Every autumn the indoor temperature takes me by surprise.

Outdoors, the average temperature mostly follows a nice curve. Warm summer, gradual decline into cool autumn, continuing into a cold winter, and then a corresponding curve back up in spring.

Intuitively I expect the same indoors. Warm in summer, cool in autumn, cold in winter. But that is not what happens. Instead it is warm in summer, cold in autumn, then the heating turns on, and we have the same cold all the way through to late spring when we can turn off the heating again. It wasn’t necessarily always like that, but it’s been our reality since Sweden’s electricity prices spiked in 2021.

This means that there is a very short season for medium-warm clothes: long-sleeved jersey dresses, thin jersey tops, things with lacy sleeves. Half of August maybe, all of September, and that’s more or less it. After that it’s all layers of wool.