Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.

In eight grade, Swedish schoolchildren get to do practical work experience. The concept is called prao in Swedish. Kids spend two weeks at an actual workplace, doing real work.

This is Adrian’s second week of prao at a Brillo Pizza, and I stopped by to see him at work.

The first challenge is to find a prao place. Some find a place through friends and family, but I couldn’t find anything suitable at Sortera. (It’s all either office jobs, or work that is too dirty and dangerous for an inexperienced underage worker.) Adrian spent hours searching, both online and just walking from place to place, before landing a prao place at Brillo Pizza near Odenplan.

I got to order a pizza from Adrian, pay him for it, and watch him make it fresh for me. I found out that pizzerias have machines to flatten balls of dough into standard-sized pizza bases.

I also learned that they pre-portion all the toppings such as cheese in plastic cups during slow periods, so when it’s time to make a pizza, there’s no measuring or guessing – just grab a cup and spread its contents on the pizza. A standard pizza gets 110 grams of cheese. A pepperoni pizza has exactly 14 slices of pepperoni, and a kebab pizza gets 80 grams of meat.

Adrian made a pizza for himself as well and then we could have lunch together. We both opted for a “Maggan”, which is a fancy margherita topped with extra mozzarella after it’s baked. (Mine is half-sized since I don’t eat like a growing teenager any more.)

First thing in the morning: IKEA, to start looking for a new bed, and to buy clothes rails for my built-in closets. Visiting IKEA on a Saturday can be a nightmare, but not if you’re there right when they open. Plenty of space in the parking lot, and no crowds inside, either. By the time I was ready to leave, the situation in the parking lot was rather different, with cars hunting for free spots.

Next up: a trip to the city to buy embroidery yarn, which was also this season’s inaugural bicycle trip. My 30-day travel card ran out yesterday, and today was a bright, sunny day, which seemed like a clear sign that it was time to dust off the bike, pump up the tires, and start pedalling.

The sun is warm, but the air isn’t. And at this time of the year the sun still doesn’t reach very high in the sky. Even at two o’clock in the afternoon, long sections of the cycle lanes from here to the city are in full shade from the houses that line them.

In the evening: party. Eric, Ingrid and Adrian had a housewarming party at their new apartment. They’ve got all the essential furniture in place and have settled in. The living room sofa is large enough to fit Adrian’s entire band of friends at the same time!

And then later in the evening, Melodifestivalen with Ingrid, while Adrian was watching it with his friends at the apartment – we preferred a quieter evening. Much of the music is pretty boring – artists trying to repeat their wins by replicating previous hits – but the winning song, a catchy and humorous Swedish-Finnish song about saunas, was actually fun.

Exhaustion and bedtime after that.

Happy forty-seven and a half to me!

For my birthday this summer I wanted to go out to have a nice restaurant brunch. I was going to wait until September so the brunch places in the city would open again after the summer. But then it was the kids’ birthdays, and the divorce, and Christmas, and more divorce, and it never happened.

Today Ingrid, Adrian and I finally went for my birthday brunch at Kelp, a very local restaurant, just five minutes’ walk from home. We all ended up ordering the same things: scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, single-variety Swedish apple juice, and French toast with a home-made berry compote. And then, while Ingrid and I were bemoaning how full we were, another serving of French toast for Adrian, who is in that teenage bottomless phase. Very nice.

Cleaned out and sorted through Adrian’s hat and glove basket in the hall. For some reason I’ve been assuming that he would do it himself, but clearly it doesn’t bother him that half the space in it is taken up by things he has outgrown.

Well, it bothers me, so I did it for him.

There were hats in there that are so small he literally can’t have worn them since he was in pre-school. The fingerless gloves I made for him in 2017. And underneath the too-small hats and scarves, there was a pile of literal junk. It was like looking through a window into an earlier time.

Several safety reflectors. Mitten clips, which I had forgotten were even a thing. Stones, of course, and sticks and chestnuts. A broken balloon. A marble, a bread bag tie, and a broken pencil.

At some point in time, each of these things was important enough for him to put in the basket.

A few snapshots from the Bergheden family Christmas party. Food (potluck style), conversations, and presents for the kids.

Sweeney Todd at the Royal Opera. Technically a musical, which is nice, because it made the whole thing sound more pop-culture-ish and got the kids to join, but really, what makes this a musical rather than an opera?

I was most impressed by the work of the dialect coach, because Ms Lovett sounded as British as could be, and so did the others.

It’s Christmas Eve!

Knowing Nysse and his habit of attacking wrapped-up gifts, with all their play-friendly paper and ribbons and shiny bits, we didn’t leave the gifts out overnight. But when he’d had his breakfast and gone out, we put the gifts under the tree. He managed to attack one of them – luckily the one where the inner layer was a sturdy cardboard tube, and thus hard to damage and easy to re-wrap – but after that I kept my eye on him all the time and chased him away twice, after which he was almost afraid of even going near the tree, so there was no more damage.

Lunch was devilled eggs, pickled herring of three kinds (flavoured with blackcurrant, apple and curry, and mustard, respectively) and a citrus and gravad lax salad. Plus potatoes and vörtbröd, a Swedish Christmas bread.

Ingrid piped and decorated the eggs, and folded the napkins.

The citrus and salmon salad was a new entry on the menu. Tasted good!

Then it was time for presents. With everybody so grown-up, there’s a lot less cheering and jumping up and down than there used to be!

Nysse, when he woke up, attacked the rolled-up Santa hats as if they were fluffy little animals, and for some reason really enjoyed licking the little olive wood bowl that I gave to Eric.

A Christmas day with my brother.

I picked him up by car in Uppsala as usual. What was not as usual was the thick slush coming down from the sky. I also hadn’t accounted for today being the first day of Christmas break and thus large crowds heading out of town to their cabins in the woods or wherever. The roads were slippery and full of snow and a lot more traffic than usual for 7:30 on a Saturday morning. The drive there and back usually takes me an hour and a half, but took two and a half today. For a good chunk of the way, we were all driving at 40 km/h behind a pair of snow ploughs.

Anyway, I managed to not become a statistic (and we saw no cars on the side of the road and no cars with sirens on) so all is good.

Then we baked. More lussebullar in all sorts of shapes, because after a while we all become bored with the traditional ones. There were lusse croissants and doodles and swirls and twists, and even a lusse snow lantern.

And then we made a batch of mince pies, too, because those are delicious and everyone should have access to mince pies at Christmas.

Adrian took up drums again this year. He tried five years ago but lost interest. Now he’s re-found it.

The end-of-term concert was quite a bit longer than I had expected, and a lot of it sounded better than I had expected, too. I guess my expectations were partly still stuck in 2019.

Adrian played the bass drum in a drumline (which was my favourite piece of this evening), the standard drum set in a rock song, and the marimba for Jingle Bells.

If the photos look weird, it’s because I’ve blacked out other kids who were in the frame.