It’s dark and wet. Everything is bare and asphalt-coloured. I hardly see any daylight.

November has no redeeming qualities.

Adrian’s pockets are always full of random things.

His jacket pockets tend to be full of chestnuts, above all. When I last emptied his winter jacket for washing, all the pockets together yielded about half a kilogram of chestnuts.

Trouser pockets and hoodie pockets tend to have smaller things. Screws. Pebbles. Bottle tops. Clumps of sticky putty.

This is his latest treasure: waste pieces of thick wire in various finishes, from the crafts room at school. (They’re doing wood and metal crafts this term.) Pocket-sized, shiny, endlessly fiddlable.

I didn’t see anything of Lund, other than some empty streets and closed shops and a Coop supermarket. It was dark when I got there, and dark when the workshop ended and I hurried to the train back home.

I’m off to Lund for a full day workshop tomorrow.

The train from Stockholm to Lund is an X2000 which sounds fast and was high tech some time before 2000 (when everything really modern was named either “2000” or “millennium”) but now feels rather dated. During half of this trip, the train’s tilting function was out of order which made the ride somewhat nauseating. It was just barely possible to walk to the bistro car and back, with food, without dropping any.

Long train rides and flights confuse my brain. First I have my normal day. The train ride is so distinct from normal life, and so disorientating, that it seems like a separate day. By the time I arrive, it feels like I’ve lived two days in the space of one, with a disconnect in between.

Back in my student days, at the Stockholm School of Economics, I was active in the student union and a member of its board. (Which sounds way fancier than it was.) Student life follows an annual cycle; I was a member of the board of 1998/99.

This year, in honour of the school’s 110th anniversary, the student union threw a grand party for all past board members. Tails and ball gowns, here we come! (Ball gown also means high heels, though, which is less yay.)

Half of our year’s board members turned up, and the seating was by year, so I got to catch up with them and hear what they’re all up to. Two children each, mostly. Most had spent some years spent abroad, and some were based abroad still.

As for careers, most were now CEO of this or director of that. Which is as expected. The SSE educates future managers and leaders for the world of business. I’ve done some leading and managing, and can do a decent job of it, but I don’t really want to. I don’t enjoy it. I’ve never sought out leadership positions. (On the board of the student union I had the one technical role, as treasurer, rather than leading any of the clubs.) I’d much rather build things than lead other people who build things.

It’s unlikely that I would have attended the SSE if I had had a free choice. But back in the mid-1990s Estonia was not part of the EU, and my right to live here in Sweden was granted as an annual boon in the form of a residence permit. Being an immigrant like that, I had no right to work (although I did work anyway, and was paid under the table) and no right to financial support as a student. I was lucky enough to get a grant to study – but that grant was tied to the SSE. Given a choice between free money for a business education, and no money but some other education of my preference, I took the money.

I don’t exactly regret that choice. I met Eric, I had fun, I got an education, and it led to a job. But it was a job that I never loved and at times was really miserable in. It took me years to get back to doing what I really enjoyed.

Meanwhile, here’s me in my ball gown in super weird green light.

Adrian said he had a little catching up to do in his math workbook tonight.

When he brought out the workbook late at night, it turned out that the “a little catching up” was around 20 pages, which would take him at least an hour. He was quite tired by the end of it. I was quite annoyed that he had described this as “a little” and had just spent two hours playing board games in the evening instead of getting started on the homework.

The second of five, in a series of lunchtime organ concerts that I’ve booked tickets to. This time we heard Sebastian Johansson, Sweden’s youngest organist. The hall was not packed but the crowd was definitely larger than last time.

Bach, Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major.
Demessieux, Te Deum.
Sebastian Johansson, improvisation on a given theme.
Avicii, Wake Me Up.

For me, much of this concert was “interesting” rather than enjoyable. The sound of organ music can range from delicate to industrial. Much of today’s music ranged towards noise, for my ears – even the Bach prelude. Too many notes at the same time, at too high volume. But the concert was an interesting display of the organ’s versatility.

The improvisation was fun to hear. The theme he was given was the jingle of Hemglass ice cream vans.

Cherry cake, for Friday fika at work tomorrow.

Store-bought fika is accepted, but everyone is always extra happy about home-made fika.

I don’t like throwing things away. I think it’s partly due to my Soviet childhood, when everything was scarce and you couldn’t just get another one when you broke the one you had. It wasn’t so with everything, of course, but that was my overall feeling: things that you valued needed to be treated with some care.

One of Adrian’s birthday presents was a book with experiments using everyday things. A whole section was dedicated to experiments with candy. Adrian decided to try out an experiment that involved heating marshmallows in a microwave oven and seeing them expand (because the air bubbles inside them expand) and then contract as they cool.

That was kind of cool, but Adrian pretty quickly decided to add more. First he stuck wooden toothpicks in the marshmallow to see if they affected things.

Then he added more marshmallows and more toothpicks, and constructed sculptures – that he then heated in the microwave oven to see how they were affected.

He found out that the marshmallows got soft when heated, so the sculptures tended to collapse and needed to be reinforced with yet more toothpicks.