I picked up my knitting project after a few weeks’ break. I was doing this without a pattern, and thought I remembered exactly what I was supposed to be doing. But simply trusting my memory was clearly a mistake. Now I have to unpick all that cable twisting the wrong way.

A new cat came to visit us a couple of days ago.

We know the neighbourhood cats. Most often we see Cleo, the middle-aged large brown tabby, who lives across the street and definitely thinks of our garden as part of her territory, as she confidently prowls around. We also get regular visits from the orange tabby who occasionally sits around the old rat holes in the garden, flicking its tail and looking ready to pounce.

This cat was unknown to us. And it looked young and lost and scared as it walked around in the garden. Got spooked by some sudden sound and ran up in a tree, and mewled piteously. It even walked into our house, which none of the other cats do, and was clearly looking for a friendly human.

We thought it might have gotten lost and tracked down its owners. It turned out the owners lived diagonally across the street. The cat, whose name is Sid, was quite young still and this was the first day the family had left him on his own for the day. He was struggling to adapt to this new reality.

Just a few days later, and Sid is already looking more confident when he visits us. Today he explored our house (as the French doors stand wide open all day when we are at home) which included inspecting the inside of the fridge, my desk and the window sill (where some flowers got knocked down) and this perfect cat-sized cardboard box.

I’m almost done with the second section of the trench for the hedge. This one ends in a corner that seems to have been a dumping ground for large rocks when the garden was first landscaped. If they had just been another ten or twenty centimetres deeper, I wouldn’t have touched them, but now the earth above them is so shallow that I decided they really needed to come out. Over the decades, the earth around the rocks has become super compacted (because of pressure from all sides, I guess) and I can barely get the edge of the spade in. Digging is replaced by hacking and prying.

Section 11 passes through a fascinating area of pine forest west of Järna, with dozens and dozens of old mining holes.

In my mind I had never connected the name Järna to järn (“iron”). It’s always just been a name to me. Now I know better.

Some holes were just vague indentations in the ground, partly filled with earth. Others were filled with water instead, and looked pitch black because of the depth and the dark rock bottom. Some were actual roofless tunnels that you could walk in. There were also ruins of utility buildings from the mining era.

Today I actually saw other hikers on the trail. (There were also people in Järna but they don’t really count.) I ran across a few campers near a spring, and two French hikers. The French couple walked at roughly the same pace as I did but we timed our breaks differently, so we kept passing each other whenever one of our parties had stopped. I think I passed them three times and they passed me twice, until I left the main trail and turned onto the connecting trail to Mölnbo.

Section 12:1 goes along the shore of a lake for quite a while, and had some nice views to offer. The path was dusty and the day was hot, and I had a pleasant break at the lake and bathed my feet.

There were plenty of bilberries in the woods – enough for me to eat my fill and tire of them. Luckily there were also bog bilberries (which I haven’t previously found much of in Sörmland) and raspberries, to provide some variety.

Snake skin

Day 1 of a two-day hike along Sörmlandsleden.

Section 9 goes through central Södertälje and is unlikely to go down in history as anyone’s favourite, least of all mine. I understand why it exists, and it was my own choice to walk it, and if I had to make the decision again then I’d probably make the same choice. But it was rather dull.

Section 10 was pretty typical Sörmland. Some open fields in the beginning, and then rocky pine forests with bilberry bushes. I notice here that all my photos are of the open areas – the whole section definitely didn’t look like this. The fields with their ripening heads of grain just felt so much like late summer.

This was my first solo overnight hike. I had a heavier pack than I normally walk with (sleeping bag and stove and all that, and more food of course) so I was slower than usual. I didn’t know exactly how much the pack would slow me down, so I was a bit worried that I would arrive very late at my planned camping spot. I needed to find the spring which was supposed to be there, so I’d have water for cooking dinner, and I didn’t want to have to look for it in the dark. So my walking was at times less relaxed than usual, and my breaks shorter. (I am a worrier, though I make an effort to avoid it.) In the end I got to the campsite shortly after seven in the evening, which still left me enough time before dark.

I cooked myself an excellent dinner – a hearty stew with carrot and tomato and lentils and wheat grain. Then spent some time reading while there was still enough light from my campfire and the setting sun. Then applied one last layer of mosquito repellent, and went to bed. The mosquitoes were repelled enough to not bite me, but they kept buzzing so close to my face that I had to use earplugs in order to be able to sleep.