Ingrid is home after spending a week at scout camp. Tanned, tired and hoarse, but very happy with the whole experience.

She’s been to camp before but this one was larger in scale than any of the previous camps. This was a country-wide Jamboree, with eleven thousand scouts attending from all over Sweden and even from abroad. (Interesting fact: I read that the Spånga scout group made up one per cent of them.) Ingrid got to meet scouts from all sorts of places ranging from England to Hong Kong.

Among other scouts, she also met the King of Sweden – he’s a patron of the scouting movement and takes a very active interest in scouting. Well, she didn’t personally meet and greet him, but she said she got to see him from just a few metres’ distance.

Even more memorable than meeting the king, according to Ingrid, was swimming in the sea. (The beaches around here are all lakeside beaches.)

A quick trip to Ulriksdal garden centre to buy some plants. There are some gaps in the border in front of the house that I want to fill in. And the Bergenias at the top of the border, nearest the entry porch, were just not doing their job at all. When we came home and replaced them, I discovered that they hadn’t rooted themselves at all: I could almost lift out the original square clumps of soil from the surrounding earth.

We also took a walk in their self-pick fields and came home with a mixed bouquet of flowers. It was also nice to simply walk around in fields of beautiful flowers.

Adrian reading. Like Ingrid, he prefers comic books to “real” books.

Adrian and Eric, reading in the sofa.

We got a delivery of two cubic metres of fresh earth for the hedge. Adrian and I had great fun spreading it out.

When we moved here, some gardening tools became ours together with the house. (Others we bought ourselves.) One of them was a small spade which has now become Adrian’s. It’s smaller and shorter than standard spades, but it’s a real tool that can be used real work, unlike the plastic toys that are sold under the label of children’s tools in garden centres. Those are way too short and too flimsy – they might work for some pretend gardening for a three-year-old, but Adrian has outgrown that age.

In reality, though, he spent not so much time shovelling and more time climbing, sliding, crawling and rolling around in the soil.

When he tired, he used the spades to make catapults instead.

Bumblebee and lavender.

I found a scrap of cheap cotton yarn at the bottom of a drawer and crocheted a cover for the lamp in my window. It’s basically a round tube of netting, somewhat wider in the middle, that I just pulled on over the top of the lamp shade.

A lamp sock. Or a lamp vest maybe? No, definitely a sock: a net sock is much cuter than a net vest. The latter makes me think of overweight middle-aged hairy-stomached men.

I like the shape and colour of the lamp shade, but the green glass is too transparent. Even though I have the weakest lightbulb in there, the light is too strong. The cover should diffuse the light just enough to make it feel less sharp.

I quit my job today.

What a liberating feeling!

All the stress and rush; all the annoyance and irritation. They all evaporate and leave me more relaxed than I’ve been at work in a long, long time.

All the decisions von oben that take no account of how development actually works, the reorganizations and downsizings and unrealistic expectations. I can just think “meh” and “not my problem any more”.

“The Night Circus” is the story of two young magicians, Marco and Celia, and their magical contest. The contest has no apparent end and its goals and rules are unclear. The contestants are both bound to it for life: they cannot give up, nor apparently win or lose. They just keep competing. The tragedy of it all only dawns on us slowly.

The arena for the contest is the circus from the book’s title. It has mostly non-magic performers, but Celia and Marco start adding magical elements to it. Not just the obvious illusionist’s show that is truly magical, but all sorts of other acts that are magical in the sense of being weird and wonderful. A garden of ice; a carousel where the animals are partly alive; a hall of mirrors where the reflections are not quite the mirror image of that which they reflect.

Marco’s and Celia’s powers complement each other. They build the circus together, while still always being aware that they are competing.

As a reader, you can see the love affair between the two from miles away, but they themselves don’t, and it takes years for them to cover those miles. (What a romantic, sentimental concept of love, to have the lovers kept apart and longing forever.)

The circus is beautiful and mysterious, and makes you wish you could live in that world only so I could visit it. In the book, the circus gains fans whose whole life revolves around visits to the travelling circus. But I never feel that I can really picture it – it remains just a little bit vague, like a dream.

The world is apparently flawless, full of lovable, charming characters. They have parties with excellent food; they perform in beautiful circus acts. Magic appears to always succeed. There are no failures and no mistakes. Nobody is ever in a bad mood, everyone at the circus always gets along. All is dreamlike perfection.

We experience all of this through short glimpses and the occasional set piece. The story jumps back and forth in time, which is occasionally confusing, but in keeping with the dreaminess of it all, the slight confusion didn’t bother me much because I found that the exact order of events mostly didn’t matter much.

It takes a patient reader to savour the wonders of the circus and the book. The pacing is slow all the way, which goes with the dreaminess but has its downsides. While I enjoyed every page I read, I never got that feeling that I can’t put the book down and just have to read one more page, so it took me a while to finish. It could have done with more variation in tone and pace.

Only at the very end does the intricate magical balancing act of the circus start to teeter. I was almost hoping for it to come crashing down in fire and flames, but it doesn’t. Ending such a story is hard, but Morgenstern manages it well – although again she doesn’t quite succeed in getting the pacing right, making it dreamy instead of dramatic.

I got this book as a Christmas gift from Ingrid. It was a great choice. I do wonder how she picked it.

A rainy view from my desk.