Adrian and Ingrid both cook dinner once week. Ingrid saves favourite recipes on TikTok; Adrian sticks to trusted favourites.

One of his favourites is a simple but delicious pasta dish with oven-roasted cherry tomatoes, cream and mozzarella. I’ve always thought of it as an ordinary, everyday meal, but when I was shopping the ingredients today, I realized that with current grocery prices, it’s become a luxury dish. Even just the 800-900 grams of tomatoes cost over a hundred SEK, and the cream and cheese are another fifty SEK.

Commuter train schedules have been unusually erratic for the last couple of months, because of staff shortages. I don’t understand how staff shortages can come out of nowhere and stay for months, but whatever.

Now the train company has decided that trains no longer need two members of staff, and a driver can do the job without a conductors. Drivers vehemently disagree and say that it is unsafe. If anything were to happen, they would be alone with no help or support. I can understand their point of view. Imagine being involved in an accident, for example – and then, while still in shock, being solely responsible for upwards of 2000 passengers.

It’s gotten to the point where the drivers have gone on a three-day wildcat strike. Spånga is located right on a train line, but far from the tube lines – which is great most of the time, but not so much when the trains don’t run. Spånga to Sundbyberg (the next station towards the city) takes 5 minutes by train, but 25 by a zig-zaggy combination of bus and tube via either Rissne or Tensta.

I worked from home yesterday and the day before, but didn’t want to miss the tretton37 lunch today. For the way home I picked another tube + bus combo, via Brommaplan. The next 117 bus from Brommaplan to Spånga was a shortened route that stopped earlier, and instead of waiting for the next one, I walked the last kilometre and a half. It was nice.



Last Wednesday when I was in town I happened to walk past Riddarfjärden and see the City Hall across the water, with a spectacular light show. I guessed it was connected to the Nobel week festivities. When I later googled to check, I found out that it was a whole thing, with light installations at at least twenty places around Stockholm. I wish I’d known about this before – I’d have tried to see more of them. The City Hall probably got the most impressive installation, but I’m sure the rest were beautiful and interesting.


I’ve had this long, fluffy, woolly skirt for at least 16 years, because I know I bought it at Spitalfields Market when we still lived in London. It was love at first sight: I love the look and the feel of the fuzzy material, and the skirt itself is constructed in a unique and interesting way. And it has pockets!

Despite its awesomeness, I haven’t been wearing it more than a few times every winter. It’s warmer than I usually need when I’m in an office. And I’m also aware that its hairy look is rather eye-catching, and I don’t want to be “the crazy lady who wears a fuzzy blanket all the time”.

This is the winter the skirt has been waiting for. With the cold (–8°C) and the electricity prices (around 5 SEK/kWh) right now, the best thing to prevent both bankruptcy and freezing is to dress warmly in multiple layers of wool. And I’m working from home, so the only person seeing my hairy skirt all day is me.

Nysse seems to have feelings about this skirt as well. He never reacts to any of our clothing, except Ingrid’s shoelaces, which he likes to play with – and this skirt. I get the impression that he’s curious and maybe puzzled about it, and sometimes almost seems to think it’s alive, so he bats at its edges when I walk past him.


On the one hand, it’s 15°C in the living room.

On the other hand, we’re paying around 500 SEK per day (that’s 50 EUR for you Europeans) for electricity right now. Heating more would cost even more.

So I guess I’ll just get another blanket.

18°C used to be the point where I would turn up the radiators. With these prices – and with the visibility we have from our new electricity contract – I’ve had to learn to frame things differently. Heating is something you do at night when prices are lower. During the day you just dress warmly. Three layers of clothes is normal. At least two of the layers should be wool-based, preferably.

Which is why I’ve ordered more warm woollen sweaters and undershirts. Buying second hand, I could literally get a sweater or two every week with the money I’m not paying for more heating. And then at least I get a sweater out of the deal, instead of feeling like I’m just burning money.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll also be getting a heat exchanger installed. Which will unfortunately cost quite a bit more than a few sweaters, but on the other hand will do more to keep us all warm for longer. I’m counting down the days.

In the meantime, the next ten days will be the worst in sight. The weather will be really cold; Sweden’s largest nuclear power plant will be undergoing emergency maintenance; hydropower plants will be running at reduced capacity to let ice form on the rivers; wind power will be limited because it’s less windy than usual.

Every year since 1988, the Swedish Retail Institute has announced a “Christmas gift of the year” – a product that somehow embodies the zeitgeist for that year. Apparently it is based on “an independent analysis of consumption trends” but it’s probably just some group’s fingers in the air.

Sometimes they capture the beginning of a trend, or the introduction of a product that stays. The CD player in 1992, a cookbook in 2002 when cookbooks were starting to be hip, a flat-screen TV in 2004. Sometimes they zoom in on a temporary madness – the spiky acupressure mat in 2009, a juicer in 203, VR goggles in 2016.

In 2020, the camping stove got to embody the Swedish people’s new-found love for the outdoors, triggered by the covid quarantine; in 2021 an event ticket symbolized the end of the quarantine.

Anyway, it’s a bit of fun, even though I’ve never let it affect my actual choices of Christmas gifts.

Until this year. The Christmas gift of the year for 2022 is a home-knitted garment. Inflation is high, and so are electricity costs. There is a war going on, and people in bombed-out cities are without heating or electricity. The world feels like a chilly place. People want something to warm them, both in body and heart. And home-made crafts, which used to be something for grannies and oddball hippie activists, are suddenly trendy again.

I have a cardigan to finish, and I really hadn’t planned to knit any more socks right now, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. So there will be some socks under the tree this year again. I did half a sock today, just in meetings or while reading – thicker yarn makes the work go fast – so I can easily get some done before Christmas.


Sunday evening. We’re listening to commentary on the Ukrainian war by Perun while I’m knitting and Eric bakes pizza for dinner. Perun comes out with a new video every Sunday, so this has become a habit for us. (Not the pizza part. But knitting is often part of it.)

Perun’s videos are the best source for commentary and analysis of the war that we have found and I’d recommend them to anyone who is interested in understanding the background of what’s happening. Most remain relevant many months after publication. Today’s video, How Lies Destroy Armies, is about the pervasive culture of lying in Russia and how it affects the army and its performance. No surprises there to anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, but still interesting. Others I’ve particularly liked include the instalments about Russian Mobilisation and Captured Equipment in Ukraine.

My main source for more immediate updates of what’s happening on the ground is the Institute of War and their daily briefings – here is today’s briefing – with its accompanying interactive map. The briefings are based only on publicly available information from all kinds of sources, including both Russian and Ukrainian ones, rather than any one person’s or group’s speculations. I like its regularity – I can just increment the date in the URL to get the next briefing – and the structured, consistent presentation.


For lack of a better subject (I do struggle with photography when the evenings are so dark) I was going to take a photo of the last out of five bags of coins that I’ve worked on getting rid of. I checked both local supermarkets and both were happy to accept even quite large amounts of coins. In ICA you have to insert them into a coin slot one by one, but Coop’s machines have a funnel where you just pour whatever coins you have and it then slowly chugs through them all. Adrian often goes with me to the supermarket and he’s quite enjoyed helping me out with this.

I’ve been doing pretty well at remembering to tuck a coin baggie in my pocket when leaving the house, so we’re now down to the last bag with the smallest-denomination coins. That’s worth a celebratory photo, right?

Except Nysse was nearby. The shiny, clinky heap of coins attracted him immediately, and he decided it was now his. He lay down on top of it like Smaug on his hoard, and proceeded to defend it from me. In the first photos I took only about five coins were visible, because all the rest were hidden underneath Nysse.

When I stopped moving the coins around (because of the threat of claws) he lost interest. A hoard is much more fun when someone else actively admires it.


Autumn is coming, and the weather is getting colder.

Electricity prices are crazy this year in southern Sweden (nuclear power plants being shut down due to political decisions in the 1980s, limited transmission capacity between the north and the south, high energy prices in the rest of Europe, etc) and I’m not looking forward to our electricity bills for this cold season.

That top line, double and triple historical prices, that’s this year.


Tomorrow is election day, but advance voting stations have been open for something like two weeks already. I’ve been planning to get it done early, but kept putting it off. Now it’s done.

I am not a Swedish citizen so I only get to vote in the local elections. The county/kommun elections at least feel somewhat relevant. The regional elections on the other hand seem mostly pointless. The only services provided at the regional level is healthcare and public transport, and every single party promises more accessible healthcare and shorter queues, by magic, no hard trade-offs.

Adrian came with me to see how it all works. Their current focus area in social studies is democracy and elections and government and all that, so he wanted to see it live.

Ingrid voted herself in the School Elections, where middle and high school students across the country get to vote almost for real. Their votes are counted and the results published after the main elections, so as not to affect them. In the next election in four years’ time, she’ll be doing it for real.

On the national level there are all sorts of weird parties trying to make their voices heard. Some seem sensible but niche; some are unworldly idealists; some are lunatics (like the Swedish Communist Party); some are simply there for the joke. There is a party calling themselves Ond Kycklingpartiet, “the Evil Chicken party”.

The café next to the advance voting station was urging us to “celebrate democracy with a praline”. This was cheeky enough to work, so Adrian and I bought fancy pralines for ourselves.