We’re on a week’s vacation on Santorini. Today was mostly travelling, although we had some time in the evening to explore Kamari, the village where we’re staying, and its black pebble beach, and the long beach promenade.

Hoping to not get caught by another heat wave to make hiking difficult, we booked this trip for as early in the season as possible, as soon as school ended. It’s hot, but not unbearably so.

Coming here in June is also good to avoid the crowds that are sure to be here in peak season in July and August – now the restaurants are more than half empty, and there is plenty of room both on the beach and in the streets.

We celebrated end of school with a buffet dinner at Ri Cora, which is becoming something of a tradition.

At the end of the evening I realized I hadn’t taken a single photo, although I’d gone there with a firm plan to take some. Especially since I get so few photos of Ingrid and Adrian these days, when they’re mostly doing their own things in their own rooms. We were almost home by this time, so I asked them to slow down to give me time to get out the camera. Their interpretation of “slowing down” was a slow-motion walk.

And then posing for the camera, with hair-smoothing and twisted bodies. (For Adrian’s last school photo earlier this year, the photographer had him twist this and turn that and put his hand there, and he said it had felt incredibly awkward.)


Eric biked home so I didn’t get any of him at all. But we do have a summer vacation coming up so I’ll get more chances.

Ingrid’s school year is already over, and she finished her first year of high school with As in all subjects. Some came more easily, but she kept fighting all the way to the end in the ones where she was hovering between an A and a B. She spent so many hours practising her French verb tenses – every single day, for weeks – for the last major test, and it all paid off!

500 years since Gustav Vasa was elected king of Sweden, which ended the Kalmar union and made Sweden an independent country.

(Fancy cake by Ingrid.)

Eric and Adrian went out on a hike on Friday, and Ingrid has long planned to go camping with her friend group this weekend. Not wanting to be left out, I thought I’d do the same and check off the next stage of Sörmlandsleden.

Not even halfway through my drive to the starting point, Ingrid called me, nearly in tears. They had ended up on the wrong bus, and since the right one only goes once every two hours, they’d lose almost all of their planned afternoon out in the forest. As luck would have it, I was only 15 minutes away from the bus stop they’d gotten off, so I turned around and then spent the next hour and a half shuttling them from their bus stop to the Paradiset nature reserve they were aiming for.

By the time I was done playing chauffeur, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I could still have followed my original plan – but here I was, right at the entrance of a beautiful nature reserve, so why not stay right here? The horde of teenagers headed east towards lake Trehörningen; I followed Sörmlandsleden (stage 6) south-west, stopping just short of the other end so I wouldn’t get back to civilization.

This is a beautiful time to be out walking. The greenery is all fresh and young and lush. I’ve never before managed to time any of my hikes to hit the peak of lily of the valley season.

And then in the middle of everything vibrant and beautiful, I come across this devastation. I cannot fathom how clear-cutting can still be allowed – how it can be legal to destroy a landscape like this.

Towards the end of my walk I saw a clump of aquilegias right next to the road. Beautiful colours, larger blossoms than even the ones in my flowerbeds at home. I was surprised to see them in the wild – but another fifty metres on I saw a lilac bush, so I guess there must have been a cottage some time in the past.

Adrian and Ingrid both wanted to be involved in the plant shopping, so we ended up with perhaps a less coherent planting than I usually do. I picked some, Adrian picked some, Ingrid picked some… And some of the plants I had in mind were out of stock at Ulriksdal, so I had to replace them.

Ingrid helped me with the grouping and layout, and then we went back to get more ground cover plants to fill in the gaps.

I’ve always wanted a hellebore in the garden, and now circumstances came together to give me one: I have a shade planting that I’ll be passing daily – and the plant nursery was advertising large, home-grown hellebores.

It’s wood anemone season, and the woods in Hägerstalund are always flooded with anemones. Ingrid and I went for an anemone walk in the spring sun.

It’s amazing how they carpet the whole ground.

Vårsalongen, “The Spring Salon”, is an annual art event where anyone in Sweden can send in their works to be considered for inclusion. The result is always eclectic and varied. The works range from paintings, drawings and sculpture to video installations, and more. This year all the works can be seen online.

I was happy to see quite a few pieces of textile art, even though I didn’t particularly like any one of them. Another memorable works this year was Vintern 2021/22 by Mårten the dog, which consisted of all the gloves and mittens that the artist had carried home from his walks during one season.

Ingrid is a budding artist and it wasn’t hard to convince her to come with us, and Eric is always up for art exhibitions. Adrian was perhaps a bit less enthusiastic, but I was pretty sure even he would enjoy it. The exhibition is so democratic and relatable – there’s even a “Young Spring Salon” section for sixteen to eighteen-year-olds – that there’s always something for everyone.

Predictably, Adrian enjoyed the sculptures the most. When given a choice, he always prefers to work three-dimensionally, whether with paper or clay or Legos.

Liljevalchs was recently expanded and now has several new galleries which I hadn’t visited before. The upstairs ones had amazing ceilings.

Those galleries currently exhibited works by Jockum Nordström, whose graphical works I didn’t find particularly interesting. But his mobile sculptures were nice: agglomerations of objects and pieces of wood, with a weight attached to a rotating arm of metal wire, and something noise-making for that weight to hit on each pass around the circle: a zither, or a broken violin, or a bicycle bell.

Afterwards we had lunch at Liljevalchs’ new vegetarian restaurant. The food wasn’t bad but they were badly understaffed so we waited a long time for our food, only to find out that they had lost half of our order, so half of us had to re-order and wait again.

Moped season has started! And it has involved a lot of disassembly, fixing, re-assembly, re-disassembly and re-fixing, to get the thing to run. Good thing Ingrid has lots of motor-interested friends, including one who goes to a specialized motor sports high school, to help her.

We don’t pay much attention to Valentine’s day, but Ingrid bought a bouquet of pink and red roses, and I made pink pancakes.