We’ve been saying for weeks, if not months, that we really should play a longer board game, with all of us. In the evenings, the kids are often busy with schoolwork or online games with friends. Whenever we’ve agreed on a time for a weekend, something always turns up. Adrian has a sleepover; Ingrid’s friends want to go to town…

This time we set the time a week in advance and decided that we’d go ahead no matter what. Whoever is not at home loses out. No postponing.

And of course Adrian was invited to a sleepover and was near tears about having to choose. The FOMO is strong with these ones.

But then we played Small World, which is one of our all-time favourites, and had a lot of fun, and the anguish of losing out on a sleepover was forgotten. I like the rule that this game has about keeping scores hidden until the end – this way everyone can believe that they have a chance, all the way to the end.

Eric won, by picking a new race in the very last round, with 5 bonus coins because the other players had been skipping that race so many times. I came in second place thanks to my army of skeletons, who very determinedly harvested their enemies’ bodies. Ingrid steamrollered her neighbours repeatedly, first with amazons and then with giants. Adrian’s trolls bullied my sorcerers because my skeletons had previously harvested too many of his tritons.

We’ve had this blanket since before we moved to London, because I remember buying it to match our sofa in our flat in Enskede. So it’s got to be over 20 years old. Still in good shape, and still my favourite. All our other blankets are polyester fleece – bought mostly for the kids over the years – but this one is 100% wool. A bit scratchy, but very cosy and warm.

The blanket has a fringe, which started out as twisted yarn. With time, the twist has gone out of most of the fringe. I’ve tied knots in the loose fringes, as and when I’ve spotted them, to keep them from unravelling completely. Now there are just a very few of the original twists left.

A fresh haul of chocolates from Chokladfabriken. I’m very lucky to have an office near one of their shops.

Adrian likes anything fruity, so his favourites are the passion fruit hearts, the ones with lingonberry-flavoured filling, and the raspberry ones. Ingrid also loves the passion fruit hearts, and also the ones with orange flavour, which I totally forgot to get this time. I like the various “chocolate on chocolate” varieties – truffles with chocolate ganache, the cru sauvage truffles, and so on.

At one point I bought a pretty box of truffles and pralines. Normally I just buy a bunch of them in a bag, and transfer them to the box (which I kept) when I get home. Now it bothers me that I didn’t line up the three with the diagonal slash in the same direction.

The workout equipment has been gathering dust for many months. But today! I actually did a proper workout for real, with weights and everything. I decided it several days in advance so I wouldn’t have the “I’ll do it tomorrow” excuse, said that it would only be 15 to 20 minutes so it wouldn’t feel like too big of a commitment, and got it done. It actually felt too short.

Stockholm is putting up generous amounts of Christmas lights in the city as well, not just in Spånga.

The Christmas lights at Spånga Torg are up. We’ve gotten new lights this year – there used to be spirals of lights around a few of the trees, but they were purple, and only wound around the largest branches. Now it’s like they’ve wound the strings around every single twig. Looks very impressive, and brightens things up very nicely. It must have been a tricky job.

I was going to grab my camera and take a proper photo for today, but there is this cat who’s been in my lap for the past hour and a half, so I can’t, and I have to make do with the phone camera. He’s so fluffy and warm that I just want to keep him exactly where he is. And there are all these little paws.

He’s been really cuddly today. He spent two hours at lunchtime in my lap, until I was starving and was forced to move him. I think maybe it’s the colder weather. During the warmer season he’d often fall asleep on me, but then move after a while – I’m guessing because he got too warm. Now warm is good.

Another concert in our series of chamber music at Konserthuset, with the Maier quartet.

Premiere of Stabilitas loci by Ylva Skog. The composer herself was present to introduce the piece. Written during the pandemic isolation – quiet and a bit melancholy. Raindrops against a window that turn into little streams. Lovely – definitely the nicest part of this evening. And there’s more of her on Spotify!

String Quartet Op. 9 by Bo Linde. The information leaflet says that he “was active at a time when Swedish music life was characterized by disagreement between modernists and traditionalists, and counted himself as one of the latter”. I really can’t understand how because this piece sounded almost aggressively modern to me. Long stretches of pizzicato; notes so high that the violin could barely produce them and most of the audience very definitely couldn’t hear (and I only heard because I was sitting two metres from the violinist and have quite young ears still). I mean, you can use the violin as a balalaika but maybe then just write music for a quartet of balalaikas instead?

String Quartet No 15 A-minor Op. 132 by Beethoven. Quite dramatic, kind of all over the place. A more trained ear could probably hear how the different parts make a whole, but for me it was a jumble of disconnected parts. The slow movement (“Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart”) felt like a constant slowing-down, like a Shepard tone but in speed and energy, not tone. I found it completely energy-sapping. Not my thing.

One thing that I have noticed and liked in many string quartets – but not all – is how no one instrument leads. They hand over the baton for the leading role to each other all the time. One instrument plays a phrase. Another responds, echoes, bounces it further – but it only follows this thread for a short while before it takes charge and introduces something new. Sometimes I get the impression that this is “a thing” for string quartets, and then some other one comes along (like the one by Linde) and I hear none of that in it, so then maybe it’s not. I have no musical education whatsoever, beyond what was mandatory in school, and they definitely didn’t go into this kind of detail about the characteristics of construction of different forms of classical music.

Sunday evening. We’re listening to commentary on the Ukrainian war by Perun while I’m knitting and Eric bakes pizza for dinner. Perun comes out with a new video every Sunday, so this has become a habit for us. (Not the pizza part. But knitting is often part of it.)

Perun’s videos are the best source for commentary and analysis of the war that we have found and I’d recommend them to anyone who is interested in understanding the background of what’s happening. Most remain relevant many months after publication. Today’s video, How Lies Destroy Armies, is about the pervasive culture of lying in Russia and how it affects the army and its performance. No surprises there to anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, but still interesting. Others I’ve particularly liked include the instalments about Russian Mobilisation and Captured Equipment in Ukraine.

My main source for more immediate updates of what’s happening on the ground is the Institute of War and their daily briefings – here is today’s briefing – with its accompanying interactive map. The briefings are based only on publicly available information from all kinds of sources, including both Russian and Ukrainian ones, rather than any one person’s or group’s speculations. I like its regularity – I can just increment the date in the URL to get the next briefing – and the structured, consistent presentation.

First birthday.