We’ve been on vacation for the last week, and I’ve got a large backlog of things I want to say about the holiday and other things. But today/tomorrow will be busy days with New Year’s Eve and all that that entails. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up in the next few days.
In the meantime, may your year end happily and the new one start well.
This is what I was met by when I got home after two days’ absence: a huge, fragrant, twinkling Christmas tree. (It’s so huge that I can’t fit it all into one photo without going so far that the flash on my camera doesn’t light it up any more.)
The tree almost manages to look huge even in our apartment, even though the ceiling here is quite high. The crossbeams are at least 3m from the floor, and the ridge is about another 2m above that. The tree must be a good 4 metres high, and large enough that it doesn’t really stand up on its own and rests against one of the beams. I wonder how Eric got it home, or in through the door! (“On the bike,” he says.) Our string of Christmas lights looks almost puny on that tree. (We haven’t got the rest of the decorations up yet.)
The lights were our only Christmas decorations in our previous apartment, where the living room wasn’t really large enough for a proper tree. So we hung them on our fig.
We’ve had some trouble finding the right sort of trees here in London – they mostly sell firs of various sorts, whereas the traditional tree in Estonia and Sweden is a spruce (picea abies). I’ve got to admit that firs generally look lusher and greener; spruces tend to be thinner and sparser. And spruce needles are a lot sharper – although that only matters initially when you’re hanging up the decorations. However, some firs hardly have any smell at all – we happened to buy one of those the year before last (or maybe it was last year). The smell is an important part of a Christmas tree, and this year’s tree smells wonderful.
This year’s Christmas preparations in our household have now been kicked off through the purchase of 9 bottles of glögg and 6 bottles of julmust, both absolutely essential for a true Swedish Christmas experience. What would Swedish expats do without IKEA? (Invite lots of visitors from Sweden in December, I guess… although nowadays you can probably buy your julmust online.)
Christmas has three essential components: the tree, the sweets and the drinks (which also happen to be sweet, coincidentally). Presents are pleasant but not essential. Christmas food, other than the sweets, is also optional.
The drinks part is now sorted for this year. The sweets will be fixed this weekend (Saturday). This only leaves the tree.
I love julmust. If the glögg bottles weren’t so infernally heavy, I’d have bought three times as much julmust. I think a follow-up / refill trip might be needed in a few weeks’ time.
Superficially, julmust might look like Coke, but it’s really a very different thing. I am not particularly fond of Coke – I may drink one maybe once or twice a year – mostly because Coke is disgustingly, cloyingly sweet. I don’t understand how they can dissolve that much sugar in water. It somehow manages to taste sweeter than sugar water. Julmust is sweet, too, but it has a spicy rich flavour. It reminds of dark beer (think Guinness) which is not surprising given that it contains malt and hops. It tastes very nice mixed with beer, about half and half.
According to reliable sources Swedes drink 60,000,000 litres of must each year, of which 45,000,000 in December. That’s about 5 litres for every Swede regardless of age. (Add about 4 or 5 million litres of glögg, too.) Apparently Sweden is one of the few countries where sales of Coke actually decline in December, as julmust displaces Coke from the top spot. The rest is drunk at Easter, for some reason, and during the rest of the year you can hardly find must in stores. Definitely not outside Sweden. That’s part of its charm – it wouldn’t be as special if I drank it every week.
It has been interesting to see how people react to the autumnal weather we’ve had for the past week – after ridiculous +15°C warmth during the second half of October and first half of November, we’re now down to frosty nights and chilly days.
The cycling crowd has shrunk significantly – the streets are emptier, and the railings I chain my bike to at work are almost empty. All the more space for me! Those who are left seem to be of two sorts: the hardy and the foolhardy. The hardy wear windproof jackets, thick gloves and hats. The foolhardy wear shorts (really) and fingerless gloves, and start shivering when they need to stop at a traffic light.
In fact the same can be seen among walkers as well. Every year, this time of the year brings out a special subspecies of Englishmen: the Martyr. It walks around with hunched shoulders, rubs its hands, looks miserable, and complains pleasedly about the “unbearably cold” weather – all the while continuing to wear no coat (men), no gloves or scarf or hat (both sexes) and itsy-bitsy little shoes that barely cover the toes (women).
I try to imagine why they would do this. Do they enjoy martyrdom so much? Do they find the effort of buying gloves so unpleasant? For a while I thought that perhaps the “frog in hot water” effect was playing a role: the weather gets just a little bit colder every day, and never drops suddenly enough for them to notice that it is winter. But this year even that theory has been disproved, since the weather turned cold literally overnight.
The Martyr has a cousin called the Calendar Girl, by the way, who also ignores the weather, but in the opposite sense. (I haven’t seen many men do this.) They dress according to what the calendar says – “if it’s October, it’s got to be autumn”. Never mind that it’s 15 degrees outside – she wears furry boots, or a thick woollen scarf, or a down jacket. Go figure.
For the past three weeks (or is it four?) my workday has started 7:20, instead of the previous 8:00–8:15. I’m not entirely happy with how it’s turning out. Out of long habit, I still leave the office about the same time as I used to, or maybe 15 minutes earlier. So I’m not getting home much earlier than I used to. Also out of habit, I’m still going to bed roughly the same time as I used to. Even though I’ve cut out everything non-essential from my morning routine, this still means that I’m getting 45 minutes less sleep every night. Not good.
I don’t like the hurried mornings. I don’t like the fact that I’m now cycling every single day, since walking would cost me an extra 30 minutes of sleep. I liked walking occasionally.
And I miss the bells of St. Pauls. In the past, I timed my mornings so that I often cycled past St. Pauls just as the bells were ringing 8 o’clock – 4 medium peals and then 8 beautiful deep ones. St Pauls has excellent bells, and I like their sound.
I guess I could try to catch the 6pm bells instead. That would give me an extra incentive to try and get out of the office before 6 at least occasionally.
This afternoon I flushed my employee access pass down the toilet. Whoops.
It was an accident, honestly!
I was about to leave… I picked up the access pass from the ledge that I’d put it on, and it slipped from my fingers, bounced from the edge, and of course the same law of gravity that makes sandwiches land upside down, inevitably pulled it towards the toilet bowl, just as the whirl of water was starting to slow down.
I had a split second to think “This can’t be happening!” and then realising “I hope it isn’t too large and heavy – hope it flushes and doesn’t remain at the bottom, where someone will have to fish it out”. Luckily it disappeared.
I thought this sort of thing only happened in fiction.
One of the things I like about living in London is the frequency of fireworks displays, and their size and scale. During autumn / winter there are at least 4 good-sized shows, so they average roughly one per month. In September there’s the Thames festival, which, as far as I know, is just a general party for no particular reason – circus for the people. Then there’s Bonfire Night of course, when every borough with a modicum of self-esteem puts on their own show, so there are shows in all the major parks, and you can pick & choose. (Of course there are lots of unofficial fireworks as well, and people start trying out their bombs about two weeks earlier.) Just one week later there’s the Lord Mayor’s show, and after that there’s a 6-week wait until New Year’s Eve.
We missed Bonfire Night this year, since we spent all the evenings of last weekend in concerts. But yesterday the Lord Mayor’s show made up our fireworks deficit.
The Lord Mayor’s show starts as early as 5pm, probably because it’s a family-oriented event. This time of the year, it’s almost dark by 5pm, and the little light that’s there doesn’t distract at all. In fact it makes the fireworks a bit different from the usual, and if the sky is clear it looks very pretty, with sunset colours almost gone. We could see huge clouds of brown smoke billow from the barge that the fireworks are shot from, and drift in towards South Bank. (I’m glad we weren’t standing on that side of the river.)
Good show – well composed and had a nice rhythm. Not as many “big bangs” as some shows we’ve seen. There were quite a few “two-stage” bombs – instead of the usual “up and explode” they did “up and explode and change direction”, or “up and explode and explode again” – as well as double circles (that look like Saturn with its rings). Also lots of simple sparkling things – plain white twinkling starfalls and golden rains. Very nice. I am getting spoiled here, though – 15 minutes of fireworks actually felt a bit short!
Saturday, 10 o’clock at night, end of October. 18°C outside.
Spotted on the way to Costcutters:
No, scratch that last one, that was just our Pakistani neighbour…
All of a sudden, it’s autumn.
The past week was this year’s first week of autumn. Late summer lasted long, and the week before had 17-degree weather still. But now it’s turned cold – I’ve needed gloves when cycling both to and from work. And we’ve had several days of steady rains, and strong gusty autumn winds.
We can’t really see the seasons from our apartment. Weather, yes, but not the larger longer-term changes. The few trees visible from our window are all evergreens, and never change.
The light changes, of course, and we get less of it. It’s barely light when I get up. In fact the time I get up has slowly been slipping together with the sun, so that I’ve gotten up just as it’s almost light. As the sun rises later and later, so do I. Just a few minutes every day, but it adds up… even after cutting my morning activities shorter, it’s now close to the point where I’m getting to the office too late.
Well, one more week and we turn back the clocks, so the inevitable struggle of getting up in the dark gets postponed for another while.
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| St. Paul’s, Saturday evening |
Daytime, the City of London is ordinary. Ordinary streets, sober office buildings in pale grey stone or shiny glass. Add people in the streets, a few trees here and there, flowerbeds, and the brown waters of the Thames, and it’s a decent enough place to be – but it isn’t very exciting, really.
As it gets dark, the balance changes. Ordinariness is replaced by spots of stark beauty against a dim background, and the City becomes quiet and beautiful. The City is very calm in the evening. The noise and life that would fill a high street at night – bars, neon lights, KFC and McD – is conspicuously absent, and the little that’s there is concentrated to a few spots.
At night, all the flat grey buildings shift into the background, and others step forward. Church steeples are lit up by white lights. St. Paul’s, which is just a large grey cathedral during the day (as much as any cathedral can be “just a cathedral”), glows against the night sky, majestic and huge. Three of its sides have undergone a thorough cleaning over the past couple of years (the fourth side is still wrapped in scaffolding and white plastic) which has made it look even more beautiful.
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| Tower 42 | Lloyds | The Gherkin |
| These 3 images (C) Freefoto.com | ||
The top of Tower 42 (NatWest Tower) is bright blue and green; Lloyd’s steely sides are electric blue; the Gherkin (or the Swiss RE building) is topped with red sparks.
A few years ago, when the Gherkin was finished but still unoccupied, all of it was lit at night: every other floor was electric blue, and every other one was bright green. Some nights it even had huge floodlights pointing at the sky. It was a marvellous sight.
Nights are soft in London. In the country, the night sky can be a wide expanse of stark black with sharp stars. But in London, there is always a slight fuzziness to the sky, even when it isn’t really cloudy, and stars are few and dim. So the shining lights of the City have no competition.
This is me at age 3.
My father has always been interested in photography. But back when I was small, his photographing always used to happen in short bursts. So I have several sets of maybe a dozen photos, all clearly taken on the same day, and then sometimes nothing for about a year. Summer was usually productive, when my parents both had vacation and we were all in the countryside at my grandmother’s summer cottage.
He started scanning his old negatives and slides this summer, and gave me a CD a few months ago. I’ve been going through the photos and tried to sort them by time, and it’s been really hard.
Some can be placed fairly exactly using other known events. The one where I’m just standing up on my own (but still not looking quite stable) would have been taken in 1978, when I was a year old. If I’m sitting on a blanket and there’s a tiny baby crawling next to me, then it’s definitely 1980, the year my brother was born. My first day at school is also easy to place.
Others just have to be triangulated. Do I look slightly taller there than in those other pictures? Does my face seem slightly older?
My mother came by this evening, and brought a handful of old black-and-white photos with her. Some of them were pictures I hadn’t seen for years, but had strong memories of: Christmas party at age 3½, myself in a plaid dress, bravely facing Santa Claus… And luckily, most of the prints had dates pencilled in on the reverse, so we could use those to confirm the dates of at least some of the scanned photos.
Some of the photos were of herself as a child. I had never seen those before.
There was one where she would have been in her late teens, we figured, which would make it about 1970. She was pretty, I thought – with long straight hair and a paisley blouse, and this small serene almost-smile on her face.
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