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

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…!

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…!

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. ☀️

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!

…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.

So, all in all still on track. What about you?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

15. I managed to find self-watering pots for tomatoes that a colleague swears by. Too late for this year, but not for next.

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!

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?

It’s today, and it also happens to be the anniversary of an event that shaped much of modern society (no, not Corona), so here’s my contribution:

The early bird rose

to the Christian occasion:

A Diet of Worms.

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?

——-

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.

3. Read at least one non-fiction book per month

This worked out well in 2019, so I’m sticking with it.

4. Get certified as a paraglider (at long last!)

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…

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!

——

*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.

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.

((Nearly) all pics courtesy of LW)

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.

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. 

Dawn over Val Gardena.

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.

I don’t mention my children a lot in this blog, partly because this is written for them, and partly because I don’t want to put them in the limelight, but today is my youngest child’s tenth birthday, and I’ll make an exception. Not because I want to write about the immense joy and love he and his older sister have filled my life with every day of their existence, but because the anniversary made me realise that the time I’ve had with them thus far has passed all too quickly. That made me pause and think.

If a decade can go by so fast, shouldn’t I be planning ahead for the next one? I’ve been setting out goals for the coming year for some years now, but surely the same principle should be applicable to longer term goals as well? I’ve just never really done it, because the notion seems like hubris – how can you expect to know what you want from a point in time so distant as a decade away? But to use the words of Mark Twain: “You should plan your future. You’ll be spending the rest of your life there.” And besides, as today shows only too clearly, a decade passes in the blink of an eye.

So where do I want to be in 2028? Well, still around, and of sound body and mind, first of all. Keeping fit and reading and staying active should help with that. Eating well, too.

Being financially secure would be nice. In ten years’ time I will have paid off my mortgage and will hopefully still be gainfully employed, so that should be ok. The worry is that technological or political developments render interpreters superfluous, but I’m not too concerned about that.

So assuming I’m alive and well and financially doing quite alright, what do I want out of life?

I want to see my children well on their way to being well educated with good job prospects, whatever that means in the Blade Runner era. The rest of my family are hopefully also well (with the exception of my father, who could pass away long before that), but there is little I can do to affect the latter.

I will be 57 in 2028, so resolutely middle-aged but not yet old. As I see it, I will still be living in Belgium, in the same house, as the kids will (hopefully) be coming to see me regularly if they have moved out, and might have boyfriends and girlfriends with them. Besides, there is precious little chance of retiring at that tender age, so I will have to stick around for work.

Having been single for four years I find it difficult to imagine I will be cohabiting with anyone (I may be wrong – nothing is more difficult to predict than the future, after all!). Misty will be nearing the end of her life, if she isn’t gone already, so I guess one thing I will be able to do is let my house for longer periods and live elsewhere. It would be fantastic to spend a month at a time in places like Central America, South Africa, Canada, south-east Asia, Japan…

Speaking of work, I guess I will never quit being an interpreter, but it would be nice to try something else. As I’m already spending almost as much time working for the Communications unit as I’m in the booth (and writing this blog in my spare time) clearly this is the way to go. Speech writer for politicians, maybe? I would like to take a stab at writing a novel one day, too.

I also want to live greener. Installing solar panels and becoming self-sufficient in terms of energy is part of this. Having chickens and bees, as well. If I could I would buy the empty plot across from my house and keep goats, but that takes the kind of money I don’t have. At least not now. Installing a swimming pond in the garden would help local wildlife and give me somewhere to swim.

What else? I hope I can cultivate friendships – old and new – so that people come and visit me and enjoy the garden, as having it on my own seems more of a chore than anything.

So that’s me in 2028. What about you? Will you join me? Have I forgotten something vital? What about 2038? A condo on Mars? Or fighting over scraps with a few other straggling survivors, fearing rabid dogs and killer rabbits? Time will tell.

It might sound like a Dwayne Johnson movie, but “Fast and faster” is the working title of a project of a different kind. Not a Hollywood blockbuster, but my latest challenge. Fasting.

No, I haven’t become Muslim and joined in Ramadan – Ramadan Mubarak to those who are and do! – but there are similarities. Ramadan means you don’t eat from dawn until dusk, so it’s a kind of cyclical fasting, which is exactly what I’m doing, but to a different beat.

Cyclical or intermittent fasting (IF) is supposedly very good for your organism, amongst other things because it induces ketosis – a state in which your body starts to burn reserves of body fat rather than constantly working through the latest batch of fast carbs you’ve been feeding it. I’ve tried this last year, when I lived on a paleo diet for the better part of a month, and the results were good, but it seems fasting might be an even better way to do it.

The rationale is much the same: caveman eating patterns were dictated by availability, and so we have evolved to go without food for periods of time. Modern food is anything but scarce so we tend not to, but proponents argue that our bodies actually do better with less, so I figured it was worth a try. And if I lose a couple of pounds and/or become a faster runner in the process, so much the better…

There are different ways of doing IF: some suggest going without food entirely for two days out of seven, others follow the Warrior Diet (which – cool name aside – means you eat during a window of four hours every day). I have chosen to fast 16 hours every day, giving me an eight hour window (between noon and eight in the evening) during which I eat what I want.

Why this particular pattern? Frankly, I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop myself from eating even for that long, so it seemed sensible to start easy.

I was nervous about the effects on my training regime, but I needn’t have been. The first day I biked to work and back on an empty stomach (38k) without feeling the worse for wear. True, I did ensure that the trip back was timed so I could eat right after I got home, but working half a day on an empty stomach after an hour of biking wasn’t a problem.

I was also concerned about my general well-being. Fasting is about depriving yourself of essential fuel, after all. Again, I bredbent have been. If anything I feel better for it. I’m on day five of this challenge, and I feel less bloated, fitter and more focused. I haven’t checked my weight (this not being the prime reason for my trying this), but I look leaner already, my energy levels are great and I haven’t experienced any “hanger” – irritability as a result of low blood sugar – so things are looking good.

As per usual I’ll try it for a month and report what happens. Next weekend I have a 20k race planned in the morning – that’s a two hour workout without anything to eat – it will be interesting to see how that works.

I’m deep in the densest of jungles, following a barely visible track over huge granite boulders and around insidious vines. Ten meters below me the surf is crashing on the shore with ferocious force, and the skies have just opened up in a monsoon rain that renders everything startlingly slippery. I’m stuck. I also have a sense of deja vu. But the worst is yet to come.

How did I end up here? To find that out we have to go back a couple of days.

We have come to the Seychelles to dive, Miss Adventure and I. We’ve signed up with Trek Divers, one of two outfits operating out of the one harbour on La Digue, a rural island in the middle of the archipelago, incredibly scenic and unexploited.

If you think of the prettiest picture you’ve ever seen of a beach – secluded, jungle right down to the white sand, followed by turquoise waters – chances are you’re picturing Anse Source d’Argent or one of the other beaches here, as they are often featured in travel magazines.

So mornings are spent on the boat, going out to local dive sites. The diving is good enough – better than the Andaman Sea, but nowhere near as good as Pemba – and we see plenty of things: morays of all sizes from endearingly cute to scary big, snappers hiding in large schools under the many granite rocks that have been tossed up by nature to form tunnels and caves, through which we swim with our hearts in our throats.

Then there are massive humphead wrasse, octopi – always hiding in crevices, often pulling bits of dead coral on top of their already camouflaged selves, the better to become invisible – and incredibly graceful turtles, the octopus’s polar opposite, as they sometimes swim unconcernedly in our midst, checking us out with stern countenances as much as we do them, one of them even allowing me to stroke its shell-clad belly.

Further out in the big blue are reef sharks – shy, sleepy critters – and barracudas who look grumpy and a lot more menacing than the sharks. Speaking of sharks: on one dive a remora (one of those little fish that attach themselves to shark bellies) decided to try its luck with me instead, and spent the rest of the dive darting in and out between my legs, trying to find a comfortable spot. I was a bit concerned that it might succeed (especially when it tried to get into my bathing shorts!), but took great joy in the fact that I apparently move enough like a shark to fool its closest companions…! 😋