This was our bill for rubbish collection during the last quarter of 2015. Stockholm Vatten collected 19 kg of mixed rubbish and 53 kg of food waste that will be composted or turned into biogas. Mixed rubbish is charged at 1,20 kr/kg and food waste is free of charge. Hardly any general rubbish, in other words, but quite a lot of food waste.

The reason is recycling. Since we got serious about recycling in 2014, we have drastically reduced the amount of actual rubbish we produce. A rubbish bin stands in the corner in the kitchen, but we almost never empty it. It gets emptied bi-weekly by our cleaner, and that is enough. It just does not get full in between, and since it contains little to no food waste, it doesn’t smell either.

Recycling our rubbish has made me more aware of rubbish and what we throw away. The amount of plastic packaging that comes into this house keeps astonishing me. We go through silly amounts of plastic bags, plastic jars and bottles and boxes, plastic clamshell packaging etc. And that doesn’t even include plastic shopping bags, because I use reusable textile bags instead.

We went to Fotografiska to see Erik Johansson’s exhibition Created Reality – hyperrealistic composite images of impossible scenes. Impressive and interesting, well done and well presented. Even Ingrid said it was more fun than she had expected.

Afterwards we climbed the stairs to Fjällgatan (raced them, actually, and I won but Ingrid said it was cheating to take them two at a time) for lunch at Hermans, one of Stockholm’s best know vegetarian restaurants. It’s on all “top ten vegetarian places” lists in media, but I had never been there.

Well, now I have, and I won’t go there again. The staff was unpleasant, the restaurant cramped and overcrowded, and the food no more than so-so. A lot of flavour, yes, but crude and unbalanced – sort of tone-deaf, with pepper, mustard and vinegar mostly overpowering the flavour of the vegetables themselves.

What I mostly remember from Hermans is the queueing, trying to get at the food, and the endless stream of other guests’ bottoms and crotches squeezing past our table to also get at the food.

I joined a colleague for a Friday night out at a club – Soul Train. More of an evening club than a nightclub, really, since they opened at 19:00 and closed at 22:00. An after work disco, I guess.

The photo shows the official photographer at the club. We took photos of each other.

The whole thing was kind of fun but oh my god the sound level. If this is what other people regularly subject their ears to, it’s a wonder that they are not all deaf. I put in earplugs (which I always have in my handbag) the moment I got there – had it not been for those, I would have lasted a few minutes, tops.

I do not understand the point of turning up the volume to 11. Yes, loud music sounds better and is more danceable than quiet music, but only up to a point. At this volume and probably with cheapish speakers to boot, the music just sounds atrocious, with distortion and crackling bass. You cannot speak to your friends; you cannot even order a drink without yelling. Where is the fun in that?