected with this is of course the inherent social injustice of a small percentage of the world population hoarding most of its wealth. A society in which a company can simultaneously ask for a government bailout AND award shareholders billions is a society that isn’t just, and therefore isn’t doing what it is supposed to.
The Swedish word for society, samhälle, literally means ”that which holds (us) together”. What holds us together is that we humans cannot survive on our own. If we do not show solidarity with one another we are doomed as a civilization, even as a species. Showing solidarity means that no one individual should be allowed to enrich themselves to the point of being wealthier than entire countries. Showing solidarity means not letting one country attempt to buy up essential medicine from another, but nor does it mean letting the latter country sit on its resources if they are more needed elsewhere. In fact, the notion of national states itself is something that hampers us in this regard.* Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if this potentially cataclysmic crisis proves to be the impetus that enables us to bring about changes to our societies so that they truly become that which holds together – not only people, but the world as a whole?
*It would seem that I have – quite accidentally – come to argue in favour of global (not international, nota bene) socialism. Who’d have thunk?
I always try to sum up the year that was. This time around, it’s both easier and more difficult than usual. Easier, because life has been reduced to the bare essentials in many respects, and more difficult because… well, you know.
Corona/covid came out of nowhere and walloped the world in the face, and the world responded by reeling around like a clown as it tried to come to terms with this new reality.
As the illness went from being an underreported event in a far-flung place to conquering the world, masks became ever more commonplace, as did questions about Sweden’s approach to Covid, which I felt supremely unqualified to answer. Social distancing was the catch phrase on everyone’s (hidden) lips, and then Lockdown was a reality. The inherent flaws of humanity (Loo Roll Riots) and its capacity for empathy (daily Healthcare Applause) were on full display.
In our case the kids and their mom went on holiday to northern Italy in February, just when things got started there, so they had to quarantine before most people. Throughout spring the kids struggled with isolation, an entirely new work interface, and teachers who seemingly had no notion of the burden they were placing on their wards. Luckily for us, there was little work for interpreters, because there was no infrastructure in place to hold large multilingual conferences via internet, so we could help the kids with their transition to distance schooling.
Summer holidays were different, shall we say. Having struggled to even get to Sweden, we isolated as best we could. Whether rafting with the kids and my sister and her family, or kayaking with my brother, I slept outdoors pretty much the whole time – either in a tent or in a hammock slung between a couple of trees. It was lovely, but very brief, as I didn’t get all the leave I asked for (in spite of there being absolutely zero work, my employer insisted on having people on standby…), meaning I had to return to Belgium, where I was forced to self-isolate, and so couldn’t work anyway, of course.
Instead, my mind turned to all the things I had been contemplating doing for a long time, and hadn’t got around to. August saw me take on a flurry of projects: getting solar panels installed, buying a hybrid car, getting bees, planning a swimming pond, constructing a duck house, volunteering at a wildlife rescue center, getting an e-bike, making jams and juice and canning fruit and sauces. It was good.
Then September came around, and a return to school and work, but not as we knew it. School was a strange hybrid, work even more so. Even after more than half a year, both organizations were clearly struggling to come to terms with the new parameters. There was still precious little work for me, so I planned on going to the French alps for a week of paragliding. It wasn’t to be. La rentree had the predictable effect of making cases surge again, and I had to stay home. This was a blessing in disguise, as our beloved cat Misty suddenly died; had I gone I wouldn’t have been there to bury her and grieve her passing with the kids – a poignant reminder of how many people lost loved ones without being able to be there! As it was we buried her in her favorite spot in the garden on the last day of summer. She left a painfully large void in all our lives.
And so we struggled on. Like everyone else we have tried to cope as best we can. In many ways we have been incredibly lucky, in that no one in our family has died from Covid. We still have our jobs. We haven’t been too affected by the many nasty (and under-reported) side effects of Lockdown and isolation, such as domestic violence, depression, substance abuse (ok, fine, sugar consumption levels have been too high). The garden has been an oasis and a constant source of joy.
It does sort of seem like a lost year in some ways, but at the same time I feel very strongly that the world needed this enforced pause to stop and take stock and reflect on where we go from here. I have certainly done so. And even though my ambitions for this year were largely knocked sideways, I have still managed to fulfill some of them: apart from the projects already mentioned I reconnected with old friends and made new ones – you know who you are! – and I did have some fantastic adventures in spite of the limits on travel. Forced to stay at home I did read a lot more than I otherwise would, and played a ton of piano – ninety-nine more years of solitude and I might even get good at it…
So there you go. A year like no other. Some good things, mixed in with a LOT of crap. But this, too, shall pass. Vaccines are coming, the Trump era is hopefully nearing its end (and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see him and his cronies go to prison!), and maybe, just maybe, we can build a better world on the ruins of this one*. If there is one thing that this year has instilled in me, it’s the need for everyone to pitch in and do what has to be done in order for all to prosper.
Here’s to making sure that things improve in 2021!
*Of course, we probably have not seen the last of it yet. Trump declaring martial law in 2021 seems unlikely but then so did Brexit in 2015, and now we have Russian oligarchs buying lordships in the House of Lords even as the country prepares to hurl itself into the abyss.
A new decade beckons. It seems not long ago 2020 was in the realm of sci-fi, but here we are. As always, I am setting out my ambitions for the next year. They don’t include traveling to Mars, or even the moon, but still they might seem far-fetched to some. So, here we go, in no particular order:
1. Travel to new countries
I don’t know exactly which ones yet, but Montenegro left me wanting more, so maybe Albania and Macedonia? Or the Rockies and/or Utah?
2. Walk at least 10k per day
I’ve been on a walkstreak for forty days now, racking up at least 10k steps per day, which is approximately 8.7km, so I’m stepping it up a level.
Thwarted not once but twice in 2019, I’m headed back in April – let’s hope third time’s the charm!
5. Learn a new tune on the piano each month
Nothing much to say about this one, really. I heartily recommend Musescore if you want to find new sheet music.
6. Make new friends and stay in touch with old friends more
I’m only too aware that I’m not good at making friends. I will make an effort to change that.
7. Write a book
I’ll have quite a lot of time on my hands this spring, as I’m using up the last of my parental leave, so maybe I could give it a shot? If not now, when?
8. Learn to draw and paint better
Both the kids like it, and we have fun doing it together, so I’ll make a concerted effort to get better at it.
9. Recover from injuries, exercise regularly and don’t get injured again
THAT’s as far as I dare hope after two years of persistent problems and general buggery.
10. Improve French
Merde alors!
11. Play chess
Challenge me! Chess.com is fine, but meeting up and playing for real would be nicer still.
12. Learn to crawl
No more granny-stroking for me. Wait, that sounded wrong…!
13. Run 10k again
Ok, so I lied under 9. Hope springs eternal!
14. Go kayaking
I have tried it briefly a couple of times. Moreish!
15. Go hiking
See 1. And 2.
16. Keep bees
To bee or not to bee is no question.
17. Keep chicken
Not too close to the bees tho!
18. Drink no alcohol
#oneyearnobeer or any other plonk, for that matter.
19. Eat no sugar
No refined sugar. No cake, candy, jam, marmalade or similar. I’ll be the antithesis of a sugar daddy…
20. Be kind to yourself when you (inevitably) fail 1-19 at some point
No reason to beat yourself up for not always reaching the level you strive for. Fail and try again.
And that’s it. Should make for an interesting year. Happy 2020 everyone!!
I started this year saying I wanted it to be a year of excellence. It wasn’t.
It was, more than anything else, the year my father finally passed away, long after Alzheimer’s had stolen him from us. I won’t say more on the subject, but it obviously set the tone for a large part of the year.
It was also a year marked by injuries, as pinched nerves in my back and a crappy Achilles’ tendon prevented me from working out like I would have ideally wanted to. No running, no races, not even a proper training regime, as I seem to be going from bad to worse. It’s frustrating and painful, but there is nothing for it but to try and try again. For now, I’m walking 10,000 steps per day and do various exercises to strengthen my core. It helps, but I’m along way from where I want to be.
And yet it has been a good year in many ways. I took the children on several journeys – to Dubai, Croatia, the US and Canada, and Iceland – every one of them new countries to us all (well, apart from the US for me). I went on several more trips without them – to Crete to hike, the Pyrenees to paraglide, to Barcelona when there was no paragliding to be had, and to Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia for some prime adventuring. So it was a good year for traveling.
I did succeed in my ambition to read more non-fiction, and thanks to chess.com and Musescore I’ve at least kept up my chess game and piano playing, respectively.
My French probably has improved ever so slightly, but it’s still an embarrassment. Merde alors!
I kept a diary for half the year, but lost the habit when roadtripping in the US – the days were simply too long and exhausting to keep it up. I did get a new job – still in communications – but since it’s a project specific one and the project hasn’t really gotten underway yet there’s not much to say about it for the moment.
I stayed vegetarian the whole year, and am inching closer and closer to veganism, which feels good. And I’ve been staying away from sugar and alcohol since a month, which is showing on the scales already.
The birds and the bees still elude me – at least no chicken run or bee hive has been installed in the garden as of yet, but hopefully that will soon change.
So not all bad, if not an excellent year. Now let’s see what 2020 might bring…
As one of my resolutions for this year I set out to read more non-fiction, and I did – even though many of the books in the original pile didn’t get read for some reason. Amongst the books I did read, the following stand out (in the order my eyes happened to fall on them on the bookshelf):
Recovery (Brand): Russell lends his own mix of philosophy and humour to the AA brand of addiction overcoming.
Homo Deus (Harari): a mind-boggling exposé of the past, present and future of the human race.
Prisoners of geography (Marshall): How landscapes determine the political efforts of nations. An eye opener.
Through a window (Goodall): chimps, and what they teach us about humanity.
Hjärnstark (Hansen): On the paramount importance of ensuring a healthy body to accommodate a healthy brain.
Bird by bird (Lamott): lessons in writing and life, drawn from a life of writing.
Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman): possibly the best book this year; how rational are we, really? Mind: boggled.
Underland (Macfarlane): this man has written several books I wish I had written. This is probably his best.
Touching cloudbase (Currer): not necessarily the best book I’ve read, but essential if you want to learn paragliding.
—-
So there. Something in there for everyone, I hope. For every one of these I have probably acquired two more, so I will keep this challenge for next year, too. Join me, maybe? #onenonfictionbookpermonth
I was supposed to be flying. Paragliding in the foothills of the Pyrenees. But the weather isn’t cooperating, and so it is that I find myself in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, with four days on my hands and no plans whatsoever. I’ve been here once before, but only to run the marathon, and I didn’t see much of the city – I must be one of the few people to have passed the Sagrada Família on foot without even noticing it was there! So now I will make up for my previous lack of attention. And there are worse places to be grounded…!
Like Rome, Barcelona is a city spanning millennia, but with the exception of the bullfighting ring (which is a direct descendant of the gladiatorial games of yore) Barna (not Barca – that’s the football club) doesn’t wear this fact on its sleeve. Instead there are hints everywhere; a colonnade incorporated in a building, supporting arches laid bare in basements, a stretch of aqueduct suddenly appearing like a ribcage of a long dead animal revealed by the ebb and flow of the desert sands. Some can be seen in archeological digs, others are felt rather than perceived by the naked eye – the rambling roads of the old town still snaking their way to the sea along buried waterways, place-names lingering where the features themselves are long gone.
And these are just the things you can perceive above ground level – there is a whole sub urban cityscape, too. I’m reading Underland at the moment, and I’m dying to find someone that can give me a more comprehensive tour of the hidden layers of the city’s past, but alas, I don’t find any such cicerone. Instead I wander the streets aimlessly, getting creatively lost and finding a seemingly endless array of interesting stores and quaint bars and restaurants. There’s the café that serves nothing but cereals, the street vendor that specializes in what must be diplomatically circumscribed as anatomically-looking plants, the store filled with nothing but huge sacks filled with all kinds of flour, nuts and seeds, one establishment that sells only glass jellyfish, another that’s full of leather masks (for carnival, or other special occasions), the list goes on and on.
It is a city ripe with contradictions: the second largest in the country, and a centre for the independence movement; a city thriving on tourism, with a strong opposition to that very phenomenon; a city that is clearly very well to do, yet possesses a large population of dispossessed people. These aren’t your ordinary homeless people, either; much like the independence movement, these poor people are organized; they live in tribe-like groups that squat in empty buildings and form an entire shadow economy, siphoning electricity from the grid illegally, much like their ancestors would have done to get water from the aqueducts without paying.
Due to all this and more, Barcelona has a unique quality to it. An American I meet that has previously lived in New York City and San Fransisco says it combines the best qualities of the two – and I see no reason to contradict her. The famous grid-shaped city planning of the newer parts of town combined with the labyrinth of the old town, the proximity of both sea and mountain, and of course the marvelous architecture (so much more than the Gaudi showcases – but yes, this time I do get to see his little church project!) all make for a wonderful cityscape. Add to that the many authentic restaurants and food markets, the international blend of people from all over and the likable nature of every inhabitant I encounter, and you have a pretty ideal mixture. If I had to live in a city, this would be high on my list.
You know that feeling when you arrive at the train station only to see the train you need to be on pull out? That was me this morning. Why? Well, I was slow, due to being dead tired from having been unable to sleep most of the night, and the reason for that was undoubtedly the two large whiskeys and enormous chunk of gingerbread dough that I had late last night.
As I stood there watching the train disappear in the distance it felt like I was watching an illustration of what was happening, as if life itself was showing me a metaphor; everything you put inside your body is either helping it or destroying it, and this was a clear picture of what I had been allowing myself to do more and more of lately. Eat and drink enough poison (sugar and alcohol) and you cannot act surprised when the metaphorical train of life leaves without you.
So. It was decision time. It’s not like I haven’t stopped before. I gave up both sweets and booze in the past, but those were just trials, test balloons if you will. Just like I knew it was time to give up on a carnivorous lifestyle over a year ago, so now the time has come for refined sugar and ethanol.
“Rewarding” ourselves by consuming chemicals that are harmful is hardly intelligent, nor particularly evolved. Humans are happy to munch on sugar as soon as opportunity presents itself, because it is scarce in nature, so evolutionarily speaking it is a good thing, but with the abundance now on offer that instinct works against us. On the other hand we need not be dogs who get treats when behaving correctly.
The same is true for alcohol – several species are known to enjoy a tipple; moose eat fermented fruit, dolphins get high on puffer fish, and so on, but these are rare treats (koalas spend most of their STD-infested lives high as kites on eucalyptus, but we won’t go into that now…) unlike the constant availability of wine, beer, spirits that humans face nowadays.
So no more. Detox is a load of mumbo-jumbo, but notox will be my watchword from now on. As of today I will live without all kinds of refined sugar (juices, marmalade, candy, confection, cakes, ice cream, you name it) and any and all Ju-Ju juice. Having put on four kilos in three months isn’t sustainable, and hopefully this change will bring about an improved situation in this regard as well. I will not bore you with the details, but I will publish updates here below of how my body changes (not to worry, no nudes forthcoming) and together we will see what happens. Only time (and my new, smart scales) will tell.
Update: So that was the starting point. Two weeks in (2/12), and the picture is looking brighter already; total weight down 700g, fat percentage down 0,4%, V-fat down 0,5kg. Less good: muscle loss 0,3kg, but then I haven’t met exercised at all.
Montenegro’s nature is truly grandiose. Traveling inland from Budva we stop at Lake Skadar and take a boat journey into the National Park. According to the guide books it offers a sanctuary to a great many species of birds, but since birds cannot read they seem unaware of this offer – there aren’t hardly any around. Still, it’s a pleasant break from driving, it’s sunny and warm and we’re alone on the boat with a great big platter of fried dough balls served with local med, honey, for lunch;life could be worse.
The journey into the interior skirts Podgorica, the capital, but we make straight for the mountains. The road snakes its way along the Moraća river, and mid afternoon we arrive at the mouth of the Mrtvica canyon, where we’ll do our first proper hike. The road leading inside it is so narrow that we miss it at first, and the drive along the side of the canyon to the trailhead is a harrowing experience, better suited for a 4×4 or perhaps a mountain goat.
The only reason we finally find the trailhead is because an old local man flags us down and points it out. He also says there’s a risk our car will be broken into as we have Croatian plates – clearly Montenegrins don’t love their neighbours neither!
Miss A is a little shook by this statement – she is a keen photographer and doesn’t want her equipment stolen, so subsequently takes everything with her in her backpack. I don’t own any fancy kit, so leave everything in the car*. And then we’re off, racing dusk up a most wonderfully overgrown ravine, where the trees aren’t just bearded but positively shaggy, and the waterfalls bounce and bound over boulders the size of buildings in the chasm below.
The next day, fortified by local shepherd fare, we venture even longer and higher into the mountains. Biogradska Gora is another National Park of stunning beauty – reminiscent of New Hampshire, with trees in every shade of russet, caramel, bronze and amber. Possibly because she is literally from that neck of the woods, or because she has picked up my cold, or because the map we’re using is sketchy in the extreme and doesn’t allow for proper navigation, Miss A is less than impressed with our quest to find the Mountain Eyes (the local name for glacial lakes that dot the region), and keeps up a litany of “Are we there yets” and “This is the worst trail evers” throughout the hike. It reminds me of my children, which I guess is good, and even I have to admit that the lake we eventually discover is underwhelming as a reward for four solid hours of walking. Still, it is a very pleasant park.
There are lovely cabins on offer near the visitor’s centre, but we want something better, so we use TripAdvisor to find alternative lodgings. The joke is on us; bad internet and too much haste sees us pick a place that’s called Riverside Lodge, or somesuch. I guess it’s a better name than Motorwayside Shack, but the latter would have been more correct. Suffice to say we leave as early as we can the next morning.
We drive into the morning mist and follow the lovely Tara river into the heart of the mountains. Autumn makes the deciduous trees glitter like jewels, and black pine trees cling to the serrated edges of the canyon, making it feel like a Japanese watercolor come alive.
The best way to experience its beauty is from the river itself, however, so that’s what we do. Rafting companies offer everything from two hour trips to two full days, the latter of which will take you all the way to the Bosnian border. Given time constraints and what we’ve seen so far of border crossings in the region we opt for the former, and spend a blissful morning being ferried down river by the currents (and never mind that the company fleeced us, charging for entrance tickets to the national park that turned out to be a week old…).
The last area we explore is Durmitor, another National Park of outstanding beauty. It’s of a different kind to what we’ve seen so far. Above the tree line entirely, the mountains here are clad in nought but pale golden grass. It’s a stark landscape, deserted and unforgiving, but very appealing nonetheless, not least when we stumble upon a herd of semi-wild horses. Whether it’s luck or what little I have gleaned of horsemanship, it’s a good feeling when two of them finally approach me and sniff me out under the watchful eye of the herd lookout.
And that marks the end of our journey, almost. There’s a long drive back to Dubrovnik, via orthodox cloisters nestled like swallows’ nests on rocky outcrops**, and through a somber Bosnia – we don’t stop here, but somehow the mood of the country is still clearly different – and back into Croatia under cover of darkness.
I already want to go back. There are secret canyons to be explored, trails to be walked, ridges to be soared, and all of it as yet unspoiled. It comes with my highest recommendations.
——
*I do start compiling a list of all the things I wish I had – GoPro, drone, iPhone X et cetera – in case the car does get broken into. My birthday is coming up, after all, and if Montenegro is about anything it’s about playing the system to your advantage!
**Montenegrins are very devout – there are long lines to kiss the remains of the local saint, and the cloister courtyard is full of pilgrims who stay here for days in the sweltering sun in the hope of benefitting fully from the presence of Divinity. Whether it’s present or not I wouldn’t like to say, but the presence (and smell) of humanity is quite overwhelming.
Driving into Montenegro you are immediately struck by the sheer amount of geography that has been crammed into such a small country: the coast is very dramatic, with steep, forest-clad mountains erupting directly from the impossibly blue Adriatic. The other thing that is immediately apparent is the recent history between Croatia and Montenegro; nowhere else in Europe are there border controls with a no man’s land between them, but in the Balkans they take borders seriously.
Bay of Kotor (not featuring Kotor)
We drive along the coast to the first of several geological features that have shaped the nation: the Bay of Kotor. It is an enormous fjord, and nestled in its safe haven is the city of Kotor, that once was a wealthy commercial hub and an important part of the Venetian empire.
Much like Dubrovnik it is remarkably intact, but it has a very different feel to it – less polished, more chaotic, and a lot more charming for it! We stroll around its narrow streets, enjoy gelato and the many, many cats that call the city home, and then climb up its half-ruined fortifications that clamber up the cliff face against which the city is cradled. Only half of it is still accessible to the public, as the other half is too crumbled to be safe, but its state of disrepair only adds to its considerable charms, and since its much too steep for the cruise ship crowds we have it largely to ourselves.
Venetians – famous for blinds AND walls.
Further along the bay is Perast, a one street cluster of old Venetian palazzos where wealthy merchants once summered. Several of them have been restored and turned into B&B’s or hotels, and we spend the night in one of them, enthralled by the surrounding beauty. It’s a testament to the many wars that have ravished this region that the room has gun slits in the walls, but no one mounts an attack during the night, and we even manage to avoid the onslaught of tourists the next morning as we negotiate the hair-raising switchback road that takes us up into Lovćen.
Lovćen is the heartland of Montenegro; it is a National Park centered around Crna Gora, which means black mountain, the name deriving from the way the mountain looked clad in dense forests. Lovćen is also the only place where the Slavs managed to hold off the Ottoman Empire – like an East European real life version of Asterix and his fellow Gauls, the tribes of this area were simply too much for the Turks to conquer, and eventually the latter sued for peace – the only time the Ottomans ever did, something which is a source of pride to all Montenegrins.
Drop dead gorgeous…
Today, this national pride is manifest at the very summit of the mountain, where a mausoleum to Peter II, Prince bishop and the spiritual founding father of modern Montenegro is hewn out of the rock. Many of his countrymen make the pilgrimage here, and even if it is a bizarre thing to find on top of a mountain, it does nothing to detach from the beauty of the National Park. We spend a glorious autumn day hiking up and down the mountain, enjoying the solitude and quiet beauty of it all, before getting back in the car and heading back down to the coast, and the city of Budva, which we reach after dark.
In many ways Budva is a manifestation of Montenegrin society at its worst: corruption is rampant in the country, and organised crime is at least as prevalent here as it ever was in Italy. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in Budva, another old trading town that has reinvented itself as the favorite marina of Russian oligarchs and their super yachts. The once pleasant town is overrun with developers building anything and everything they can think of to lure the rich and the rubberneckers to their shores, and they ride roughshod over any civic or aesthetic considerations in the process. The one part that has remained (outwardly) untouched is the miniature island known as the scene of the poker tournament in the James Bond movie Casino Royal – it is now fully owned by a hotel conglomerate catering to the super rich, who are lining up for the chance to emulate 007 (and never mind that the rest of the movie was filmed in Czechia…).
Casino Royale – or How To Market Your Hotel.
The only reason I wanted to come here was that there is supposed to be good paragliding off the mountain ridge behind it, but the outfit I contacted to go flying didn’t react in time, and besides, having seen the state of the beach that they proposed to use as a landing area I don’t feel comfortable flying here anyway. It is an experience best left to a different clientele, and so after breakfast we head on to what really makes Montenegro worthwhile: its wild nature.
In a manner of speaking, every age brings with it a journey into a foreign land, so what better way to celebrate the annual turning of the counter than by going on an expedition to… a foreign land?
Dubrovnik by drone.
I meet up with my good friend Miss Adventure in Dubrovnik, famously pretty old town on the shores of the Adriatic. I was in Split earlier this year, so strictly speaking it isn’t my first time in Croatia, but Dubrovnik is situated in the strange appendix that is separated from the main landmass of Croatia by a Bosnian land bridge, which makes it a Croat enclave in a foreign land.
This mapping oddity is a result of the war that followed Yugoslavia’s collapse, when Bosnia and Montenegro shelled the UNESCO-protected town from the mountain ridge up above in an attempt to conquer it. Judging from the number of roofs that had to be replaced, and the many plaques commemorating the atrocity in the old town, it would seem UNESCO doesn’t provide any actual protection, at least not against invading armies…
Nowadays, a different kind of army invades the city on a daily basis. Hordes of tourists come to gape at its wonders, but such ancient history as the civil war doesn’t interest them. Instead it is another civil war – that in Game of Thrones – and the many locations used in filming scenes in King’s Landing that draw the crowds. Most popular of these are apparently the stairs where Queen Cersei began her naked walk of shame…! Why you would want to see a staircase on the basis of the fact that a naked woman once stood on them, I don’t know. What kind of third degree voyeurism is that? In any event, my own brief attempt at reenactment is promptly ended by my companion, ironically with the words “Have you no shame?”.
Not actually the author.
GoT or no, tourism is simultaneously a blessing and a curse for Dubrovnik – it is virtually its only source of income, but the success is such that it is becoming unbearable, even now in the off season. The city is also famous for its astonishingly well-preserved fortifications, its walls still intact, and most of the turrets, forts, bastions and casemates equally untouched by time. Never breached by a foreign army, the defenses of the city are now – somewhat ironically – overrun with foreigners. The price of walking around the top of the city walls is steeper than the walls themselves at 27€ per person, and even without the presence of one of the gargantuan cruise ships in the harbour you have to be among the very first up those stairs, or it is one long Escheresque queue of instagrammers, obese Americans, lemming-like Chinese and GoT geeks.
What can you do when you’re up against such a defense?
The same is true for every alley inside the walls. The main shopping street is called Stradun, and it’s a case in point. It’s surprisingly broad and straight for a medieval city street. It used to be a narrow, marshy straight that separated the island part of town (Ragusa) from the shore side (Dubrava), but as it became ever more clogged with debris and waste from the two cities, the decision was taken to pave it over, thus creating Dubrovnik as we know it, and something of a medieval esplanade – alas, it’s still clogged up, only now it’s with throngs of people.
Early morning on the Stradun…
It is a shame (no pun intended) because Dubrovnik could be so lovely, with its cream-coloured limestones and medieval Mediterranean vibe, but as it is it feels like a movie backdrop rather than a real town, and the crowds make it unbearable for long; one day and one night is plenty, and we are happy to get a rental car and make a run for the Montenegrin border.
I’m running off a cliff at the top of a mountain, much like Wil E. Coyote in the Roadrunner. Unlike him, however, I continue out over the edge and keep going, even as I look down and ponder the gaping abyss opening up below me. I can fly. How did this happen?
I’ve come to the south of the Pyrenees, to the highlands of Catalonia. Ager, a sleepy hamlet on a hillock inside a bowl of a valley is the HQ of Passion Paragliding, and I’m here to qualify as a Club Pilot. It’s been almost two years since I got my first taste of flying under a canopy (at the other end of the Iberian peninsula), and I am keen but nervous – the last time a stroke of bad luck saw me rupturing a muscle in my behind – a bummer if ever there was one – and I’m not up for a repeat performance!
We’re a motley little crew that’s gathered in this remote location under the tutelage of Toby (the sweet and funny man whose outfit this is) and his handsome Catalonian sidekick Ganis (pronounced tantalizingly akin to Janice): apart from me there’s Dana, half Persian and all English, a clever and determined bloke, editor of medical research papers, and very much a kindred spirit, and then there’s Andrew, retired lecturer in economics at a community college, who is almost comically slow on the uptake and forever apologetic, apart from on the topic of Brexit, of which he reveals himself to be a dyed-in-the-wool, staunch supporter, bless him (although he admits to not having kept up with the news at all over the last six months, as it upsets him too much).
Then there are the CP plussers – a bright young guy from Bahrain called Khalid who says little but takes in everything, and a Northern lass named Jackie, both of whom are significantly more experienced than us – and finally there are the cling-ons, as Toby calls them – Jackie’s boyfriend John, who is semi-retired and lives for paragliding and in a camper that is a mix between a luxury aircraft and the bat cave, Jan, a very straightforward and ditto talkative woman of a certain age who travels the paragliding circuit and plies massages and more to fliers, and finally Rob, a lovely giant teddy bear of a man who is an old student of Toby’s. All of them hang out with us and go up the mountain with us, and prove to be more or less helpful to our learning efforts.
Alas, the first couple of days the winds aren’t cooperating, so we spend a lot of time on theory, of which there is plenty, and ground handling, which is difficult at the best of time and even more so in gusty winds – the canopy is quick to go off at a tangent if you’re not very meticulous and careful with your movements. (One particularly vicious gust catches me off-guard, and drags me across the unforgivingly gravelly dirt, meaning I get my battle scars early, and the others a good laugh.)
Andrew is meticulous to the point of just standing stock still, meditating over his wing, but on the other hand he does practice his movements with an imaginary canopy outside the local bar, which raises a few Catalan eyebrows, as he parries and dances with his non-existent glider. Happily, the locals are accustomed to the antics of the paragliding community, so they are quite tolerant – the wingéd people bring in a lot of sorely needed tourist money, after all.
We continue on, and it is frustrating at times, but we’re gradually improving, picking up little tricks here and there – even Andrew starts to get it. And after a few days of this, the wind eases off, and suddenly we are driving up to the ridge that forms the edge of the bowl-like valley, some 600 meters below.
We start out taking off with the help of Ganis, but even then it’s a daunting thing to willfully throw yourself off a mountain, and things can go wrong even at the best of times; Dana has to abort several attempts, and Andrew manages to switch off the radio during one of his first flight. To make matters worse he goes flying off on in the opposite direction to what was agreed, which has the usually sanguine Toby cursing the sky blue in the LZ. I’m no exception: in my second attempt the wind drops off just as I’m running towards the edge and I dive forward into the scree, my bird imitation more penguin than eagle. Add more battle scars.
After that I’m a little bit apprehensive, but Rob provides a much-needed pep talk, so I carry on and fly twice more that evening. Thankfully all the ground handling pays off, which means that towards the end of the week I can get the canopy off the ground with relative ease, and then finally – on the last day – I reach the point where I can balance it in the winds over my head with a degree of precision that allows me to literally step off the mountain and into the air. The trees and jagged rocks fall away, and I soar out over the sun-kissed landscape and into the air high above olive groves and pig farms and fincas. The buzzards are thermalling as I glide off into the sunset, and I feel as if I am one of them.
The week flew by (pun intended) and I’m not even sorry the fickle winds didn’t enable us to get enough flights in to get our certificates, because this way we get to go back and do it again. I can’t wait!
My baby brother turned forty this year, and the whole extended family went to Iceland to celebrate. We had to fit it around everyone’s schedule so in the end we only went for four days, but what days they were!
Arriving in Keflavik on Odin’s day seemed fitting, and the home of sagas didn’t disappoint; already at the rental car desk they told us tall tales about the risk of volcanic sand peppering the cars if the winds rose along the coast – turns out that was a typical rental car company hoax to get us to pay for more insurance, but still, Iceland didn’t disappoint: even the drive from the airport to the capital went through lava fields, and we all looked eagerly out through the low clouds to see the odd volcanic cone rising out of the mists.
We headed immediately for the Secret Lagoon, one of several places on the island where you can bathe in natural thermals. It’s over two hours from the airport, but a lot less crowded and touristy than the more famous Blue Lagoon, and unlike the latter it’s not heated by wastewater from a power plant either, so it was an easy choice. Floating in a pond of water that’s heated by a geyser might not be everyone’s cup of tea (even though it was easily as hot as one, at 42 degrees centigrade) but we took to it like ducks to, well, scalding water, and spent the rest of the day there.
On Thor’s day we set out from Reykjavík on the first of several organised tours (courtesy of my sister); horseback riding in the morning, and whale watching on the afternoon. Both were fantastic experiences, not least because of the unexpected, glorious weather. They did leave me wanting for more, however: hacking (riding out on cross-country trips) would be more satisfying if you could go out into the real wilderness, even if the National Park we were in was pretty enough.
The same is really true for whale watching. Having seen humpback whales feed at close range only a couple of weeks ago off Cape Anne in Massachusetts, the sightings of minky whales here were a little underwhelming (the dolphins were nice tho!). And I later learned that north of Snæfellsbær there are orcas (indeed, some Americans we encountered had even seen them from land!), so that would have been a better bet.
Anyhow. Everyone was happy with (if sore in the nether regions from) the riding and no one was sea sick from the boat ride, so all was well, and it also meant everyone really appreciated the rather slower pace of Frej’s day, when we did the “Golden Circle” by tour bus. Long established, it encompasses the Gullfoss waterfall, Tingvalla, and Geysir National Park; the first is an enormous, two-tier waterfall, the second is the area where Icelandic Vikings assembled in the very first National Parliament in AD 930, and the third is where the mother of all geysers, the eponymous Geysir, sleeps peacefully – it only erupts when there’s an earthquake in the region, and hasn’t done so for ninety-odd years, but when it does it apparently leaves even Old Faithful in Yellowstone in its steamy wake.
All were good outings, but it felt wrong to be on someone else’s clock – I would have liked to spend more time at Tingvalla, to explore places such as Gallows Rock and Drowning Pond (laws were a little harsher then – I suppose having to wait for justice for up to a year and riding for up to two weeks to get there didn’t encourage leniency!) but that’s the compromise you have to make when you try to take in so much in so little time, I guess.
The next day was no less relentless: we took the cars up to Snæfellsbær, the peninsula/national park north of Reykjavík, and drove around it, stopping briefly here and there to take in volcanic caves, a narrow rift gorge, the jagged coastline, and salty fishing villages.
I would have gladly spent a week exploring it all, but we were on a tight schedule, because that evening we went out on a deep sea fishing expedition, angling for (and catching plenty of) cod which we then promptly devoured on board the ship*.
I had hoped to go on one final adventure, to Silfra, a lake situated right between the tectonic plates that hold North America and Europe, respectively. There, you can dive in crystal clear waters in a straight narrow enough for you to touch the both continents simultaneously, but our flight was early Sunday afternoon, and there was no feasible way of making that happen. Instead, we ventured to an old-fashioned bathhouse in Reykjavik, where you could move between pools with temperatures varying from ten to forty-two degrees centigrade – a sufficiently exciting adventure for the rest of the family, for sure.
All in all it was a marvelous four days, and it was particularly nice to be able to do something with the whole family, but next time I come I will stay for longer, and do all the things we didn’t have time for now. There are still glaciers and volcanoes to be explored, for instance – now THAT would truly be A Song of Ice and Fire!
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*My not-so-understanding clan made fun of me for eating the fish, as it marked my second ever deviation from vegetarianism, but I figured it was more ethical to eat what I had caught, as not doing so would have made it even more amoral and wasteful.
We went to Split on a whim. It was a decision taken more or less at random, as I needed a destination for my Easter week with the kids, and knew they wanted sun and warmth. I was so overwrought at the time tho that I only checked Momondo for reasonable flights to anywhere in Croatia, and then promptly forgot about it – to the point where I thought we were going to Zadar until mere days before departure…!
Split proved to be fabulous, however. It’s an old town, built up around Diocletian’s retirement home; one of the few Roman Emperors ever to step down voluntarily, the guy was clearly a bit of a planner, since he spent the last ten years of his emperature(?!) organising the building of this vast palace on the Adriatic coast.
When he wasn’t doing that, the Big D was busy making a name for himself as the last emperor to prosecute the Christians, which was kind of lucky, because after his death, Christianity was made the state religion, and what with old Dio being out of vogue, the Christians pillaged the palace and tossed his remains in the sea. Why lucky then? Because the palace was too good to tear down, the pillagers moved in, and turned into villagers. The palace is better preserved today than any other similar construction precisely because it has been continuously inhabited ever since. Sure, you have to look a bit to see it under the Venetian influences and the mishmash of buildings that have been torn down, erected, repurposed and re-erected over the centuries, but it’s still a wonderful edifice, and massive at 30,000 square meters.
We explore its nooks and crannies, alleyways and hidden squares, and delight in finding new, hitherto unseen gems, like a perfectly preserved temple to Jupiter, the Letmepass Street (all five meters of it) where we stop to watch American tourists get stuck (it’s not a meter wide), and the cellars of the palace, where Daenerys kept her dragons. (Lots of scenes from GoT were filmed here…), glimpse inside the cathedral (which is housed in Diocletian’s mausoleum – how’s that for revenge?!) and stroll along the promenade feasting on gelato (Italy being but a stone’s-throw away).
The region of Dalmatia has more to offer than just Split, too: we take a ferry out to the island of Brač and have this year’s first dip in the Mediterranean, then go up into the mountains to take on white water rafting down the Cetina river; we’re in an inflated canoe rather than a raft proper, and it’s exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure, as I’m the only one paddling most of the time, and steering us through the eddies is hard work indeed. The kids are very good though, and not the least bit scared, save for when a spider boards our craft…
Then there’s the impenetrable fortress high above the city that has served as its main defense since times immemorial: Kliš. When the Turks came the battles fought beneath its walls were so fierce that the village that later grew up there was called Savaś Alanì (Battlefield in Turkish). The Turks took the Citadel, but never the city, and the locals (who knew the land) would scale the battlements under cover of darkness and assassinate them on a regular basis until the invaders finally exvaded.
More recently, Split was spared during the civil war that tore the region asunder, but Kliš has a renewed claim to atrocity fame, for it was here that the Khaleesi had hundreds of Meereen slave owners crucified. (My daughter has recently discovered that she looks quite a bit like Emilia Clarke, who plays the Mother of Dragons, hence the interest in what the character gets up to…)
Meereen/Kliš, minus the executed people.
Finally, we go on an excursion to Plitvice National Park, to see Croatia’s most famous landmark, the thousand waterfalls of this river land. It’s a long journey by bus (it’s easier to get to from Zagreb), but it is worth it. The park isn’t huge, and it is obviously full of people (although the guide informs us this is nothing), but it is nicely done, with wooden walkways leading across the delta and natural paths along the river and lakesides.
The waterfalls are absolutely everywhere, from small brook-like ones where ponds overflow one into the other, to great cascades up to seventy meters high where tributaries come crashing down into the ravine – if like me you like water features, this is a wet dream (in a manner of speaking) come true.
For scale, note people on gangway to the left…
All in all we spend a very pleasant week in Split, not least due to the fantastic hotel we find right on the edge of the old town. In Aspalathos Residence, rooms are spacious and stylish, the food is wonderful, and Tatjana reigns supreme.
Will we be back for a Split second? Who knows. I certainly want to see more of Croatia – Dubrovnik and Zadar, specifically – and the island of Brač is a kite surfers’ paradise, so chances are.
Leaving Chora Sfakion by car, going past Anopoli, you come to the old abandoned village of Aradena where the road crosses the Marmara gorge on a rickety bridge. It is incredibly scenic, especially if you have a soft spot for ruins. The gorge is deep, deeper than any other I have hiked, and it’s also the one that I have felt most dubious about taking on. The guidebook describes it as difficult, poorly maintained and absolutely off limits in times of rain because of the risk of rock falls. It hasn’t rained lately, but given that nearby Samaria is still closed for that very reason, I’m hesitating, but as I’ve run out of options I figure I’ll give it a go.
It starts well enough, with a well-kept path leading through the ruins and into the gorge, and once on the bottom of the gorge it’s easy going at first. It’s early, and I’m being serenaded by a morning chorus of birds that make their nests in the walls. This gorge has walls much steeper than the others, too, which reflects in the fauna: it’s quite sparse, the red rock mostly bare save for stunted shrubs, and – surprisingly – big spruces on the bottom in the wider areas. It looks like what I imagine Grand Canyon does.
It’s also different in that this gorge drops in steps rather than a continuous descent, so at first the path is almost flat, and very pleasant walking, but when I reach the first fall I quickly realize this won’t be easy: the blazons are hard to find, the path overgrown and difficult to distinguish from goat tracks, and I repeatedly find myself losing my way.
The second drop is described as the most difficult. I take a wrong turn and find myself facing a long slope of gravel and loose rock that ends in a sheer drop down to a boulder. I know I have to reach that boulder, as there is an iron ladder bolted to it, so I gather I have to slide on my bum, gripping whatever outcrops I can to slow my descent. Far above me a kid bleats forlornly. If I were the least bit superstitious I’d be inclined to think it was trying to warn me off. Once I’ve committed there will be no turning back, but I can’t see any alternative, so down I go, surfing on this wave of pebbles. I manage to steer to the side in time to avoid the cliffhanger ending, but I would be lying if I didn’t say so was shaking afterwards. The ladders, although ten meters long, bent and unstable, are a piece of cake in comparison.
Not pictured: shaky author.
The next drop is little better. I find myself unable to trace the trail, and end up navigating as best I can over the enormous boulders – the only way is down, right? – something which goes reasonably well until I end up having to climb down as far as I can between two of them, and then drop a good meter onto unknown ground. As my backpack has a tendency to get stuck in places I consider throwing it down first, so as to avoid an unorthodox hanging, but in the end I decide against it, figuring it will cushion any hit I might take to my back. I do my best Spider-Man impression, and come away clean, adrenaline gushing, only to see the actual trail come into view again.
After this it gets easier, and since there is a distinctly Western feel to this place I begin to amuse myself by naming the different areas in the best tradition of dime novels. So I managed Calamity Falls and Drop Dead Drop only to come onto Droopy Pine Flats (where the trees on the slopes, having seemingly realised their mistake, grow first down the slope, and then straight up as they join their more fortunate brethren), and so on.
One memorable encounter is the reason why Crocodile Canyon got its name, for there, right in the middle of the dry river bed lies a prehistoric monster. Goodness knows who has assembled it, but it’s an impressing piece of artwork, a full six meters long, all made out of interestingly shaped pieces of wood and rocks. My eyes fall on a likely-looking stone, and I add my own final touch to the masterpiece: the skull at the beast’s snout. Pleased with myself, I stroll on.
The expanding and contracting nature of the gorge makes it feel like a birth canal, every contraction painful, followed by an intermission of relative ease. Finally I am reborn, as both the gorge and I spill out into the ocean.
I’ve been carrying food supplies and water as there was no indication that either would be on offer, but here, perched on a hillock next to the small pebble beach is a cafeteria, and so I sit there and have second breakfast on the terrace, their only guest. It is beautiful.
The way back is infinitely easier, if not easy. The sun has risen and is beating down on me for most of the return journey, but at least now I can find the way. Time and again I see where I should have walked on the way down, and I don’t stray from the path even once, even though I am tempted to do so when I see a cave on high that I missed coming down.
The ancient Minoans buried their dead in caves such as these – there’s even a “gorge of the dead” at the easternmost tip of the island – and I am dying to climb up there to explore, but given what the terrain looks like, and the fact that I’ve just heard the gun crack report of rocks tumbling down the steep incline, I reluctantly decide against it. Regardless of what might be inside the cave I don’t want to give anyone a reason to rename this gorge, and so with heavy heart I let my tomb raiding dreams remain just that: dreams.
Funnily, I don’t see the croc on the way back. I assume it has slithered back into its lair, and waste no time chasing after it. Instead I head back up the ravine, dusty and thirsty, but ever so pleased with my adventures. There are some other hikers coming down the gorge now; I marvel at how ill equipped they are, and wonder how they will fare. And then suddenly I hear thunder up ahead, and realize I’m passing underneath the bridge at the same time as a car is crossing it. I climb back out, and that was it. The only thing that remains is to have my lunch of yogurt and honey and a slab of sheep cheese in the shade of one of the ruined old houses overlooking the canyon, before starting back on the road to Chania, and finally fly home. I didn’t get to do Samaria gorge, but all the other hikes were spectacular, too. The friendliness of the people, the beauty of Crete in spring and the grandeur of the gorges all leave me feeling very happy. This truly is the good life.
I leave Chora Sfakion on the road headed west, hiking along the coast. The road soon veers off inland and upwards, leaving me and the trail to hug the contours of the coastline. It’s much more arid here than on the western side of the mountains, with nothing but browbeaten shrubs clinging to the rocks, and in several places the path has all but disappeared due to rock falls into the turquoise sea far below, so it’s a perilous hike. My thoughts go to my friend M, who fell on a solo hike much like this and sustained severe brain injuries – not a cheery prospect.
The reward comes after a little less than an hour: Sweet Water Beach, which a colleague tipped me off about prior to the trip as “a hidden gem, mostly nudist”, lies splayed out in front of me. She was partially correct. It is undoubtedly beautiful, but as I have it entirely to myself I make it exclusively so.
Not featured: nude author.
The waters are cold, however, and since there is no Naussica to greet my Ulysses I soon set out again, following the coast past a deserted little chapel of that most archetypical Greek kind – a one bedroom affair with a bonsai bell tower next to it. Again, there is no one there apart from me and the goats, and I reflect that the difference between this place and yesterday’s cairns is just one of scale.
Even the Notre Dame (which burnt last week), whilst infinitely more elaborate, is still just an expression of humankind’s most fundamental trait: to change the landscape and imbue it with symbolism. The first ape to place one rock upon another for no other reason than to say “I was here, this has a meaning” was the first human. We give praise to the spirits of the gorges or the Greek Orthodox god of this chapel or the Catholic one in Paris for the same reasons: not because we believe in them, but because we know we are but passing through, and we want there to be a point to this, or, failing that, we want to leave something behind to mark our passage, at least. The goats – agnostics every last one – don’t care. And with that thought I move on.
I reach the tiny cluster of houses that is Lotho Bay after another half hour, and drink nearly a litre of freshly squeezed orange juice before setting out again, because I have realised that I have made an error: the trail from Lotho to Anopoli (literally “the high city”) doesn’t lead through a gorge, but serpentines its way up the rock face, all five hundred meters’ ascent of it. Midday is approaching, and the dust cloud from yesterday is gone, so the heat is relentless.
I gasp my way up the mountain, stopping to catch my breath and sip from my bottle every ten minutes. At three hundred meters’ elevation a buzzard vulture swoops by mere meters away. Given my usual luck with birds of pray I fear it’s coming for me, but it just sails on. At four hundred meters I become aware of another flying hazard: a drone hovers high above, its engine like that of a persistent bluebottle fly. When I finally reach the crest and the little church that is perched there, the owners of the drone – an overweight Brit and his Greek companion – greet me with disbelief. “You hiked all the way?” “Yep. Came from Chora.” “What, on foot?!” It’s enlightening to get a different perspective on your own normality sometimes. 😄
We part our ways and I hike the last part of the road into Anopoli, where I hope to hitch a ride back with a bus. Turns out there are none, but trail magic comes to the rescue: the drone guys show up at the same taverna I’ve chosen, and are so taken with my exploits (or possibly the foolishness thereof) that they not only ply me with beer but offer to drive me back down.
I gladly accept, and after a feast of a lunch we pile inside their car. Here again I quietly notice a difference in philosophy: the drone guys have a very Cretan approach to road safety – no seat belts, at least two beers each, we hurtle down the road, goats and gravel flying. It’s stomach-curdling. Add to that the fact that there is a whole cottage industry around making little mailbox-sized Greek churches to mark the spots where people have perished (all with faded photos of the diseased inside) and you can see just how lethal a stretch of road is… I count more than a dozen on the way back to Sfakion, and feel a distinct urge to build a cairn once I’ve waved the gentlemen goodbye.
After breakfast on the pebble beach in Sougia I set out up the gorge that lies right outside the village. It’s not very big compared to yesterday’s Irini, but it takes you up on to a plateau which I intend to traverse to get to the next bay, where the ruins of the Ancient Greek port town of Lissos lie.
The gorge is full of oleander, which is poisonous, so I keep my trousers on, in spite of the heat. Once up on the plateau it’s a different story – the large shrubs are replaced by low brush of thyme and wild rosemary and other ethereal herbs, and the polished rocks of the gorge (more of a dry gulch, really) give way to volcanic rock, serrated and cruel. The trail is nothing more than a goat track, so my ankles get what’s coming to ’em as I stumble along, but it’s pretty as can be, the red earth, the undergrowth in every hue of blue matching the Libyan sea to the south and the White mountains in the north providing a grandiose backdrop to it all.
Part of the reason why I keep stumbling is that there’s a new type of plant here, too. A kind of enormous lily that is quite frankly astonishing, and can only be described as deeply erotic. The phrase “to bee or not to bee” takes on a whole new meaning. Consider the lilies, indeed!
Bee that as it may. When I reach the ruins of the city there is not a living soul in sight, so me and the kri-kris have it all to ourselves. I spend a happy hour climbing up and down two-thousand-year-old walls and foundations, in and out of bath houses and watchtowers (or what’s left of them), marveling at the excavated Temple to Zeus with its mosaics laid bare – it was destroyed in an earthquake, so the archeologists were able to retrieve a number of exquisite votive statues when they dug it out. Goodness knows what else lays buried here…!
That excursion only lasts me the better part of the morning though, so after a last lunch on the beach I hop back in my car and drive off to Imbros Gorge.
Imbros is the second most famous gorge on the island, and it’s with some hesitation I decide to hike it, because guides often bring their groups here when Samaria is closed, and I don’t want to share my experience with hoards of Brits, Aussies and Kiwis. Why those nationalities? Because apparently forces sent to strengthen Crete’s defenses during WWII were evacuated through the gorge after the German invasion, and hiking it has become an act of pilgrimage for their descendants.
As it turns out I arrive so late in the afternoon that there is virtually no other people here. With a few exceptions I have it all to myself, and what a hike it is! Here, Mediterranean pine dominates, and the goats are out in force in the lush forest undergrowth and – more often – perched improbably on the cliff-sides.
A couple of times Imbros narrows to the point where you can just about touch both sides at the same time, the walls swaying crazily upwards where the waters have dug down over millennia, and in one place visitors have gone collectively mad, producing cairns in untold quantities.
It is quite impossible to resist the urge to add your own rock, the sheer magnitude of the combined effort drawing you into its own logic. There’s a Nobel prize in economics waiting for the person who explains the practical applications of that particular aspect of the human psyche…
You can see why Imbros is popular: it’s easy walking, the path gentle and forgiving, it’s not too long at just shy of two hours, and very pretty throughout. A giant arch marks the finishing stretch, and at the end there’s a scattering of houses where everyone is offering taxi services back to the top for 20€. That’s theft tho, so I walk another kilometre or so and hitch a ride with a young local fisherman instead. His driving is as erratic and engaging as his English, but it makes for an interesting ride, as I learn about his family history while hanging on for dear life through every deadly curve and every massacred sentence.
Once back at the car it’s already past seven in the evening, and dusk is settling on the land. Along with the daze from the Saharan dust cloud that has engulfed the island all day it makes for a dreamlike decent into the nearby fishing village of Chora Sfakion. I find lodgings for the night by asking in the taverna where I have my dinner, and am soon sound asleep.
The original reason why I wanted to go to Crete was to hike, and specifically its gorges, that are supposed to be gorge-ous (Sorry. I’ve got it out of my system now.)
Imagine my dismay then when my hotel receptionist in Chania informed me that the most famous gorge of them all, Samaria, was closed! Apparently the bad winter rains had wreaked such havoc that it wouldn’t open for weeks yet.
Luckily there are others, so after some research I set out for Agia Irini instead, just on the other side of the White mountains that run along the middle of the island.
Everyone had warned me about the roads, but as I meandered up the lowlands through endless orange groves they didn’t strike me as particularly bad. How wrong I was! The moment the land began to rise up more steeply, the scars of landslides became visible on the wooded slopes, and driving turned into never-ending zig-zagging between enormous piles of dirt and debris that would often cover half the road, thus forcing you (or oncoming traffic) into the other lane. And this on roads that are nothing but hairpin bends!
Several times the road had simply disappeared, as if a giant had taken a bite out of it, and I passed a massive ancient stone bridge that had half collapsed – one of the foundations had been Kobra Kai’d by the deluge, sweeping the colossus off its feet. The cretans didn’t seemed too fussed about it all tho: I saw one guy in a digger working to clear the roads. Given no additional precipitation I’d say he’ll have the job done in two to three centuries!
Suffice to say that I was happy to arrive safely at the entrance to Agia Irini after a 35 kilometer long drive that took over an hour. The gorge itself was a delight, with the stream that crafted it very much a presence, burbling its way down the mountain for the first two thirds, then inexplicably disappearing without a trace. The fauna was very rich – I was to discover that every gorge is a microcosm unto itself, and Irini was dominated by stately cedar trees, the kind that once covered much of the island but which are now largely gone. There were enormous bushes of wild sage and rue, giving off clouds of heady perfume, and most of all there were platanos – plane trees. Normally you associate them with tall, straight trunks creating shade on city squares in an orderly fashion, but here, mangled and mauled by the onrush of water, they looked more like mighty maples, managing to thrive in the most unlikely of places, clinging to rocks, submerged in the brook or both. I was entranced.
The trail was by no means easy, but the sun was shining, there weren’t many hikers around, and I thoroughly enjoyed skipping back and forth over the stream and the waterfalls, so I hiked it all the way to the end, grabbed a coffee at the one café, and hiked back up again to my car in little under five hours. That was quite enough for my first day though, so after that I slalomed my way down the rest of the southern slopes to the isolated coastal hamlet of Sougia, where I hoped to find a room for the night.
Apart from the odd sighting of kri-kri, the wild mountain goats that are endemic to the island, I was virtually alone on the road, and I began to worry that Sougia would be deserted. It wasn’t. And virtually everyone had rooms to let, so I got one quite quickly; it was a monk’s cell, but the proprietress was so friendly and energetic (despite being 76 years old) that I began to wonder if my new-found monk status would come under siege! Thankfully that didn’t happen; instead, I had dinner on the beach (sadly under an overcast sky, so no stars), and went to bed thoroughly exhausted.
The kids wanted sun and warmth for their spring break, so I got us tickets to and a hotel in Dubai. Then I spent a month getting more and more anxious about my decision. The only thing I knew about the place was that it was awash with oil dollars, famous for the world’s tallest building and – critically – the capital of a country of hard-core Islamic belief.
We spent last year’s spring break in Egypt, which isn’t exactly western-minded either – shock-full of Russian tourists enjoying a holiday in the sun in another military-run country – and I visited Morocco as well, but the United Arab Emirates was a different kettle of camels, I reckoned: what few women we had seen in Egypt weren’t all clad in tents, at least, and poor as they might have been, the Egyptians seemed to be self-reliant (- the Moroccans as well – to the point of trying to rob us! -) whereas the UAE is infamous for employing gastarbeiter in conditions not far removed from slavery.
Be that as it may, the dice were thrown. We would have to make it work. I packed a shawl for my daughter, and explained about cultural differences as gently as I could (I put it to her in veiled terms, you might say…). She took it well, then insisted on painting my nails the night before we were leaving. Coincidence? I don’t know, but I felt oddly proud, even as I contemplated being gang raped in a prison that would make the Midnight Express seem like a Holiday Inn. The gold glitter really suited me.
On the day of travel my son added his own bit of fuel to the fire of anxiety, when his backpack tested positive for explosives in three out of four detectors at Zaventem. The Belgian security personnel were remarkably relaxed about it, but in my mind’s eye we were already being detained by bedouins for questioning, my western terrorist son and blond, beautiful, burqua-less daughter and I; my snazzy nails and her general gender probably on par with his presumed explosive device in terms of how disruptive we’d be deemed to be to Emirati society.
In the end, none of that materialised (or I wouldn’t have been writing this story). We arrived in the wee hours of morning and made it through customs relatively quickly (a colleague had scared me with tales of having had to spend three hours in immigration), and then took a taxi to the resort. What was remarkable was that even though it was now two o’ clock in the morning there was no sense of the city being asleep. Quite the contrary: there was plenty of traffic on the one enormous motorway that leads through Dubai (seven lanes in each direction) and there were oodles of building sites along the road where apparently work was under way.
And so we reached our destination, after a drive that took us through downtown Dubai (think Manhattan goes Muslim), followed (in order) by endless shopping districts, truck depots and indescribably dull apartment blocks for the aforementioned guest workers, and finally into a flat, featureless desert, until we hit the coast, where the hotel complex was situated next to a combined yacht marina and aquaplane airport.
The holiday itself was fine, no different from a thousand other package tours. Dubai’s been branded a Disneyland for adults, and it’s true that if you have money you can do most anything you like. There are some super rich people here – my son made a game of counting the Lamborghinis he saw – but what really did stand out were the brushes we had with Emirati culture, such as it is.
Dubai is one of seven emirates and the most tolerant one (it says on Wikipedia. Tolerant of what, specifically, I don’t know. Glittery male fingertips, perhaps). However, like all the emirates it is still very much run by the traditional tribal leaders, so society is feudal and clan-based. That’s weird in itself, but it gets worse: It has some 10 million inhabitants, of which 1.5 million are Emirati citizens and the rest are guest workers. Because of this the gender ratio is completely skewered, with three quarters of all people here being men. And of course their laws are largely based on Sharia, so what women there are remain mostly invisible – if women in Egypt wore their tents with the zipper down and the inhabitants peaking out, here the tents were firmly closed.
At the same time prostitution is ripe; a quick and unscientific search on Tinder makes me estimate that nine tenths of all women there are either professional working girls or gold diggers – the latter category presumably trying to catch the eye of one of the outrageously rich family members of the ruling class.
In a country with ten million inhabitants it seems that the sheer amount of building works in Dubai city is utterly disproportionate, too. Turns out this is correct. They are extending DC like crazy, with the ultimate aim of reaching a capacity of 11 million people. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they want every single desert-dweller to live there. For now, many of the skyscrapers are empty, however. But then Dubai is synonymous with over-the-top constructions: the worlds tallest building is here, as I mentioned, but they are already working on another one that will be even higher than the Burj Khalifa, with its 828 meters.
Then there are the artificial city areas in the shape of palm trees (two with a third on the way) that protrude into the sea, and the artificial archipelago in the shape of a world map where tourists are invited to buy a property on one one the fronds, or – why not? – invest in an entire country/islan, and invite your neighbors to a friendly game of Risk.
The Palms were branded as the ultimate luxury resorts until the developer had to add hundereds of properties to the limited space (they had miscalculated the cost of production), which lead to furious investors suing them as the tree houses went from hyper-exclusive hideouts for the ultra rich to ghettofied Florida ‘burbs. And then the waters surrounding the fronds turned stagnant and putrid as the tide breaker that enclosed them proved altogether too efficient at keeping the waters calm.
On the other hand, “the World” ran into trouble as the financial crisis hit the world (the real one, not the islands) in 2008, and so remains largely undevelopped. On top of that the islands are slowly eroding, and are thus literally sinking into the sea – the owners of the amusement park and hotel complex Atlantis on one of the Palms are presumably following this development with particularly keen interest…
The world according to Al Shor-Ziteed.
If constructing big and sumptuous buildings is one particular trait of the Emirates, then luxury consumption is the other defining characteristic. With so much money around this is perhaps not entirely surprising, but the sheer devotion to spending is still staggering. The main attractions in Dubai are shopping malls!
We visit the Dubai Mall with its 3,000 shops. It has a giant indoor aquarium, home to tiger sharks and huge mantas, a three story waterfall indoors, a fountain display that is more than a rival to the ones in Vegas, and many other wonders besides, but really it is just a temple to Mammon and consumerism. It makes me feel trapped in a Housewives of Hollywood-type nightmare – if it weren’t for the many men wearing sheik-y attire and women sporting black drapes and curtains I could be in Beverly Hills.
So the glitterati Emirati have all the accoutrements of the nouveau riche, and all their inherent sense of insecurity, too; Numerous times we come upon displays of Arabic accomplishments, often dating back to the 13th century, like the replica of a water clock in the shape of an elephant (scale 1:1), that we come across in the Ibn Battuta Mall. It must have been enormously impressive back then. Today, on display in a shopping centre, not so much.
Swatch it!
These showcases are always accompanied by a comment along the lines of the one we find next to an ancient astrolabe. I don’t remember it verbatim, but the gist was something like “When Al Bundi met western astrologists in 1269 he was amazed at how piddly their puny equipment was compared to his mighty tower of star gazing, El Schalong.”
With a chip on their shoulder the size of a boulder, it’s small wonder the Emirates are going all-in to wow the world during their World Expo in 2020, but at what cost? Lives are cheap in Dubai. The Indian taxi driver that takes us back to the airport at the end of the week sums it up quite neatly. He works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, but it is much better than working in construction, he says.
We pass the foundations of the world’s next tallest building. It’s five o’clock in the morning, and the work is in full swing on what is already the size of a small city. And maybe that is a good metaphor for this strange place: A society built on medieval values, with too much money and a deeply seated minority complex, trying to make its mark in the contemporary world. What could possibly go wrong?
January is at an end, and as always when things are ending there is a bit of apprehension: did I do everything I could? In my case, the first month of the year is always a bit of an indication of how I will fare over the rest of the year in my intentions and ambitions, so how did I do?
I am still plagued by injuries, but indoor biking has worked remarkably well, as has core exercises and stretching, which I hope will eventually see me back on my feet. In total I biked some 250 kilometres in January, which is a good start. I have to ease off on the weights for the time being, so having the bike is a bit of a life line, honestly.
I learnt a new piece of music on the piano (Bohemian Rhapsody), and I read two non-fiction books (one guide to Stockholm’s culture and history, and another on the failed polar expedition of Andre – the former so-so, the latter spectacular -) but I didn’t study enough French.
I was in Sweden twice and Italy once, and I kept my diary going, so all in all I’m doing well as far as my new year’s resolutions are concerned. Thus far, at any rate. How are you doing?
One of my intentions for this year is to read more non-fiction. Fiction is a different matter – if one of my favourite authors publishes a new book I will read it, simple as that – but non-fiction I have to make a concerted effort to take on.
And yet I find reading non-fiction is the best way of educating yourself, so it tallies well with my ambition to improve intellectually. To quote a colleague who is something of a renaissance man: “I just want to make sense of the world”.
To this end I have a number of books that I’ve ordered (as seen above), on religion, personal efficiency, investment philosophy, human society and contemporary politics, plus a book on rhetorics (in the shape of famous speeches). That should see me through most of the year, but if you have any must-reads that you want to recommend, don’t be shy! I look forward to your suggestions, and will come back with reviews in due time.
One thing that struck me with Rome is the sheer number of phalluses on display. The Italians clearly like dicking around, as anything from pasta to limoncello bottles come in the shape of erect penises.
Interesting ancient dick fact #1: To Ancient Romans, “penis” was not the clinical term for the male appendix, but a dirty word.
Interesting ancient dick fact #2: Erections were seen as amulets of good fortune, and used to adorn buildings.
I’m not sure if this explains their prolific presence today, but there you go. Most popular of all is David’s member, which features on everything from buttons to aprons. If you’re not impressed by his size (the supposed correlation between big hands and other big things certainly doesn’t prove true in his case), there are surgically enhanced versions on offer, too. Strangely, David himself isn’t here – the actual statue is in Florence, much to the chagrin of my co-traveller.
My, what big… hands.
In the Vatican and elsewhere, most statues have had their willies chopped off and/or fig leaves added to them, as later Christians found the nakedness an effrontery. There are other, more symbolic phalluses on display however that were more difficult to do away with. Nothing is new under the sun; Much like latter-day developers, the Ancient Romans liked their erections… erect. They went to the trouble of bringing back obelisks from Egypt and put them in prominent places, for instance.
One of my favourite remnants of that time is Trajan’s Column. It gets feminist flak for falling in the same category, but nothing could be further from the truth: ingenious construction, propaganda and grave monument rolled into one, calling the pillar a cock-up would be a phallus-y fallacy.
It depicts emperor Trajan’s two wars against Dacia (present-day Rumania) in a long series of panels circling the pillar, and since it does so in chronological order it is arguably one of the first comic book stories in the world. The panels and lettering get slightly bigger towards the top, thus making it easier to follow the story all the way to the top of the behemoth (it’s nearly 30 meters high). What’s more, the story significantly downplays the bloodshed and violence of war, as it’s primary audience (the civilian citizens of Rome) were wary of the army – nothing new under the sun there, either.
But there’s even more! When Trajan died his ashes were laid to rest at the base of the spire, and at the top was a statue of him in his heyday, so its thought to have symbolised his leaving behind his mortal coil to ascend into heaven (deification being a matter of course for emperors back then), while his greatest achievement symbolically marks the way. Add to that that the circumambulatory movement that is required of the “reader” mimics that of Roman funeral rites, and you have a monument that is as thought through and interactive as any you care to mention.
Oh, and bonus interesting ancient dick fact no. 3: it looks like a giant schlong, if you’re that way inclined.
Not content with having had a semi-personal audience with the Pope the previous day, my companion is hell-bent on seeing St Peter. So back to the Vatican we trek, and since we’re there bright and early we get in without having to face the massive queues that form later on.
The Basílica is erected on top of earlier churches, on top of the burial place of Peter, Jesus’s main man and preferred apostle, the first Pope, and gatekeeper to Heaven if you believe the marketing hype (hence the papal insignia is a pair of crossed keys – one main and one spare, presumably…). Interestingly, basilicas where court buildings in Ancient Rome, and all cities had one. I guess the reasoning is that when you’re visiting his grave you’re also being given a once-over ahead of Judgment Day. If people knew that they might not be as keen to get inside… but inside they go, and so do we, taking in mosaics and statuary and relics and gold filigree and marble and whatnot.
The Pope’s not home, but there’s no denying his work place is impressive. Especially if you climb the cupola, which we did. It’s some 500 steps of ever narrower, claustrophobia- and cardiac arrest-inducing stairs before you reach the viewing platform at the top (presumably unique in that you can really see the whole country from it). Once there it wasn’t the view that captured my imagination, however, but the candle holders on the outside of the curving roof. Whose job did it use to be to climb around on the outside of the dome to change and light candles, and how hard do you have to believe in God before you’re willing to take it?
See the candle-holders? No rest for the wick-ed…
Leaving the lofty heights behind, we venture on to the Vatican museum, which houses two millennia’s worth of art. This one time only we give in to temptation and buy tickets that allow us to jump the queue that snakes around the wall of the Papal state (Note to Trump: when your wall is built, headhunt the Indian gentlemen who offer these golden tickets outside Pope’s Place – they will earn you (another) fortune!).
Inside it’s equally crowded, but here the orderly lines are abandoned in favour of tour groups that move like solid masses of flesh, their guides herding them like human-sized ducklings trained to follow a brightly-coloured piece of cloth on a stick. It’s tiresome, but the art is fabulous, there’s no denying that.
When we finally reach the Sixtine Chapel, the guards and signposts have the audacity to claim it’s a holy place and that photos aren’t allowed. I figure they lost the right to claim that when they started charging approximately a gazillion visitors per day close to 40€ per pop to see the place, so I took plenty – more than I would have done otherwise.
I’m going to assume you knew Michelangelo painted the ceiling, but what you possibly didn’t know (and they still don’t tell you there now) is that he painted the shroud that God is flying around on when he imbues Adam with life (see centre of the pic above) so that its outline is precisely that of a human brain! This fact was only brought to light by a neurosurgeon relatively recently, when he noticed its undeniable similarities. Imagine that! What a gutsy move: 400 years ago, in the very heart of Christendom, this man dared defy dogma and pointed out (albeit very subtly) that the brain, rather than any deity, is what make humans unique! It’s like The Da Vinci Code, only real, and better.
Damning evidence?
Once we’d dreamed of Heaven, we land in the gutter. Or at least we try. More specifically, I want to see the Cloaca Maxima, the sewage system created by the Romans and still in use today. The Atlas Obscura mentions it, but glosses over two things: it’s damned difficult to find (we try in several places, and the only thing to come of it is a very specific joke (Why did the chicken cross the road? There might be a cloaca!)) and when we finally do find it we discover it is very decidedly closed to the public. Shit.
One room apt. Airy. Large bath.
At least we got to see even more of the town this way. Interestingly, the tradition of painting walls and ceilings lives on today. There are stencils hidden here and there – some funny, some vulgar, many surprising. Apparently youngsters make them and/or collect them – something I thought was a useless fact picked up in the latest Spider-man movie; and yet here I am, Marvel-ling at them.
There’s street art of other kinds, too. Not graffiti, thankfully, but more talented offerings. Any city that has thousand-year old statues in Renaissance settings is doing something right; my favourite is the statue of Marcus Aurelius a-horse in a square designed by our old friend Michelangelo, but there is other stuff on display, as well.
I came to Rome to celebrate New Year. We didn’t coordinate it, but by pure coincidence, so did lots of other people. And here I was thinking winter would be off-season. Silly me…
Having spent the strike of midnight on the field of Circus Maximus (together with 30,000 others) and bought a bottle of spomante from an enterprising vendor at Colosseum after that, my travel companion and I slept in on January 1st, but then vended our way slowly towards the Vatican.
The best thing about Rome is that it is shock-full of beauty. Roaming its streets is a delight. Every corner you turn, every alleyway you head down on a whim, there is more architectural grandeur and dizzying history on display than you can find anywhere else. Villas, palazzi, churches and roman ruins are everywhere. The Jewish quarter and Trastevere stand out, but it really doesn’t matter where you go, it’s all a feast for your eyes.
One of my absolute favourites was Palazzo Spada – sumptuous home of a cardinal who clearly was a man of the world, as the house is decorated with friezes depicting lusty fauns and nymphs. Not content with a giant house with adjoining gardens, the good cardinal also used mathematics and other tricks to create optical illusions to further improve the grandeur of his home. The distance from the woman to the statue at the other end of this colonnade?
Considerably less than ten meters. Really. It is. Tricky bugger.
When we finally got to the Catholic centre of the universe it seemed most of the city was gathered in the piazza. We had planned to see St Peter, but instead we got to hang with his present replacement, Franciscus, who spoke to the crowds from his balcony.
I have no idea what he was on about (bad sound and Italian conspiring against me), but the devout roared its approval, and he insisted on being in a selfie with me, so I guess he is a likable guy.
Second window from the right, top level: Pope.
The various other popes have certainly left their mark on the rest of the city as well over the centuries: every other edifice seems to have been adorned with their names, more often than not combined with the medieval equivalent of a papal graffiti tag – who knew their collective rap name was P-Max?!
The only institution that is possibly more venerable in Rome than the Pope (at least according to foodies) is Alfredo, the birthplace of fettuccine Alfredo, so that’s where we headed next. The walls are filled with portraits of famous patrons, and the atmosphere of religious raptness that falls over the dining room whenever the head waiter rolls out his little trolley to perform the mixing of the fettuccine and the Parmesan is no less magical (sorry, wonderous) than the miracle priests perform when turning bread and wine into the body of Christ.
Is it good? Yes. Undoubtedly. The pasta is done to perfection, the Parmesan (aged two years) is powerful yet subtle, and since carbs don’t count when on holiday we have a large portion each. And yet I can’t help but feel that it is really nothing more than really fancy mac ‘n’ cheese.
Be that as it may, others have noted before me that the strength of the Italian kitchen lies not in the complexity of its dishes, but the superior quality of its ingredients and the masterful way in which they are combined; that is certainly true at Alfredo’s, but also in virtually every other eatery we encounter. We have delicious melanzane parmigiana in modest neighbourhoods, we find the best tiramisu in the world in a hole-in-the-wall called Pompi (the queue runs into the street at all times during the day) – if it hadn’t been for one evening when we had what can only be described as a Fawlty Towers experience (where the serving staff would appear at random intervals with orders that no one recognized as theirs, thus putting the wait in waiter), it would have been a perfect score. As it was, we hiked over 20 kilometers per day and I’m still convinced we racked up a calorific surplus…!
We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions S.M.A.R.T. and make sure to make the most of time,.
So I’ll stick with the familiar format – develop as a human (intellectually and physically), travel, have new experiences, and set myself new challenges – one trip or challenge per month on average, for a total of twelve.
Trips: I have nothing planned (beyond the fact that I am in Rome celebrating New Year as I’m writing this), but hiking somewhere with my brother, taking the kids on several trips (the first one in February), and paragliding in either Spain or Switzerland (back allowing) are definitely happening.
Challenges: As last year was plagued with injuries, I don’t dare set any fitness goals at the moment. I do hope to improve my fitness, but in what way remains uncertain as of yet. The ideal is a workout per day, of some sort.
In the workplace things are equally up in the air, with my job as a roving reporter having come to an end, and nothing concrete to replace it. I want to keep writing and working with communication one way or another, tho, and I have a few ideas – let’s see what happens.
I already know I want to stay vegetarian for the coming year (having stuck with it for two months I see no reason to change back to a carnivorous diet), and I want to continue to stay off refined sugar, so that’s two. I really want to learn how to paraglide properly, which makes three. Also, limit time spent on social media (more difficult than it sounds?) – four. Keep a diary – five. Read (at least) one non-fictional book per month – six. Improve my piano and French skills, for a total of eight. And linked to all this: use my time more efficiently and wisely.
There is a funny passage from the book About a boy (later filmed with Hugh Grant in the lead) that has stuck with me:
His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.
The protagonist of the book is a time waster, but the concept works: divide your day into time slots, and make sure to use them. That will be another challenge.
Why do this? Well, first of all, because, as the poet Herrick wrote in To Virgins, to make much of time:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying
and this same flower that smiles today
tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
the higher he is getting,
the sooner will his race be run,
and nearer he is to setting.
In other words: Our time is limited, and every breath takes us closer to death. That’s grim, as realizations go, but if that doesn’t light a fire under your ass to get things done, nothing will. Also, to quote Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T.– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Did I succeed? Yes and no.
Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)
Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.
Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…
French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.
Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.
Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.
Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.
Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.
Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.
So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.
Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…
One of the first challenges I ever undertook was going without sweets and candy for a year. My parents came up with that one, and the gauntlet was eagerly picked up by me and my sister, since there was pecuniary compensation involved – money which was then spent on an obscene amount of chocolate on January 1st the following year.
That one-day indulgence aside, we did very well to avoid sugar, since there is a great deal of scientific evidence that it is very, very bad for you – and the more refined it is, the worse it is for your organism.
Alas, we didn’t keep this up for more than three years. Now fast forward 35 years and we’re headed towards the end of 2018, a year during which it’s safe to say that I haven’t been abstemious so far (at least not where sugar is concerned), so I will set myself one last challenge for the year:
Starting today and until the end of the year, I will eat no sugar. Not candy, nor cookies, chocolates, cakes, and whatever else is brim-filled with brain-addling white poison. If I can manage that, then I will continue throughout next year. It won’t necessarily make for a Merry Christmas, but it will bring a healthier and Happy New Year!
On Monday I was supposed to receive a medal. It’s one of those traditions the purpose of which I don’t understand: you get one after twenty years as a civil servant. But it isn’t merit based – everyone gets one. All you have to do is stick with it two decades. That made me think.
I never really made a considered career choice. I got very lucky in that my coming of age corresponded with Sweden’s joining the EC, as it was then. My training made me a good candidate for the job of interpreter, and my knack for languages ensured that I made it through a training programme many failed.
After that a job was guaranteed, and so I took it, because it was interesting and well paid, and my then-girlfriend-later-to-become-mother-of-my-children-and-ex-wife was also offered one, we moved in together, and the rest is history.
Only…
Twenty years on, interpreting isn’t interesting any more, as there are no new challenges, only variations on well-known ones. Happily, I’ve been able to do other things for the last couple of years – working as a journalist, writing speeches and scripts for commercials – but now that’s coming to an end.
And so the question arises: do I really want to be nothing else but an interpreter for another twenty years? The answer is obviously no, but then the real question is, what do I want to do instead?
Write. Be creative. Travel. Experience. How best to combine these things? Well, being a blogger is one good way of doing it, obviously, but it doesn’t pay – for me, at least. They say to have three hobbies: one to keep you in the money, one to keep you fit, and one to keep you creative, but I’d like to combine the three, if possible. The Japanese concept of Ikigai is a better model: the point where what you love, what you’re good at, what you can make money doing and what the world needs intersect, that’s where you should strive to be, because that’s your ikigai, literally your reason for being.
A month ago I set out on a journey. I was going somewhere very special. I was going to go vegetarian.
Like all ventures into the unknown it was preceded by trepidation, as I contemplated the prospect of future challenges as-yet vaguely comprehended. This journey didn’t involve me actually moving, but I felt like an intrepid explorer none-the-less – I needed to discover whether some long-held notions about myself really were true: Was I really going to be able to survive on vegetables alone? Would I not wilt just like the greenery I’d be eating? Would not my natural carnivorous instinct to devour meat take over, and have me clawing at the butcher’s door the very first evening, like an alcoholic sitting outside the liquor store all night?
One month on, I know the answer to all these questions is simply No. It’s telling however that the real hurdle to succeeding at this endeavour was the initial uncertainty, the step into unchartered territory. I am still not well versed in vegetarian cooking by any means, and it is a little cumbersome sometimes to find appetising food in some places when you go out, but these are minor hindrances – the real obstacle to going green was in my head.
So it can be done. Fine. I knew that. I’m stubborn and disciplined enough that if I set my mind to something I can do it for a month. But what about how I feel? What about the training regime?
Well, I’m happy to report that I feel just fine, as energetic as ever. I injured my back, and then had a week when I was ill, which meant I didn’t work out as much as I would have otherwise, but I’ve still racked up twelve training sessions in the last month, so the diet isn’t doing any harm to my energy levels.
I didn’t keep track of what I ate in the end, and I know I ate more sweets than I usually would, but I didn’t gain (or lose) any weight, so I assume it’s not been a bad diet in terms of nutrition. I’ve obviously eaten more greens than I normally do, too, and my body is still – erm – adjusting to the amount of lenses and beans I’m consuming, but all told I think I’m eating at least as healthily as before.
And of course no animals had to die for me to live this month, which is a really nice thought.
So will I continue? Yep. I don’t see that I can justify not doing it. I do miss some things, like salmon sushi when we have our family Friday sushi dinners, but not enough that I can’t do without, and as long as that is the case, I feel a moral obligation to try to do so. I might not stay vegetarian forever, but for now I’ve officially Gone Green.
And so I passed into week three of my salad-munching new lifestyle. Actually, I lie: no salad was harmed in the making of this vegetarian*. At least not yet. You see, Monday eve saw the first delivery to my doorstep of a box full of veggie ingredients and (more importantly) easy-to-make recipes.
And so I started cooking vegetarian food with some confidence for the first time. Courtesy of Hello Fresh! (The French-speaking world has a love for English names that is only matched by their inability to come up with ones that make any sense…)
The recipes ranged from familiar with a twist (mac ‘n’ cheese with pumpkin and lasagna with eggplants and soy milk) to weird and wonderful (chachouka and dhaal). Those are actual words, by the way, not onomatopoeia describing how I sounded trying to eat these newfangled dishes. Newfangled to me, that is: the people of Mexico and India might have an ax to grind with me over that description.
The kids were not enamoured with it all, but then neither were they when I served meat dishes in the past, so I’m not that concerned. Funnily, my daughter (who was the one that wanted to become vegetarian) is less enthused than my son, to whom eating with bread is a brilliant improvement upon cutlery, and who now speaks of digging up the old sand pit and turning it into a vegetable plot. Go figure.
Mmmm… yummy!
Unfortunately I came down with strep throat and had a temperature for four days, so I wasn’t particularly hungry for most of the week, but what is surprising is that at no point during these three weeks have I had a yearning for anything animal to eat. I thought I’d be going through withdrawal symptoms akin to those I experienced when I gave up nicotine or caffeine, but… nothing. No cravings, no seeking out illicit bacon dealers on deserted street corners, nothing.
That bodes well for next week, after which the challenge is complete. I really don’t know what I will do after that. Watch this space.
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* Although the trees in the garden are starting to look very good to me. Coincidence?
I was travelling with my son, who is of that age when nothing beats pasta and pizza, so we were both enjoying the food on offer (something that wasn’t the case during the first week…!). Here’s how it went:
Their breakfasts aren’t very healthy, but cornetto alla crema (pastries filled with vanilla) and cappuccino are both veggie-approved, so that’s what we had, more often than not. (Hey, I didn’t make the rules…!)
Then there’s the fact that every unassuming restaurant consistently serves really good food; everywhere we went, plates were filled with gourmet-level cooking. And thanks to the abundance of locally grown quality veg this was equally true for us salad-munchers: every tomato sauce is nectar of the gods, every mozzarella di buffala ambrosia, every antipasta and primo is a deceptively simple dish made to perfection.
So simple, so perfect.
They really have no excuse with their markets looking like they do, I know, but still, other countries have those, too, and they don’t manage to pull this off. In short: if I had to pick anywhere in the world where I could live happily as a herbivore, this would be It.
It-aly may have its drawbacks and weak points (such as rarely holding on to a government for longer than a few months and collapsing infrastructure), but you can’t beat the boot in culinary matters. India might have more to offer due to its sheer size, but since all Indian food could also double as rocket fuel I’m going to give Italy pride of place in this man’s vegetarian food pantheon.
If you are a reasonably well-travelled veggie you may already know all this, of course – a case of “bean there, done that”, as it were – but if not: what are you waiting for?! Avanti!
I got L for fall break this year. The children’s mom and I decided to split the kidlets for the first time. And now I was nervous.
You see, we were going to Italy, and now I watched in dismay as the weather turned from bad to worse to Noah’s Ark. Parts of the country were under water as we set out, with more to come. The west coast was one big thunderstorm. It didn’t look good.
Upon arrival at Milano airport there was a queue for taxis that stretched around the block, with only the occasional car coming in. As we finally got one ourselves it became apparent why: the trip into town was plighted by long detours, as necessitated by storm-felled trees and inundated stretches of street.
The streets of Milano…
Having settled in in our apartment I surveyed our options. The east coast was out: the water levels in Venice were 1.5 metres higher than usual, with gondolas all but entering the duomo; the alps were downright dangerous, with mud slides and torrential rain; the west coast looked like our best option – hiking Cinque Terre it would be.
We took the train southwards next morning. There was no rain, but nor were the skies particularly promising-looking. News reports were alarming: 20 dead and counting. L took it all in his stride, the way only a ten-year-old with a good book and a smartphone can.
Una di Cinque Terre.
We managed to arrive in the port town of La Spezia without any incident, and the next day we set out for the five coastal villages that form Cinque Terre. Alas, all the hiking paths were closed, so we had to go by train again, but given just how mountainous the region is, and how tired L got from strolling around the labyrinthine alleys and stair-cases of the ones we visited, and the number of gelatos that entailed, it was probably for the best.
The villages are beautiful, for the record, and this time of the year (and again, due to the weather-scare) the number of tourists was not too horrible, but there was no way they would be able to live up to my expectations, so having done three out of five, we left it at that.
Instead we headed for Lucca next day, a medieval town with a completely intact ring wall, something which I thought might intrigue a ten-year-old boy.
Well, the fates smiled upon us. Unawares to us, the city is home to one of the biggest comic-cons of the world – the whole town essentially transforms into a games and comics-themed amusement park for five days, and this happened to be day one of that extravaganza, so the medieval setting was full to bursting with cosplayers of all kinds. L was mightily pleased.
Lucca-like contest?
We essentially did la passergata on top of the ring wall, oohing and aahing at all the weird and wonderful critters we encountered, and on top of that there was zombie face painting and manga drawing lessons, whole tents devoted to computer games and a cordoned-off area where people could fight apocalyptic paint-ball wars. It was boyhood heaven.
And so passed our last day in Tuscany proper. The next day we set out for Milano again, and had time both for some quick shopping and several hours worth of browsing the fantastic museum devoted to all things Leonardo Da Vinci that is housed in the Vittorio Emanuele II-galleria.
It was the renaissance equivalent of Lucca: models galore, all the well-known gunships and flying machines and robots, and all of them with virtual displays showing how they had figured them out based on his drawings; some you could assemble yourself using building blocks, with explanations as to what would work and what wouldn’t.
Lisa does Technicolor
All his most famous paintings were equally disassembled, explained and restored digitally: you could view Mona Lisa in the colours in which she was painted (instead of the yellow fever’d version), the Last Supper the way it was meant to be seen (before it was bombed and “restored” with equally ghastly results), and the Vitruvian man came to life and walked out of his painting. It was another childhood dream come true.
All in all, travels in Tuscany with my ten-year-old wildly surpassed my expectations. We managed to work around the weather (literally) and had a grand old time. Not setting a rigid itinerary payed off in spades, and with a bit of luck we had more fun together than I think either of us dared hope for. Da capo!
So I decided to try life as a vegetarian. It didn’t get off to an auspicious start.
Like an addict, I spent the last couple of days gorging myself on my chosen poison before finally taking the plunge, testing if there really isn’t such a thing as too much bacon (there is – a family pack for breakfast for one) and if three cheese burgers in one sitting isn’t better than two (It isn’t!).
My last evening before this experiment begun I dined on goose liver. It was divine. Next morning I played it safe – a known luxury brunch place in town would see me through most of the day (cakes are vegetarian, after all), and the next evening I had arranged delivery of a whole box of meals (well, recipes and ingredients) to my doorstep, which would carry me through most of the week.
It didn’t go according to plan. The brunch place had crispy bacon on everything (or so it seemed), but that I could manage. Worse was the realisation that the food box company wasn’t going to be delivering anything for another week.
Back to the drawing board: Sunday afternoon I prepped as much roasted veg as I could. My vegetarian acquaintances weren’t very forthcoming; all their dishes seemed to require hours of work. A friend tipped me off about lentils with butter for breakfast, which sounds like a cruel joke to me; another veggie friend chimed in with his own top tip: don’t eat anything that has a face. Possibly useful as a guideline, but not helpful when I was staring forlornly into the fridge, wondering what to do.
In the end I survived my first week without any real difficulties, in fact. Sure, pasta and various sweets featured more prominently on the menu than I would have liked, but I didn’t actually crave meat at all, and I certainly didn’t go hungry – if anything I ate more than usual, in an attempt to get enough protein. And I got six workouts in in the gym, so clearly my energy reserves weren’t completely depleted.
So far, so good. Next week I’ll be in Italy for the most part, and if a feller can’t be a vegetarian there, I think India is probably the only place you’ll survive. Watch this space.
I stated at the beginning of the year that I wanted to try to go vegetarian, and since skipping meat and dairy is apparently among the top things a person can do to combat global warming, it seems only self-preserving to do so.
Of course, the notion of devouring other living beings is only normal because our culture tells us it is**. I will have to challenge my own inherent belief system.
Besides, having read the great book The Inner Life of Animals I can’t morally defend taking the lives of other sentient, feeling beings for my (unnecessary) pleasure any more, if I can learn to do without. The real question is, can I?
It will be a big change, that’s for sure, and an even greater mental leap – merely thinking about forsaking meat makes me have visions of entrecôte, bacon, smoked salmon… carnal thoughts indeed.
This personal carnival will also entail quite a steep learning curve, as none of my go-to recipes are the least bit vegetarian. I have identified as a cis-carnivore all my life, after all. I’ve not been as much as a little bivorous – I didn’t even experiment with veg during my college years. Salads were for bunnies when I grew up, and that was the end of it.
Luckily I have two good veggie restaurants near my work place, so I can eat out, but cooking is a different matter. Simply put: I will have to re-learn how to fend for myself in the kitchen. I have asked vegetarian friends to provide me with recipes for their favourite, easy-to-make dishes, but still, I anticipate that the transition will not be entirely smooth, and certainly not easy.
Since I’m continuing with weight-lifting for fitness, getting enough protein is another concern, but I won’t be going vegan, so eggs and cheese and other dairy are still on the table***, at least. I’ll track what I’m eating via the MyFitnessPal app to be sure I get what I need.
Will it work? Time will tell, I guess. I will publish weekly updates, so if you want, you will be able to follow my progress (or lack thereof) here in Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore. Any and all efforts to help will be greatly appreciated!
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*Literally…
** And yet we curiously delineate between this and that species – no one I know thinks eating cats or dogs is normal, and yet they happily munch on piglets and lambs.
It’s an odd thing, to see your world through a stranger’s eyes. I took Miss Adventure on a tour of my wild homeland, and learnt a fair few things in the process.
First, on the Bergslagsleden trail, came the realisation that Swedish nature is uncannily like that of New England. It’s hardly surprising if you consider that it is the same mountain range – the US part just broke away from what was to become Scandinavia long before it became famous, a little like the poor bugger who opted out of the Beatles while they were still playing gin joints in Liverpool. So what I had hoped would be an exotic nature experience became more of a stroll down memory lane for her, as she reminiscenced about summer camps from bygone years.
The author doing an impression of a smurf.
Allemansrätten, every person’s right to roam, something I take for granted, was a topic of constant wonder, however; “This would be fenced in in the US”, “Trespassers would be shot and prosecuted, in that order”, and similar comments muttered with regular intervals.
Later, in Stockholm, things that I would never have given a second thought proved to be huge hits: princess cake and cinnamon buns I could understand, but Kalles kaviar, a specialty that I wouldn’t have given good odds if you had asked what Swedish food might be suitable for export to, well, anywhere, was hailed as genius. Similarly, Swedish dish cloths have an untapped potential to conquer the world, apparently, judging from the reaction they elicited.
Unsurprisingly, Swedes in general were seen as thinly disguised Vikings, and Swedish (or Nordic) design the benchmark against which all others were measured. In an effort to make this impression a little more nuanced we went to see the Wasa museum – showcasing the most (in)famous design fault in Swedish history. The 400-year old warship that was supposed to cement Sweden’s position as a maritime power to be reckon with, and then sank a mere fifteen minutes into its maiden voyage makes for a marvellous museum. The giant oaken hull looks like a behemoth from another world, a kraken arisen from the depths, which it is, of course.
Wasa – prequel to the Titanic.
If you’re unfamiliar with the story, the ship was of a new, untested design, partly thought-up by the king himself, in what must be said to be a display of incompetence and hubris of Trump-like proportions. Imagine the Orange One insisting on NASA designing a rocket on the basis of drawings he made (with not only his name on it, but with pictures of himself in the guise of a god, a Roman emperor, et cetera thrown in for good measure) and then trying to launch it into space. That was Wasa.
So much for our proud Viking heritage and sought-after design. (That doesn’t prevent us from overhearing a tourist from a certain country asking if this was a Viking ship, but there’s no helping some people…). Be that as it may, ignoring the effects this visit might have had on my friend, I insist we rent kayaks (again) to see Stockholm as it’s meant to be seen: from the water.
We set out in even windier weather than earlier in the week, and let the breeze take us down the Djurgårdsholmskanalen, past many a fantastic pleasure dome, where the autumnal hues of abundant foliage accentuate the fact that Stockholm is a very colourful and simultaneously green city.
Kayaks – my new favourite mode of transport.
No one else is mad enough to brave the elements, so we have the waters (nearly) to ourselves, but it’s too windy to circumnavigate the whole island, so we leave that for some future visit, and go urban hiking instead. Gamla Stan (the old town) proves a success, in spite of it being overrun with tourists. This, Americans don’t have: the old alley ways, cobbled and winding, exude an irresistible draw, and the ancient buildings with their staggered gables and walls askew, painted every hew of ochre, seem to glow in the afternoon sun. It’s sagolikt and I’m proud of this place and the people who have seen fit to keep it as it is.
Gamla Stan. The old town. And it is. Venerable, even.
And so our brief visit comes to an end. Miss A flies on to Iceland for her next adventure, and I go home to my adopted home in Belgium with renewed love for my fatherland. After all, it’s only once you gain an outsider’s perspective that you can truly understand something, and I have certainly done that.
The man suddenly appearing in front of me is a giant, well over two metres tall. He also looks like a troll. He sports a mohawk/Rasta hairdo that defies all description, and he is the first person we have met in Bergslagen. As he towers over us, my travel companion, Miss Adventure, is understandably somewhat taken aback. Tales of troll abductions have reached her ears, and now she has stepped into the creature’s lair!
Luckily, he is all smiles. We are customers, after all. The proprietor of the lodge and kayak rental in Kloten, where Bergslagsleden begins, has probably not seen many customers over the last weeks. Autumn has settled in, and although it is very pretty, wind and cold ensure that we are the only visitors*, and so he is very forthcoming in his shuffling, trollish way, and we are soon off on our first adventure, kayaking the Kloten lakes for an afternoon.
It is a gorgeous day and I enjoy myself thoroughly. My American friend is less pleased – having escaped the troll encounter, the wind now catches her kayak repeatedly as she tries to stop and take pictures, so she ends up having to paddle a lot more than I. On top of that she has declined to wear a protective skirt (for fear of drowning), so she gets very wet, very quickly. After two hours she has had quite enough – it’s a good thing the original plan was amended, as paddling for days with camping equipment would have made this a miserable week.
Instead we have a late lunch, and then head out on the trail. It is a glorious day, and it feels like setting foot in a painting by Bauer. Or it would, if gravity hadn’t asserted itself. With a cool thirty pounds on my back, the hilly terrain doesn’t retain a fairy tale feel for long. A seasonal cold germ doesn’t help, either.
Trolling through the forest…
Be that as it may, the air holds that crisp quality that only autumnal days can bring, the forest floor is full of blueberries and lingonberries, and it’s good to be in Sweden. I have promised to show Miss A my wild and wonderful homeland, and Dalarna delivers in spades. The only things missing are mooses (much hoped for) and bears (much feared), but otherwise it is picture perfect.
We hike until dusk, when we find ourselves in a backstuga, a type of lodging used by the poorest of the poor in centuries gone by. It is a cottage, but instead of building all four walls, the denizens dug into a likely-looking hill, and erected no more than a facade and a roof, thus creating homes straight out of Hobbiton. Unlike Bilbo Baggins’s home, however, the backstuga is cold and coarse, with nothing of the charm of the former. But it is right by a picturesque tjärn** (forest lake), there is a table and a couple of benches, and a raised platform where we roll out our sleeping mats, and when the moon rises over the lake right outside, and we sit indoors and make our evening meal, it still feels quite wonderful.
Bilbo Baggins, esq.
It also helps that my co-hiker is a great cook, and has dehydrated all manner of food for us to bring on the trail. We dine on roasted vegetables and spicy rice that evening, and when morning comes with an unappetising drizzle, we stay inside and feast on egg frittata and dried cherries and strawberries.
Thus fortified, we set out on the trail, deeper into the enchanted forest. The rain has abated to a fine mist, which lends another layer of magic to the landscape – and a very real layer of slippery moisture to the many wooden planks we have to traverse to get across the boggier parts of the trail, which are legion. It’s not so much Bergslagsleden as bog slog leaden, if you’ll pardon the pun.
At least we don’t encounter any traces of bears, like I have further north. What we do see are mushrooms, thousands of them, and none more visually appealing than the fly death caps. Apparently they account for 95% of all mortalities in connection with mushroom poisoning, although how you can mistake it for anything else is beyond me. They are enticing, though, and it’s easy to see why people have always pictured them as little houses – for everything from pixies to smurfs.
Looks like chanterelles to mearrrgh….
On we trundle, scaling the heights of the highest peak at noon, when the sun has turned the damp forest into a steam room sauna, only to find the Klitten outdoor centre closed for business. There’s nothing for it but to continue, but we lose track of the trail and end up getting off the map altogether, and only arrive at the nearest shelter after a long detour that involved an utterly incongruous Danish spirituality centre in the middle of the forest – it might have been the mushrooms, of course…
Be that as it may, we’re thoroughly knackered when we get there, but my ingenious chef friend has a great treat up her sleave: authentic Merkin ‘smores – seared marshmallows served sandwiched between biscuits with half-melted chocolate. We sit and grill these aptly named treats over open fire, watching sunset come over the lake in front of us, and the stars coming out in the sky above, and it’s perfect.
I’ll have ‘smore of this please!
The next day is supposed to be our last on the trail, but after a morning of getting lost again, and then finally arriving in the old mining town of Kopparberg only to find that there is no public transport back to our point of departure, things are looking a little grim. There are no taxis around either – the nearest company is thirty kilometres away, and they’re not picking up the phone – and the prospect of having to spend another two or three days retracing our steps seems very real, when suddenly a bit of trail magic happens! It comes in the shape of Ewa, an old lady who happens to overhear our ordeal, and simply offers to drive us back to Kloten.
It’s a twenty kilometre drive one way, we’re smelly and penniless, but she does so without any hesitation, and doesn’t even balk when Miss A hugs her in a moment of sheer (if grubby) gratitude.
And so it is that we find ourselves back in Kloten a quarter of an hour later. It almost feels like cheating, but only almost. Having profusely thanked our driver (and handing over the Belgian chocolate that was meant to be a birthday gift) we wave goodbye to trolls and moose and set off on adventures of a different kind.
You can take the man out of the forest, but…
* Apart from three German lads, who get in a single canoe and head off in the opposite direction to ours – never to be heard from again.
** The only thing my foreign friend cannot come to terms with are the many sch-sounds.
A while ago I wrote a post about Danish idioms. I called it extra exciting expressions, or XXX for short.
For some reason it got a massive response, earning me 1,200 readers in a day – by far the best I’ve ever done. Obviously I’ve been trying to figure out how this happened.
I had this gnawing suspicion: Was it perhaps the fact that the text contained the words xxx, sex and porn? Did this mean search engines brought my text into the ranks of more steamy stuff, misleading horny people into clicking on what they thought was in fact a link to something else entirely? Was I luring innocent wannabe wankers into my seedy den of Danish?
I figured the only way to know was to conduct an experiment, so without further ado, here is an etymological overview explaining the original meaning of the most popular dirty words in English (and if this, too, proves popular, I have my answer to the above questions!):
Fuck. No four-letter word could be more ubiquitous, and yet few people know where it comes from. First recorded in English in Scotland as fukkit, it probably is a bastardisation of the Germanic ficken, which originally just meant to move back and forth, but which is also slang for fucking. The jib on a sailing boat is called a fock in Swedish, so I like to imagine a 16th century Swedish sailor trying to convey his intentions to a likely-looking lass in Glasgow in halting English, and creating the term fucking in the process…
Cock. Straight-forward enough – anyone can see the similarity between the birds (specifically the neck and head – if your appendage starts to look like the rest of cockerel – seek medical attention!), but did you know that the clinical term penis was actually a dirty word to the Romans? Penis means tail in Latin, and it was very taboo (in as far as anything was taboo to the Romans!). The polite word for it was coles.
Pussy needs no further explanation. But cunt is more difficult. It traces its heritage to Old Norse’s kunta, meaning slash or slit, but also old Dutch kut, originallymeaning sack or scrotum (proving that words can change not only meaning but also gender, apparently!). Regardless of origin, the first mention of the word is from 1230, on a street map of Oxford, where – in what can only be described as a daring marketing campaign – the local talent had named their street Gropeacunt Lane. So much for Oxford being a place for higher learning.
So there you have it. You have hopefully acquired some learning through the medium of deception and etymology, and I will watch with baited breath to see if the punters come rolling in. Who knows, if it works I might have to do what the hookers on the Ox did, and change the name of the blog to Word Porn Alley.
One of the things I wanted to try this year was to work out more consistently in the gym. If running proved too difficult after multiple injuries, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try to improve my fitness in a new way.
Going to Denmark for three weeks in August seemed a good time to start this experiment, and so I sought out a gym (the excellent fitness.dk) and made sure I went every day. Every day? Yep. Every. Single. Day.
To ensure that I didn’t overdo it, I followed a simple schematic: a rotating schedule, focusing on arms/shoulders day 1, chest and back day 2, and legs day 3. Rinse and repeat. This seemed to work. Sure, I’d have muscle aches, but since I isolated muscle groups as much as possible, it never interfered with the workout of the day.
I tried to eat well, three or four meals per day, staying clear of sugar and fast carbs (but not avoiding beer – I was in Denmark, after all!). I took magnesium and turmeric every day, plus a supplement called Clear Muscle.
So how did it go? Unlike the runstreak, my iron streak feels like it’s actually increasing my strength, rather than slowly grinding it down. This experiment has been going on one month today, and I have no intention of stopping, even though I’m now back in Belgium. I feel great. I have gained one or two kilos but don’t feel bloated or pudgy, so am hopeful it’s actually due to increased muscle mass.
Being a skinny guy (ectomorph to fans of word porn) I will never get beefy, so you won’t be seeing my face on a Schwarzenegger bod with air bag-pecs and biceps like normal people’s quads (unless my photoshop skills increase exponentially) but it feels like it’s probably a worthwhile pursuit for all people, young and old, skinny, fit or flabby – after all, tuning the engine will make it function better, longer.
Next step will be to find a gym close to work, so I can get out of the basement (where I keep my weights at home!) and keep up the good work. For that, if nothing else, I feel pumped!
Everyone likes a nice ass, and no one likes a smart ass, the saying goes. The Danes don’t care. They have a thing for arses. All kinds.
The list of Danish idioms involving your rear end goes on and on. My favourite may be their expression for a job that is particularly badly done, which is then said to move up and down like King Volmar’s arse (gå op og ned som kong Volmers røv). Quite the epitaph.* But then Danes have always had a troubled relationship with their royals (and vice versa).
Getting an arse-full isn’t a quaint pre-metric measure of the kind Americans and Brits are so found of. No, få røven fuld means being taken for a fool. If you are instructed to seal your arse (lokke røven) you are told to be be quiet in the most direct way possible.
But Danes don’t just focus on the behind. They also have a healthy interest in fully frontal parts. This isn’t expressed in idioms so much as a very liberal approach to information about people’s (no longer) private parts. As we have seen, some individuals market their goods in public, but this is just an expression of a more widespread (!) phenomenon: even Danish public television has a series of programmes called “me and my pussy/dick” (“Jag og min fisse/pik“) where you are treated to close-ups of different… er… bits, while the unseen owners regale you with cautionary tales from the netherlands.
So that’s Mor Danmark for you. Unlike John Bull and Uncle Sam (both rather creepy characters that seem hell-bent on molesting you, one way or another), the Danish national character is down to Earth in the extreme, an old lady with a naughty streak, face probably like that of a happy prune, telling you the truth whether you want to or not.
[Tried to find a suitable illustration for this imaginary woman on the Internet. Take my word for it: don’t.]
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*I really hope he was one of those early Viking kings that invaded England, so that he can feature in that famous pamphlet, World’s Greatest British Lovers.
From word porn to proper pleasures of the flesh: eating.
Copenhagen is home to NOMA, voted the world’s greatest restaurant several years in a row, but what about other Nordic food?*
I’m very happy to report that I have found some real gems while here, and they are both wonderfully traditional and nydannet – a word that means contemporary, newly created, whilst happily incorporating the Danes themselves – coincidence? I think not.
So, without further ado, here’s the ultimate guide to eating like a Dane:
For breakfast, you cannot do better than pay a visit to a recent addition to the culinary landscape of the capital, Grød. It’s a splendid example of how you don’t need a complicated concept to succeed, as long as you do what you do to perfection. Grød means porridge, and that’s what they serve, with as many as a dozen toppings. The porridge itself is very satisfying, creamy and fresh, and the extravaganza on top ensures that you never get bored. Oh, and you will be full for a looong time afterwards!
It’s porridge, Jim, but not as we know it!
For lunch, foodies and workmen alike have smørrebrød – open sandwiches with a plethora of different toppings, often incorporating traditional components such as herring or roast beef, but with interesting twists. My favorite place is a non-assuming place on Nytorv square, Mät, where you can have as many of these little delights as you like for a fixed price. Buyers beware, however: Danes are environmentally conscious, and the menu specifies that customers will be charged 15 kroner extra for each smørrebrød left unfinished!
Let’s just say I didn’t have to pay the forfeit…
No culinary expedition to Copenhagen should leave out JaDa Café. The name means “Oh, yes”, and I dare say that’s what most people whisper under their breath as they enter the establishment: JaDa makes the most gorgeous, custom-tailored ice cream I have ever seen. A perfect spot for an afternoon indulgence, and one likely to be as pleasing to your palate as your eye.
It even comes with the proverbial cherry on top.
It’s a good thing you’re biking around, because by now you have probably gained about 10lbs. However, dinner still beckons. I’ll give you two options:
Just down the street from Grød lies another interesting trendsetter: Manfred’s. Awarded by Michelin, this basement establishment is very relaxed and cozy, but what makes it stand out is that it’s vegetarian, and everything on their menu sourced from the restaurant’s own local farm. I had a seven course meal, and every single dish was surprising and good, from the cold cucumber/buttermilk soup starter to the red beet/blackcurrant/algae dessert.
If instead you want less food, and perhaps some animal protein, I would suggest a visit to Blaaregn, a local eatery where, if you have guts enough, you can find yourself face to face with a cod head on a platter.
Sink your teeth into this cod piece if you dare!
Baked to perfection, this fish – the only one that can compete with the herring for most traditional Danish food – was quite possibly the best seafood I’ve ever had. Baked to perfection with capers and nothing else, its meat was tender, succulent, and somehow a marvellous metaphor: if you dare to go back to your roots (and can face the prospect of putting someone else’s tongue in your mouth) there is no end to the gourmet experiences you can have here!
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*NOMA is an abbreviation for NOrdisk MAd, meaning Nordic food.
Sex sells. You’re reading this, aren’t you? So this post will be about porn.
Not the fleshy kind that elicits one-handed browsing tho (unless you are very particular in your tastes), but word porn. Specifically, some words and expressions that have amazed me in my efforts to decipher Danish and the Danish*.
First of all there’s swearing. There are two kinds of swearing, of course. The first is utilising curse words to emphasise things. Like all non-catholic countries there’s fewer curse words involving deities (beyond Gud and Satan), and more emphasis on bodily functions. So Danes utilise skidt and pisse (shit and piss) a lot – my favourite being pissegodt (literally tasty as piss) – but have also adopted that most prolific of American curses, the f word; only they pronounce it as fåkk.
The other type of swearing takes place when a mere promise isn’t enough. The Danish language has a peculiar expression here: Amager halshugg. Turns out Amager was the place of execution in Copenhagen; halshugg means decapitation. Interestingly, this expression is apparently very popular with recent middle eastern additions to the population, coming as they do from a culture where swearing of this kind is more prevalent. A Syrian refugee using a turn of phrase that’s shorthand for “may I be taken to the Danish capital’s executioner for capital punishment” – now that’s integration for you!
Overall there are quite a few historical references in Danish expressions, and few are flattering to a Swede: when something går ad Pommern til (lit. “goes to Pomerania” – an area in the Baltic that used to be Swedish), it means it’s going straight to Hell. If someone is being beaten up really badly they are slået til lirekassemænd – beaten until they become organ grinders – a profession associated with war invalids in the 19th century after – you guessed it! – wars with Sweden and others.
Who is to say Danes aren’t longing for revenge still? They might not say it out loud, but there are clues: if you compare, say, a Swedish matchbox – which features an innocent, naked child on the cover – with its Danish equivalent, you will find an old man there instead. Innocent enough, until you realise he is maritime war hero Tordenskiold, responsible for burning the Swedish enemy fleet.
So it all comes back to their history. It may be that the Danish sentiment is best summed up by the undying phrase of former prime minister Uffe Elleman-Jensen, who, after the Danes had voted against joining deeper cooperation with the rest of the EU, and then won their only European Football Championship to date, said: If you can’t join them, beat them.
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*For more word porn, you can read these posts from Germany and Slovenia, you pervs.
The first thing you notice in Copenhagen are the bikes. They are everywhere. Everyone bikes, young and old alike, and if you’re too young or too frail, chances are you’re still being whisked around on a bike, but of the rickshaw kind.
Alternative bikes and an air bag alternative to bike helmets, Hövding.
The bike as a mode of transport is very well looked after: bike lanes in virtually every street, even separate bike bridges to take you across the harbour, and bicycle shops and repairmen on every corner, almost. What’s more, there’s a well functioning system of hand signals to help biker communicate their intentions, and, most importantly, all drivers respect bikers.
And so it is that I spend a good deal of my day biking around the capital. I got a rental bike from the NGO Baisikeli (Swahili for, yep, bicycle) which sends part of their profits (and old bikes) to Africa, so that felt good – although at less than 100€ for three weeks I’m not sure how much of a profit they’re making. It’s hyggelig, at any rate.
All I wanna do is… baisikeli?
The other mode of transport that is immediately noticeable in Copenhagen is the boat. Friendships and other party boats turn the harbour into a movable feast when the sun is out. Everything from dinghies and kayaks to tankers and cruise ships can be seen from the docks. It’s hardly unique for the capital either, as nearly all Danes have a close affinity with the sea:
Denmark is a small place and you are never more than 50 kilometres from the shore. The coastline is over 7,000 kilometres*, which means that shipping and fisheries have always played a great part in the economy, and their fleet (both navy and merchant) has always been strong.
You can even ride a black or white swan. What’s that all a-boat?
These circumstances also explain how they could found (and subsequently lose) an empire. Empire? Yes. Denmark used to rule Norway, southern Sweden, the Dutchies of Schleswig and Holstein, AND had colonies in India and the West Indies. Losing all that (but keeping Greenland and the Faroes islands still) must have contributed to forming the national psyche into what it is today.
So what is that character? I’ve already mentioned that the Danes are fairly liberal, and I don’t know whether it’s all the biking and the boating, but all Danes look great. Rarely have I seen so many babes (of both sexes) in on place.
Possibly this is a reflection of their society in general, because Danes are apparently the world’s happiest people, and we all know we look our best when we feel good. (All that happiness seems to work in other ways, too; I cannot remember when I last saw so many pregnant women and babes (of the newborn variety) out and about.)
So… happy on the inside, and pretty on the outside. But as a nation it seems Denmark is still marked by their 19th century losses and the occupation during World War Two. They were always enthusiastic members of NATO, but have had a troubled relationship with the EU. And they’re not very keen on foreigners coming to live in Denmark, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s refugees from far away. So there is a sense of “Oi, back off, this is ours, and you can’t come and take (even more of) it!”. Which is fair enough, I guess. Two weeks into my sojourn I feel a little like Oliver Twist, tho. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”
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* To put it differently: if it were a straight line it would stretch from Copenhagen to the Caribbean.
I’m in Copenhagen for three weeks to learn Danish, and about the Danish.
The language is famously difficult to grasp, not because its grammar is particularly complex or its vocab full of anomalies, but because the Danes can’t be bothered to pronounce their own tongue. Think I exaggerate? It’s so bad, Danish babies have been shown to understand their parents significantly later in life than all other children worldwide. So people whose mother tongue it is struggle with Danish, and this is the language I’m supposed to pick up in three weeks?!
Of course, as a Swede you’d think I’d be helped by the similarities between our respective languages; after all, for much of history the two countries were either one or in various unions with one other. Surely this is reflected in the two languages?
Helped might be the wrong word. You see, for the rest of history we’ve been at war. Linguistically it’s nearly always the case that if two synonyms exist in both languages, then one is anachronistic in one language and simultaneously the contemporary word in the other.
This is probably due to a conscious effort on both sides to distance themselves from and be less like the arch enemy (in between the Liza Minelli-like reoccurring reunions of various kinds). That phenomenon makes me very self-conscious when speaking to the natives, aware as I am that I’m likely sounding weirdly archaic by instinctively picking the wrong word. Imagine if someone came up to you in an English-speaking country and addressed you with “Salutations, swain, what giveth?”. That’s how I feel.
It could just be that Swedes are more self conscious altogether than Danes, of course. Certainly Danes are much more liberal, sybaritic and individualistic than Swedes.
In my first week here I have been constantly taken aback by people’s drinking habits, for instance. The settings for lunch restaurants include shot glasses, something which hasn’t been the case in Sweden for fifty years. Beer is everywhere, but there are few truly drunk people. Little grannies will have a beer whilst chatting on a garden bench, labourers walk along chugging from a bottle whilst working, and people of all ages rent special party boats (essentially floating tables) to go around the harbour whilst drinking.
That company name, tho!
The harbour area is also home to sunbathers throughout central Copenhagen. Not all of them think bathing attire essential. And no one bats an eyelid as these impromptu nudists stroll around the docks, with latter-day Zorn tableaux ensuing – you got to love a country like that!
And if you want further proof you needn’t look further than Christiania, of course. The hippie collective in the middle of town is famous for its street vendors that openly sell drugs, but beyond the sweet and heavy haze of Pusher Street (as it is called) where people are puffing away there is a rather endearing and enduring sentiment that it is every individual’s freedom to live how they want.
As seen through a green haze.
There are, famously, those who don’t think these freedoms should apply to all, however; the second day I was here a law was adopted that makes it illegal to wear masks in public. The government isn’t targeting halloweeners, it’s after Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab.
Whilst I’m not in favour of a religion or culture that imposes that kind of clothing on a gender, fining them or confining them in their homes for dressing the way they do isn’t going to achieve real change, to my mind.
But here again, liberals are fighting back, and so it was that I witnessed first hand the demonstration where hundreds of masked Danes went out in solidarity with Muslim women on the first day of the ban. That, more than anything, endeared them to me. After all, where else can you see a topless niqab-wearer and a Stormtroopette join forces?
Crossing from Sweden into Norway on the E18, the changes are subtle, yet instantaneous. Road signs change colour, speed limits are lowered, and the quality of the motorway is vastly improved.
Not that I’m complaining: I’m on a road trip with my kids, and we’ll be spending a lot of time in the car, so anything that can make the trip more pleasant is welcome. We’re headed north, but our first stop is Oslo.
Surprisingly, the main road leading from Sweden to the capital of Norway is not a major motorway at all, but a single lane affair. We arrive quite late due to a horrific pile-up in Sweden that left several people dead and us hours delayed.
The heat is still intense, and a high rise district shimmers into view like an unexpected miniature Manhattan. The rest of town is thankfully resolutely Nordic in style, with well-heeled private residences spread around the bay in which Oslo nestles.
The city is also endearingly small; when we brave the heat the next day to go down to the docks, the tourist map makes it look like a twenty minute walk – in reality it’s more like five.
We take a ferry across the sound to the (even more) affluent and posh side of town, home to many a palatial home, and three museums that I really want to see: the Fram museum (celebrating the explorers of the North Pole – many of whom were Norwegian), the KonTiki museum (celebrating one Norwegian explorer in particular: Thor Heyerdahl) and the Viking ship museum (no points for guessing which Norse explorers this involves).
Let’s spend five years stuck in the ice. Hello?
Alas, due to the intense heat of the day and the curious absence of any information in Norwegian, the kids were less than thrilled with the first (in spite of it allowing visitors to clamour on board two of the vessels used) and completely exhausted by the second, so after having seen the famous balsa rafts and reed boats Heyerdahl captained (in spite of having been severely hydrophobic!), we give up.
Personally I would have loved to stay longer and learnt all there was to learn in both places, plus bought books on the different explorers AND gone in to see the third museum, but I sensed mutiny was coming, so I did what all sensible captains do: staved it off with double rations of rum. Rum-raisin, to be more precise.
Ice cream having saved the day, we carried out a tactical withdrawal and waited out the afternoon heat in the hotel pool before paying our respects to the Norwegian king in the evening. This we did by strolling around the large royal park that surrounds his home in the middle of town. This public space is very popular, and rightly so, as it is beautifully laid out. Dinner was courtesy of Den Glade Gris, a local restaurant right next to the park, where I was served the best svineknoke I’ve ever eaten, and had the dubious pleasure of paying a Norwegian restaurant bill for the first time – let’s just say the check was at least as cardiac arrest-inducing as the delicious pork!
Next day we continue our journey north, up along rivers and inland fjords, over mountain ridges and through tunnels (amongst them the longest one in the world, at nearly 25k, replete with a psychedelically lit rest stop in the middle), to finally arrive at Aurland, a settlement at the tip of one of the fingers of the Sogndalsfjord, one of the most dramatic landscapes I have ever seen.
Norway – an a-fjordable place?
The fjords of Norway are quite unique, their fractal-shaped branches smaller and smaller as they keep dividing, leading ever inland. It’s easy to see where the investigative nature of the Norsemen stemmed from – who could live in such a labyrinthine landscape without wanting to explore every nook and cranny? And when the land is nothing but steep mountains rising straight out of the water, travel by sea is really the only alternative, so it’s small wonder they became such excellent navigators. Equally, given what winters are like here, one can see how someone like Amundsen would propose travelling the north west passage across the Arctic by building a ship that could withstand being stuck in the ice and get pummelled by its immense powers, and then simply ride the current through, even though he estimated it would take five years!
We don’t have five years, however, only five days, so after installing ourselves in a hytte with magnificent views and bunk beds and little else, and having had a good night’s rest, we set out to explore. Nearby Gudvangen is home to a Viking village where people live as Norsemen did, all year around. It’s the week of their annual market, so the place is fair teeming with enthusiasts hawking their wares and showing off their crafts – all dressed in authentic outfits.
Menhirs to the left, jokers to the right…
It’s the closest you’re likely to get to living as a Viking, and we love it: Childe One gets her hair braided, Norse style, Childe Two gets a wooden Viking sword and a Thor’s hammer (as do I), and all of us try archery and ax throwing. We draw the line at glima, however. The Viking martial art is akin to wrestling or judo, the difference being that not only do you need to get your opponent on his or her back – yes, there are women participating, too, and they’re just as fierce as the men – you also need to make them let go of you and get back up on your own feet. This means bouts go on until you’ve inflicted enough pain on your adversary for them to release you! Combatants throw and roll each other, bending limbs in unlikely ways, and it often looks like they will get horribly hurt, but they return again and again to challenge each other; some enthusiasts have come from as far away as the US and New Zealand to fight here.
The fierce fighting aside, the setting couldn’t be more peaceful and scenic: the village lies snug between mountain and sea, cascading waterfalls high above us ensuring the lushness of the valley in spite of the summer heat. In the bay, a small Viking ship lies at anchor. When a bald eagle suddenly glides majestically past the village – hounded and completely unperturbed by seagulls – it really feels as if we’re transported 1,000 years back in time.
Next stop: Newfoundland.
After we have had our fill we set out on a ship on the fjord – not on a drakkar bound for Vinland or Miklagård, but a ferry that will take us to nearby Flåm. This is the best way to see the fjords, as the sheer walls towering above you on both sides really drive home how grandiose nature is, and how insignificant we are. There’s a railway from Flåm that is considered one of the most beautiful in the world, but after a full day of Viking fun plus two hours on the boat neither one of us is in shape for more adventuring, so that particular experience will have to wait for next time.
Notice the house on top…
The next day we start our journey south again, driving along, over and through many a majestic mountain range before finally following the Numedalslågen river, where we stumble across a whitewater rafting opportunity in Dageli that proves a huge success with the kids. The water levels are too low, honestly, so parts of it feels slow to me, but the wee ones love it, and it is exciting occasionally, so maybe it’s as good an initiation to this kind of adventuring as they can get. They paddle along like champs, taking the helmsman’s calls of “forwards”, “backwards” and “brace” very seriously, like the Vikings they are. The two hours on the river plus the ever-present heat take their toll, however, so when we stop at an inn soon afterwards to have late lunch/early dinner and it turns out they have a room, we gladly accept.
I had planned to drive for another hour and then find another hytte, but clean sheets and a warm shower and a dip in the river late at night turns out to be exactly what everyone needed. There’s another unexpected bonus to this choice of lodging: at breakfast the next day the inn keeper asks if we are taking the trolley. Turns out this isn’t a reference to the Norwegians’ much beloved trolls – there’s a disused old railway right next door, and the inn lets trolleys to tourists.
Trolls and trolleys.
Off we go, cycling along the railway this perfect summer day, past twee station houses, high above forest lakes and through pitch black tunnels. It’s a perfect mini adventure, and in a way it illustrates what I hoped for with this road trip – by not planning everything in great detail we allow the surprises we encounter along the way to be that much greater.
And so we drive back to Sweden. We arrive at Glaskogen nature reserve later than I had envisaged, but the kids are amazingly resilient, and we get a wonderful stuga right between two forest lakes, the dark, still waters of one overflowing into the other right at our front porch. It’s got a pump to draw water from the well, an outdoor privy and a wooden stove for heating (that we neither need nor are allowed to use because of the heat wave and subsequent risk of wildfires), and it’s the perfect end to a perfect holiday. As I sit and watch the sun set over the lake where the kids are still playing late at night, a cool, overly expensive Norwegian beer in my hand, I reflect that this kind of family time beats package tours ten times out of ten in my book. Tomorrow we will drive back to my parents and hang out with cousins, and that will be fun, too, but this is prime quality family bonding time, right here, the Norse way.
Dusk? Dawn? Who knows. It’s like having god shining a spotlight at you when the sun breaks through.
The last morning I wake thoroughly rested after the first good night’s sleep I’ve had here. After three days of sweating and no showers I smell decidedly musky, but I’ve had the room to myself, so the only one having to put up with the olfactory challenge is me.
Yesterday’s infernal rain has stopped, even though the clouds are still lurking only a couple of valleys away, like menacing thugs waiting to pounce. I set out down the sloping rockslide, where path and burbling brook form a two-dimensional double helix, crossing again and again, with me skipping as best I can to avoid starting the day with a foot bath.
Soon, however, I’m down below the tree line, and in for a different treat, as now I’m forest bathing in the truest sense. If there is anything more glorious than the turpentine-filled air of a mountain forest fresh after rain, I don’t know what it is. I breathe deeply, and marvel at this perfect moment, languidly strolling along the escarpment, not another soul around, just me, the birdsong, a couple of marmots, and the gentle tinkle of distant cow bells.
Vaya con dios, as the Spanish would have it.
I leave that valley and enter another, where the road leads down into darker, older spruce woods. I come upon a sulphur spring, which turns out not to be more than a spout in the forest, from which a steady little rivulet flows, much like a hundred other places I’ve passed. This one has a sign saying how healthy its water is, however, so I fill one of my bottles with it. Sulphuric water may have many great characteristics, but every time I put the bottle to my lips it’s as if someone farts in my mouth, so after a couple of sips I return its contents to the ground from whence it came.
The road takes me to the valley floor, where frolicking holiday makers make me yearn for a quick getaway. According to my itinerary I’m to cross this valley and go down a funicular on the other side, which would take me to Ortisei and the end of my hike. I don’t want it to to be over just yet, however, and I’m also conscious of the fact that I “cheated” yesterday, so elect instead to go over and around one last mountain to the forest-clad east.
By now the clouds are back with their payload, but unlike yesterday’s crazy display – like an alpha chimp asserting its dominance – this light drizzle is more akin to the gentle grooming of a wizened old female (Why, yes, I have been reading one of Jane Goodall’s books on the great apes on this trip. However did you know?!), and if anything it reminds me of treasured childhood holidays in the Austrian alps, which – to the best of my recollection – were cloaked in perpetual, misty rain.
Anyway. Up the mountain and into more spruce forest I go, utterly alone once more. It strikes me that these must be the haunts of the many deer I’ve seen mounted on walls all over the place. My woodsman skills are obviously on point, because only a couple of hundred metres later I see telltale hoof prints in the mud, and a minute later – my tracking being vastly better than I thought! – I spot a doe not twenty metres away from me, still as only a deer can be. She isn’t as intrepid as my marmot friend, however, so as I fiddle to get my phone out to take a picture she vanishes, silent as a ghost.
…or sit down beneath a crucified dude.
News of my prowess with peanut butter has clearly not reached this part of the forest, because the only other critters I see are large, dark squirrels that hightail it out of there as I approach. Their loss.
And so I come to the end of my trail. I round the mountain, and there, nestled in the garden valley, is Ortisei, from whence I set out four days ago. My hike is completed. Soon I’m whisked off to Bolzano by bus, where the Ötzi museum awaits (its 5,000-year old star rather underwhelming in the (shrunken, brownish) flesh), followed by a hot shower (oh, how I shower!) and a clean change of clothes, freshly bought.
In total I’ve hiked well over 80 kilometres in four days, most of it – seemingly – up- or downhill. The trail isn’t for anyone, but if you don’t suffer from a fear of heights, lightning, or falling horribly to your death I would really recommend it – the Dolomites are a thing of outstanding beauty, and I have truly walked with gods during my days here.
When you’ve got your head in the clouds, don’t have your head in the clouds
Day three sees me waking early once more, as strong winds howl across the plateau and through the rifugio. It’s five thirty, and I can’t bring myself to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag, so spend an hour more sacrificing at the altar of Morpheus, but by seven I’m ready to leave, setting off before anyone else.
I’m retracing my steps across the moonscape to descend the mountains of the Ladin at the opposite end I got up yesterday. My main concern today is the possibility that I might have to climb down another via ferrata – not something that I relish – but I needn’t have worried, the path down – the Via Alta di Dolomiti – is quite navigable (Don’t get me wrong: put one foot wrong and it might still kill you, but in an absent-minded way, not with the murderous intent of yesterday’s walls), and as the name indicates, has been in use for a long time – we’re in the vicinity of the place where Ötzi, the Stone Age murder victim, was found, after all. I wonder what Palaeolithic deities he prayed to, if any, as he lay dying here.
Mandatory selfie. Not pictured: marmot bestie.
Shaking off these morbid thoughts I get my head out of he clouds (quite literally) and follow ever-growing streams of meltwater down the mountain, until – two hours after I set out – I’m down below the tree line once more. I have second breakfast by a wonderful waterfall, and an even better encounter with an inquisitive marmot (all the others I’ve seen until now have disappeared before I was anywhere near). I stop in my tracks so as not to scare her off, and when I bring out my musli-bars and gently offer her a morsel she decides I am her new best friend, completely losing any inhibition. I end up hand-feeding her, and when she had eaten a whole square (some 400 calories worth) she preceded to lick my fingers. It was as if the goddess Ladinia herself had taken marmot shape to welcome me down off the mountain (it may just have been the peanut butter too, of course) and it was a moment of utter joy.
Marmot selfie. Well, it could have been
The morning holds one more surprise for me: heavily pregnant with the snow and hail of the last couple of days, the stream that I have been following has swollen well beyond its normal size – something which becomes apparent when I arrive at a ford, where the usual crossing is now a foot deep, two meters wide and, above all, cascading down with full force. Setting foot in the water would be impossible – the speed and power of the water would pull me off my feet immediately, dragging me down with it as it roars valleywards in leaps and bounds. I search up and down the white water and finally decide upon a spot where, balancing on a rock on my side, I can hopefully reach the opposite shore, all wet but solid-looking rocks. Lunging forward I land hard on the other side, with less than an inch to spare from the cauldron seething behind me.
After that, at least, I’m in familiar territory – the forest looks uncannily like that of Tiveden, the Swedish nature park I hiked last year, if Tiveden had been tilted at a forty-five degree angle! So pleased with this morning’s decent am I, that when I come to a crossroads I think nothing of it, and continue downwards towards the valley floor.Alas, only too late do I remember that the next point on my itinerary is Passo Sella, and a pass in this part of the world is the point where it’s possible to get from one valley to the next – in other words, high up. So back up I go, suddenly forced to share a road with stinking, motorised vehicles and bike riders – not nice at all after two days of nothing but the odd hiker.
This involuntary detour has meant that I have five, six kilometres more notched up than I should, so when I arrive at Sellalungo – another of these serrated mountain ranges that penetrate the landscape like the crest of a subterranean plesiosaur – and there is a funicular on offer, I only debate briefly with myself before getting a one-way ticket to the top. It’s a rickety construction, taking one or two passengers per ride, and you’re required to leap into what looks uncannily like a plastic wardrobe and hope that the assistant manages to close the door behind you, but up I go, and in ten minutes I have reached the top. And so I’m back where I started this morning, descending yet another gravel-strewn ravine, tap dancing over the pebble fields to finally arrive at today’s rifugio, perilously perched on the slope, a full hour and a half before the habitual deluge begins.
I had contemplated walking further today, but I’m glad I didn’t, as this afternoon’s outbreak was even fiercer than normal: hail the size of marbles drum down on the terrace where I had Kaiserschmarren for lunch, a hundred rivulets run straight under the house – built as it is on pollards to keep it from sliding into the next valley – and thunder and lightning echo and ricochet between the peaks. Had I gone further I would have been playing a very unequal game of chicken with these powers, racing towards the next refugio much like the first day – much better then to be seated inside, resting my weary body, even if it means spending half the day doing nothing much at all.
From two in the afternoon until I go to bed at ten, it pours down, then there’s hail, thunder, more rain, and on it goes, until it feels as if we might cast off from the pollards and sail away. And with that weird notion I fall asleep.
When dawn comes I feel surprisingly ok. As yesterday showed, the midday heat and the afternoon gewitter are my main enemies, so I set out at seven, having elected to skip breakfast. My homemade power bars will do me fine. Water is a concern, however, as my trusty camelbak bladder started leaking yesterday, which has left me with nothing but my LifeStraw, all 0.6 litre’s worth. In 30 degree heat that is Not Good. I pick up a discarded water bottle and fill it at the well, and then I’m off.
The first two hours are relatively easy, with only one longish climb, through a landscape not unlike what I imagine Iceland to be – grass and rocks, and the odd flock of sheep looking balefully at me as I pass them by. I skirt the side of one crest, and come out on the side of Val Gardena at its highest point, where I have a break (and a second power bar breakfast) overlooking a bergbahn far below, and the Sella mountain massif on the other side, the walls rising vertically in the air to make it look like an impregnable skyscraper fortress more than anything. It’s a daunting sight, and all the more so since that’s where I’m headed.
See the patch of snow in the upper left corner? Didn’t know it, but that’s where lunch was…
I descend through more marvellous meadows, cross the valley and head upwards again on Via 666. The name conjures up another unpleasant deity, but it seems my fears are unfounded, as the path runs alongside the imposing walls. Until suddenly it doesn’t. Instead it rises upwards, ever upwards through a ravine, at an impossible angle, the gravel wet and yielding, slippery and treacherous. That goes on for an eternity, and then, after having crossed the first snow field of the day, it becomes another Via ferrata, only this one has the added bonus of going up through a waterfall, with glacial water sputtering down on the climber, hands going numb in the process. It’s gruelling, and truly the devil’s own, but after a three hundred metre climb my efforts are rewarded, much like yesterday, by the sudden appearance of a plateau. This one is much higher up than yesterday’s green and pleasant land, however – here there is nothing but rock and more rock. Nothing but a timely refugio, that is, right by a sky-coloured lake of mountain water, with the best goulash soup I’ve ever tasted.
Goulash soup for the soul.
It’s a wonderful respite, but of course it cannot last, as I’m only half way through today’s itinerary. Ever upwards I trundle. More climbing. The hail storms of the two previous nights have left massive quantities of granular snow on the ground. Going up the north face of the mountain the snow is slushy but solid enough to take a hiker’s weight most of the time (the tracks of other hikers show only too clearly when this hasn’t been the case), but it’s still hard going, and once I reach the summit the south side isn’t much better, because here the sun has gone to work, turning the whole mountain into one big waterfall, so walking becomes a very wet affair. On top of that, the god of thunder has been busy again, and all around me are darkly pregnant clouds. I make haste, body surprisingly responsive, stopping only to talk a South Korean woman out of going down the way I’ve just ascended, and make it to today’s Rifugio after six hours of solid hiking, and a full forty-five minutes before Jove unleashes his fury once more.
This refugio is considerably more primitive than the previous one – there are no showers, only wash basins with icy water, and toilets are mere holes in the floor; it seems unnecessarily cruel to force people to squat after the ordeal of getting here, but on the other hand I feel a lot better today, in spite of my trials and tribulations, and sit quite happily in the common room with a beer and chocolate cake (hunger makes one considerably less choosy about what goes together), reading my book, waiting for dinner, and then wolfing it down the moment it arrives. Three courses later and I’m off to bed, happily surprised to be alive and well.
”Closer, God, to Thee”, I mumble to myself through gritted teeth. It’s the song the orchestra played as the Titanic went down, and I share their sentiment – and yet I couldn’t be further from their ordeal. Nor is it the Christian God I have in mind, when now I stand to meet my maker, but Thor, or Jupiter, gods of thunder.
I’m in the Dolomites, the UNESCO-protected Italian-Austrian outlier of the alps, and it’s the first of four days of hiking. Only now I’m beginning to wonder if it will be my last. And yet it started out so well.
I arrived in Val Gardena last night and took the funicular first thing in the morning. True, there had been an almighty thunder storm in the night, but now the skies were blue, the air imbued with that particular cool freshness that follows a summer rain. And to start with the hike was as bucolic as can be: through the pine forests lining the sides of the garden valley, where intensely pink alpine roses covered the forest floor, to pastures with an astonishingly rich flora, where mountain cows of the Milka variety grazed happily, quite unconcerned with the lone wanderer in their midst.
My plan was to hike la Curona de Gherdëina – the crown of Gardena, a circular route taking me all around the valley in question, staying at different rifugios, mountain huts, along the way.
All together now: 🎶The hills are ahlaaahhiiivvvveee…!
The first rifugio I came upon was a working farm, in a setting so picture perfect that you’d expect a von Trapp to come dancing past at any moment. The meadows were all aflower, an old woman was churning butter in the morning sun, and a smiling serving girl got me my Aplfelshorle – apple juice and sparkling water. It was wonderful. To the right loomed one of the sharp, jagged mountain ridges that are emblematic to the Dolomites, like the broken teeth of some buried giant with a serious dentist aversion, but I wasn’t overly concerned, since I felt sure the path would skirt around it. How wrong I was!
As I set out again it became alarmingly clear that the path wasn’t going to swerve – instead it went straight up towards the escarpment and then continued in the shape of a via ferrata (literally “iron road”), with crampons and steel wires hammered into the rockface for the intrepid hiker/climber to hang on to. Like a very small and inefficient dental floss I struggled onwards and upwards between the serrated teeth, acutely aware that mistakes were not an option, only to suddenly reach the crest, and the astonishing view of a gently sloping valley filled with restaurants and scores of elderly day-trippers.
This is where I came up. Still can’t quite believe it.
I felt quite annoyed at this sight: having worked so hard, surely I deserved better than to have groups of selfie-taking pensioners blocking my path? (It turned out that this was the result of a Seilbahn nearby, making for easy access to all and sundry.) I pressed on, and soon entered another valley, this one gorgeously empty apart from a dry river bed made up of the white sandstone that abounds here. It was like having a pristine, meandering road to myself, leading into the interior and away from the unwashed masses. I was overjoyed.
Alas, the only way out of a valley if you move away from its mouth is by climbing, and this is where my troubles began. By now it was close to 30 degrees in the shade – and no shade – and my legs were fair shaking after four hours of hard hiking when the climb up the escarpment began in earnest. Looking behind me I was also aware that dark clouds were beginning to form, so I didn’t want to linger, even though my muscles were protesting loudly.
Sweaty beyond belief I made my way higher and higher, over gravel of the kind I learnt to loathe in France, past the first patches of perma-snow – somewhat surprisingly a pretty pink colour, which is apparently caused by bacteria. I might have been a pretty pink colour by this stage as well for all I know, climbing up sheer rock walls in the midday sun. When I finally reached the crest high above it was to find an illustration from Tolkien immediately in front of me: the darkest, most evil-looking clouds I’ve ever seen were hanging around the next broken-toothed ridge, itself an ominous sight. All that was missing was a fiery eye in the sky, and I would have been staring at the gates of Mordor.
We ain’t in the Shire no more, master Frodo…!
As it was, the very real danger was that the thunder clouds would catch up with me and I would find myself stuck on this ridge. Quite apart from the downpour rendering the sheer rock dangerously slippery to traverse, the combination of me swinging on iron crampons near the summit and lightning from on high was one I didn’t particularly care to contemplate. I also knew that I had precious little to protect myself in the event of a real downpour – only a very light rain jacket and an emergency blanket – so I didn’t fancy my chances much if I had to try to bivouac, but what choice did I have?
Only one. On shaky legs – exhaustion and fear and adrenaline being a potent brew – I half walked, half ran the last three quarters of an hour to the refugio where I was to spend the night, caught up in the cold front that precedes proper storms, shorts and tshirt soaked through with icy sweat, but I made it.
Not half an hour after I dash through the door to the refugio, the world outside was lost to clouds and lightning and torrential rain, but by that time I was bedded down in my bunk, utterly exhausted and trying to regain some warmth, dry and pleased with having outrun Jupiter.
The rest of the day was spent acclimatising to life in a refugio; the dormitories have a dozen bunk beds each, piled three high, with the commotion this brings. Showers are four euros and five minutes each, and only available after six, dinner is served between seven and eight. Thankfully, in this regimented microcosm I’m seated with a lovely New York couple and an equally charming English ditto for dinner, which makes it a very pleasant affair, but I am spent and back in bed by nine.
Sleep comes hard, however, as I mull over the possibility that I have bitten off more than I can chew. The second day promises even more kilometres and height difference – will I really manage that, with my body already one big, dull ache, and more thunder storms a distinct possibility?
Solstice. Simultaneously the longest and the shortest day of the year*, it’s a moment of symbolic cosmic importance. It marks the (arbitrary) orbitary halfway point around the sun, and so shall I.
Then one month later the Brussels 20k – which I ran with no preparation – finally did me in. My Achilles’ tendon proved to be my Achilles’ tendon, so no running for another month (and counting). That bodes ill for my overall running goal, but I did have a backup plan, so biking and weights it is. There, I’m on track.
Challenges? Apart from the runstreak I’ve done a month of intermittent fasting, which went well and felt good, and I’ve given up coffee entirely and alcohol just about (I’ve probably drunk the alcoholic equivalent of three bottles of wine this year in order not to become a social outcast, but I can live with that kind of consumption).
Travels? Morocco, Egypt and the Seychelles are in the bag. Next up, the Dolomites, and then hopefully Norway, followed by Denmark.
Reading? I’ve read nine non-fiction books so far, so I’m ahead of the curve there (the goal was one book per month). Of the ones I’ve read, five have been real eye-openers and come with the highest recommendation:
Chess? I managed to get to almost 1500 in my rating (rather than 1400, which was the initial ambition). I’m sorry to report I have since dropped back down to the 1300 mark, but this shows it can be done, so I will persevere.
Piano? Yep. I’ve been working diligently, and have learnt several new pieces. None by heart, but still.
French? This is where I come up short. I haven’t been disciplined enough to actually seek out and learn anything like as many as 100 new words per month. in my defence I just passed an aptitude test, allowing me to learn Danish in Denmark this summer, so maybe French can be put on the back burner for a bit…
And that’s it. Three trips and three challenges in six months, on schedule. Other goals coming along nicely for the most part. Some fluctuation and changed plans, which always happens, but on the whole I’m on track. The sun can keep on spinning.**
—————
*It’s the shortest if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, so here’s a shoutout to all my readers in Australia, who currently number in the single digit. As in one. Hi Sophia!
** solstice means “sun-stop”. It was observed and named back when people had a more earth-centric view of the universe…
A new decade beckons. It seems not long ago 2020 was in the realm of sci-fi, but here we are. As always, I am setting out my ambitions for the next year. They don’t include traveling to Mars, or even the moon, but still they might seem far-fetched to some. So, here we go, in no particular order:
I 
As one of 
I was supposed to be flying. 
You know that feeling when you arrive at the train station only to see the train you need to be on pull out? That was me this morning. Why? Well, I was slow, due to being dead tired from having been unable to sleep most of the night, and the reason for that was undoubtedly the two large whiskeys and enormous chunk of gingerbread dough that I had late last night.
My baby brother turned forty this year, and the whole extended family went to Iceland to celebrate. We had to fit it around everyone’s schedule so in the end we only went for four days, but what days they were!
We went to Split on a whim. It was a decision taken more or less at random, as I needed a destination for my Easter week with the kids, and knew they wanted sun and warmth. I was so overwrought at the time tho that I only checked 
After breakfast on the pebble beach in Sougia I set out up the gorge that lies right outside the village. It’s not very big compared to yesterday’s 
The original reason why I wanted to go to Crete was to hike, and specifically its gorges, that are supposed to be gorge-ous (Sorry. I’ve got it out of my system now.)
The sky is murd’rous
Snow in the forest; the timber wolf wakes,
In the garden spring is here
One thing that struck me with 
I came to Rome to celebrate New Year. We didn’t coordinate it, but by pure coincidence, so did lots of other people. And here I was thinking winter would be off-season. Silly me…
We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions 
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
One of the first challenges I ever undertook was going without sweets and candy for a year. My parents came up with that one, and the gauntlet was eagerly picked up by me and my sister, since there was pecuniary compensation involved – money which was then spent on an obscene amount of chocolate on January 1st the following year.
On Monday I was supposed to receive a medal. It’s one of those traditions the purpose of which I don’t understand: you get one after twenty years as a civil servant. But it isn’t merit based – everyone gets one. All you have to do is stick with it two decades. That made me think.
I got L for fall break this year. The children’s mom and I decided to split the kidlets for the first time. And now I was nervous.
So I decided to try 
Hot on the heels* of the UN report on 
It’s an odd thing, to see your world through a stranger’s eyes. I took 
The man suddenly appearing in front of me is a giant, well over two metres tall. He also looks like a troll. He sports a mohawk/Rasta hairdo that defies all description, and he is the first person we have met in Bergslagen. As he towers over us, my travel companion, Miss Adventure, is understandably somewhat taken aback. Tales of troll abductions have reached her ears, and now she has stepped into the creature’s lair!
From 
Sex sells. You’re reading this, aren’t you? So this post will be about porn.
I’m in Copenhagen for three weeks to learn Danish, and 
Crossing from Sweden into Norway on the E18, the changes are subtle, yet instantaneous. Road signs change colour, speed limits are lowered, and the quality of the motorway is vastly improved.
”Closer, God, to Thee”, I mumble to myself through gritted teeth. It’s the song the orchestra played as the Titanic went down, and I share their sentiment – and yet I couldn’t be further from their ordeal. Nor is it the Christian God I have in mind, when now I stand to meet my maker, but Thor, or Jupiter, gods of thunder.
Solstice. Simultaneously the longest and the shortest day of the year*, it’s a moment of symbolic cosmic importance. It marks the (arbitrary) orbitary halfway point around the sun, and so shall I.