I’m enjoying the season’s plums that I buy daily from the vegetable stand at Spånga torg. I am so pleased that they exist! (Both the plums and the veggie seller.) I think the plums and some of the apples they sell must be local – the plums are so juicy and ripe that it’s hard to imagine them surviving any kind of long distance transportation.

The inside of a plum looks almost like I imagine the inside of a body, with its fleshy surface threaded through with veins.

I’m determined to plant a plum tree of my own this year. I started digging today in the spot I had planned for the tree, where the kids’ playhouse used to stand. Cleared away the brush and weeds, started digging down… and hit a flat rock almost immediately, less than a spade’s depth down. Shifted to one side and then to the other and realized that the rock extends in all directions. Not a boulder but bedrock, then.

There are large bushes and trees growing on all sides of this spot. I dug closer and closer to the stump of an old dead damson tree, thinking that surely if this tree could grow here then there must be deeper soil here – but no. The same flat bedrock all the way. I guess the nearby trees are all lucky survivors that have managed to put down their roots in crevices in the bedrock and managed to hold on there. Or not, given that the damson tree was actually more or less dead when we moved in.

I’m giving up on this spot and will have to find a plan B.

You’d think that in a garden of 1000 m² there should be plenty of space for a little plum tree. But with all the things already growing here, and the space taken up by the house, and the ever-present bedrock, and the shade from all the large trees in the neighbours’ gardens, there really isn’t.

The school term has started and so has the scouting season. Today we had a meeting/workshop for the leaders and functionaries. In a normal year this meeting would have taken place in the scout group’s own building. Now with the coronavirus, we were outdoors on the meadows near Gåseborg. Slightly less convenient perhaps, but much more pleasant and energizing. Fresh air and greenery and standing meetings instead of rows of wooden chairs – and lunch in the sun with views over Mälaren.

The first leaves are turning red.

My mouse gave up the ghost. I can’t remember when I bought it but it was years and years ago. Logitech is reliable.

I think what finally killed the mouse was near-constant bending of the cord where it pushes against my stack of magazines. It started disconnecting and then immediately reconnecting at random intervals, which made the computer go ding-dang-dong and then dong-dang-ding each time. That was a bit of a bother but not too bad, until the behaviour changed to disconnecting but then not reconnecting on its own.

With some experimentation I figured out that wiggling the cord would make the mouse come to life again so I got another few days of use out of it, while I researched mouse models.

Web shops list all kinds of specifications and measurements for mice – dpi and weight and battery life and sensor technology and what not. What they mostly don’t say much about is the shape of the mouse. I specifically wanted a mouse with an ergonomic shape that slopes down towards the little finger, like the old one. The web sites do not make it easy to find such mice. The shape of the mouse is usually not part of the description. There are photos, of course, but if those aren’t from the right angle, they don’t help much either.

The old-school way – asking people – worked much better. I asked at work what ergonomic mice people liked, got two or three models recommended, and just picked one of them. (Another Logitech model.)

The new mouse is wireless. I like the reliability of wired mice, but on my small desk a wireless one will be more convenient. That cable won’t be hitting my magazine stack any more.

I wonder how many years this one will last. There’s a chance that I won’t find out: I’m letting work pay for it, so it’s possible that I will switch jobs before the mouse dies (although I have no plans in that direction).

Adrian decided to do some cleaning and arranging in his room. His collection of Funko Pop figures gets pride of place but they are unstable and keep falling over, so now he put them all in place with sticky putty under their feet.

Groot, Gandalf, Drift, and Mugman – and Cuppet out of view. An eclectic collection.

Adrian is at home with a cough since Friday. Since it’s getting close to a week since he could go to school, I thought it might be good for him to start catching up with schoolwork so he doesn’t have too much to make up when he is back at school.

Getting any kind of information or support from the school has been like pulling teeth. They have no preparedness for this at all. I tried calling the main administrative office. They only had an answering machine; didn’t call me back when I left a message; didn’t have any information when I finally got hold of them. The teacher didn’t even acknowledge that she had received my email. (I understand that she might not have time to write a detailed reply, but an “I’ll get back to you” would have been appreciated.)

In the end I just walked to the school and got hold of Adrian’s main teacher during a break. I got some of Adrian’s school books home at least, and some vague instructions.

How can the school be so unprepared for this, and have no plan and no co-ordination in place whatsoever? Surely it cannot come as a surprise to them that plenty of kids will now have to stay at home for extended periods due to minor cold-like symptoms.

Meanwhile, here’s a nice rainbow from this afternoon.

I went to the office for the first time in three months.

I was looking forward to cycling to town but it rained all morning and I really don’t like cycling in the rain so I took the train. Regretted it. All these people everywhere. I can only describe the train as “crowded”. Not as crowded as it would have been a year ago but still.

On the plus side, I met a few of my colleagues face to face, which was really lovely. We had a great workshop (about recruitment and technical interviews) and plenty of the kind of idea-bouncing and discussions that just don’t happen online.

On my way home, I passed a pavilion in Spånga where some representatives for the city were gathering information about how the locals here use all the parks and other green spaces that we have. I realized that our family rarely uses the green spaces in Spånga. We’ve outgrown them. If we want greenery, we want something larger than the little patches that Spånga has to offer, and we’ll go to Starboparken or Nälsta at the very least.

It was interesting to see just how detailed the city’s inventory of green spaces is. The map used nearly ten different kinds of green colour to mark the different kinds of green spaces. “Nature park” is distinct from “nature in the city”, and a “city block park” is different from “park square”. Some of their terms I can’t even find English equivalents for.

The cherry tomatoes are all ripening. The golden ones are my favourites – juicy and bursting with sweetness. The red ones are a bit bland, but the dark ones have a deep, rich flavour.

A bit of stage 13, most of stage 12 and all of 12:1. From lake Stora Envättern to Mölnbo, 15 km.

My day followed the same basic pattern as yesterday. Up early, pack and get walking. Porridge stop after an hour or so. Lakes, pine forest, spruce forest.

I walked stage 12 before, quite recently even. Some bits of the trail – with the nicest lake views – I definitely recognized. A few hills and roads were vaguely familiar. But as soon as the path went through just plain forest, I could have been anywhere.

Knowing that I am heading home inevitably made me think of train timetables and such things, and the walking did not feel quite as mindfully relaxing as yesterday. It’s a good thing that I made this a three-day trip rather than just a weekend: now I had that one perfect day of hiking untouched by ordinary days or ordinary concerns.


When I reached Mölnbo and civilization, an older man I met asked me if I had run across any wolves. I found out that a couple of wolves have their territory in the area between Läggesta and Mölnbo, and they had been spotted recently quite near Mölnbo. The man seemed to be trying to get a scared reaction out of me, but I was more disappointed. I realize that the odds are small but I’d have loved to see a wolf.

Half of stage 14 and most of stage 13. From lake Glådran to lake Stora Envättern, 15 km.

I woke up shortly after six. I’m never hungry early in the morning, so I postponed breakfast and instead just packed up and started walking. Breakfast tastes much better when I am properly hungry. I stopped for a porridge breakfast around eight.

The Sörmlandsleden trail has been split into stages based on some kind of logic, but that logic is not always very obvious to me. Sometimes a stage ends (and the next one begins) by a road, which makes sense if you want the starting points to be easily accessible; other times it seems to be a random point in the middle of nowhere. The stages are not much use for planning an overnight hike: shelters and other suitable campsites are rarely near the end of a stage.

Instead I planned my days around lakes. Lakes are nice to look at, of course, but more importantly, they have water – which is most useful for doing the dishes and for cooking. This part of Sörmland is dotted with small lakes, so with a little bit of planning, it wasn’t hard to end each day near one of them.


For drinking water there are freshwater springs, well marked on the maps and clearly signposted. Unfortunately, all of the springs I passed today were dry, or nearly so, with just a muddy puddle at the bottom. I had filled up my water bottles at a spring yesterday, but when that water ran out today, I had to switch to lake water.

Most hikers agree that water in mountain brooks is safe to drink. Opinions about the potability of lake water in Sörmland vary. Some say you should boil or purify it; others say it’s OK to drink without treatment. I look at these lakes and see them all surrounded only by wild, clean nature – untouched by industry, agriculture, beaches or summer cottages… so I just went ahead and drank the water as is. A little bit of fish poop won’t kill me. The water had a slightly metallic taste, but didn’t cause any problems.


The hiking today was much like yesterday’s. Up and down rocky hills, through pine and spruce forest. Wonderfully wild and peaceful.

On top one of the hills there was a viewing tower, built by a local orienteering club back in 1969. It had a cute little money box for donations, dating back to the same era. The vintage sign exhorting visitors to donate to the tower’s upkeep was now accompanied by a much more modern sign with a Swish number. I didn’t climb the tower – I’m sure I would just have seen more of the same forests and lakes I’ve seen already – but donated anyway, because I liked the look of the sign so much.

The path down from the viewing tower passed through wonderfully rich lingonberry fields. After eating bilberries off and on all day yesterday, I was getting heartily tired of them and was more than happy to switch to lingonberries and the occasional bog bilberries.

If I went out to pick berries, I’d probably want the berry bushes to be on flat ground, but when I’m hiking, I like them best on uphill stretches of the path. That way I don’t have to bend all the way down to reach them (because bending with a rucksack can be awkward) and can just scoop them up without really stopping.

By now I’ve gotten properly into a hiking mood. My thoughts drift. Sometimes I notice the trees and bushes and rocks and roots around me. Sometimes I just walk without really noticing or thinking about anything in particular. Time passes, and I can’t say how much of it has passed.

I take a lot of breaks. After snack breaks, I sit and read for a while, instead of hurrying onwards. I started early and I don’t want to stop until around dinnertime, because once I’ve stopped and set up camp, there won’t be much to do. I’d rather spread my walking over a large part of the day than have a long empty evening.

There were several camping spots around Lake Envättern, so I could find one without any other campers and more or less pretend that I was out there alone.

Just as I had finished cooking dinner, it started raining. I’d gotten hit earlier in the day by a very sudden rain shower – it took just a couple of minutes to go from tentative drops to pouring rain, and I had to really scramble to get my rucksack covered and my rain clothes on. This time I knew what to expect, which helped a little bit, but I still only had a few minutes to get all my things into the tiny tent. It was a total jumble in there.

The tent fabric seems so incredibly flimsy that it’s hard to imagine it withstanding any kind of weather, but it kept me nice and dry.

Wildlife today: one heron flying above a lake. One vole, larger than a mouse but smaller than a rat, that ran across the path. Splashing noises from fish in the lakes. Bumblebees and grasshoppers. Thrushes and various unidentified tweeting birds.