Ingrid, Eric and Adrian each with a book. Myself with a camera.

A discussion arose with a friend about whether the kids look like me or not.

To me, they just look like themselves. And Adrian looks like Ingrid and vice versa. I can’t immediately see that any part of their faces looks like mine or Eric’s. We all have normal, average face-shaped faces, mouth-shaped mouths, and so on.

On the other hand, I can look at other kids at school or daycare and notice immediately that they definitely look nothing at all like me, so I guess there must be some similarity there after all.



Adrian, on the kitchen table, browsing Bamse.


Knitting that cardigan that I began two winters ago. One of my favourite ways of winding down in the evening.


My favourite crumble (which really is a scrunch rather than a crumble) is still as awesome as ever. Here with cherries.


Ingrid wanted to make dinner. She made a potato gratin. (I did help out with the peeling and slicing because we were under a bit of time pressure.) Here she is grating the cheese.


When the body is restless but the brain just wants to watch movies.


With Ingrid spending the day (and night) away with a friend, Eric and Adrian and I went to Hagaparken for sledding. First we had a nice long walk in the more wooded parts of the park. Then lunch, and after lunch some great rides down the slope. Good gliding, great speed. Adrian was whooping with joy on the way down; I myself was so out of practice sledding that I was actually secretly pleased we couldn’t go even faster.

Today was my kid-free night and I went to the cinema. I saw Imitation game which I had high hopes for, but came away disappointed. Benedict Cumberbatch does a good job and is very believable, so when I came out of the cinema I felt pretty good about the movie. But the more distance I get and the more I have time to think about what the movie actually said and did, the less I like it. The story of Enigma and Alan Turing is told in such simplistic terms that it’s almost insulting.

According to the movie, Turing was a lone genius, totally socially inept. Recruited to help break the Enigma, he designed and built a great machine, working on it alone for something like two years, while the rest of the team mostly stood in his way and argued with him and his bosses tried to hinder him. (One wonders why they kept paying him all that time.) First the machine did not work, then he had another genius idea, and then it worked. Done! Whoo! Oh, and Turing also makes all the heroic decisions and choices.

He’s been squeezed into the mould of an immature nerd with no sense of humour and no social skills, making him almost a caricature – and to make this totally obvious everybody else is reduced to the role of ignorant hindrance.

Turing’s homosexuality is weirdly present but not present. On the one hand much is made of his first crush as a schoolboy, and the conviction for gross indecency that led to his downfall. But between those events, we see none of it. It’s like the movie is still stuck in the 1950s and tries to sweep homosexuality under the carpet.

While the movie seems to have been made with the aim of raising him from obscurity and showing him for the hero that he was, as well as wagging a finger at the homophobia of that time, it rather does the opposite. It manages to portray him as a victim rather than a hero (and in fact adds a subplot that would turn him into a traitor as well, if it had any basis in fact).


My sheepskin slippers, waiting by the staircase.

When they are not on my feet, my slippers are in one of their two parking spaces. One is a basket in the living room, which holds everybody’s slippers. The other is next to the staircase up to the bedrooms. I park the slippers there when I go upstairs at night. I don’t walk around upstairs so I don’t need them there, and I find them slightly clumsy on the stairs. Plus, this way I always know where to find them.