After two late nights – one flying, one at the theatre – we were tired today. Ingrid slept late, and we took it easy during the day. More bus rides, less walking.

We took a bus to town. alked around Covent Garden, watched some street performers, walked to Leicester Square and Chinatown, walked along Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace. Took a bus to Harrods, admired the food hall and the chocolates and cakes and teas, and the jewelry and handbags with silly prices.

The highlight of the day was afternoon tea at Paul’s. Ingrid has recently taken up tea-drinking (mostly rooibos and spice tea) and a real, proper afternoon tea was a key item on her wish list. Paul’s is maybe more French than English, serving little brioche buns instead of sandwiches on their tea trays, but the whole thing did involve tea and multiple cakes and that’s what matters.

By then it was evening and we took a bus back to the hotel and rested while watching Sherlock Holmes (the one with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman).

We’re in London! Seeing Hamilton!

First we slept, though, to recover from yesterday. Finally I had to wake Ingrid because I was starving hungry. The hotel breakfast looked decent – but since it was charged separately, I was rather aware of the cost, and decided that we could get an equally nice breakfast for half the price at the nearest Pret.

Apart from Hamilton, our plans for this day were vague and loose. I thought we could just see a bit of London, so we simply walked out of the hotel and headed south towards the Thames. This took us past not just a Pret but also the Gherkin, various other cool buildings, and then the Tower of London. Ingrid didn’t feel like walking for hours in a castle, so we just looked at it from the outside.


She was more interested in Tower Bridge – it’s pretty iconic! – so we went inside and looked at all the photos as well as the old engines. The view from up on the walkways is pretty nice as well. It really brings home the contrast of central London – centuries-old buildings side by side with gleaming, curved skyscrapers in glass and steel.

We walked westwards along the Thames, taking in the Globe theatre, Borough market, Millenium bridge etc on the way. Lunch was fish and chips near St. Paul’s.

One of the items on Ingrid’s list of places to see and things to do was Platform 9¾ so after lunch we took the Tube to King’s Cross. We had heard and read that there’s a baggage trolley there, halfway into the platform wall. What we were not prepared for was the commercialization of it. There is a Harry Potter shop right next to it, with a queue just to get in. And another big queue of people waiting to stand next to that baggage trolley and get their photo taken by a professional, with enough of a crowd there to warrant multiple security staff to wrangle them all. Eugh. The cost of globalization and cheap travel is that everything Instagrammable is totally overrun.

In the afternoon, we went to the London Dungeon. (No photos from there because it was dark from beginning to end.) I had expected something museum-like but it was more like a series of short theatre performances, with the crowd walking from one vignette to another. From Guy Fawkes, through the plague and the Great Fire, to Jack the Ripper and so on. Overall, not bad.

Dinner was conveyor belt sushi at Yo! Sushi. This was mixed with nostalgia even more than all the other things we’ve walked past. One of the very first times I had sushi was at Yo! together with Eric. Either their quality is not what it was, or maybe it’s my palate that has changed, but I found the food less flavourful than I remembered.

Then some queueing, and finally, the grand finale of the evening – Hamilton, at the Victoria Palace theatre. We were there early to give Ingrid ample time in the gift shop, and she was overjoyed.

She was even more overjoyed by the performance itself. And I have to agree – it was fabulous. I’ve heard it on Spotify enough times (god knows!) to know what it sounds like, but hearing and seeing it live was a whole different experience. I’m glad that Ingrid is such a fan because without her I wouldn’t be here.

When the performance ended, my first thought was that if only we still lived in London – we could come back and see it again.

Ingrid and I are off for our three-day trip to London to see Hamilton, the musical, spending a good chunk of today getting ourselves there. Train to Stockholm, bus to Skavsta, flight to Stansted, train to Liverpool Street station… Hours and hours of sitting around either being transported or waiting for the next phase of transportation. And we won’t reach our hotel until past midnight.

We have a teenager in the house. Ingrid just turned thirteen. I’m still trying to get used to this idea.

Ingrid’s birthday presents weren’t too photogenic. (Here she is doing homework instead.) The main one was a ticket to Hamilton the musical, in London, next weekend. She’s been quasi-obsessed with Hamilton for months, and almost knocked over the lights on the table as she jumped with happiness when she opened that present.

By the way, her class gets no specific homework as such. They just have tests and quizzes every week, so her study schedule is based on preparing for each such test. She likes the logical subjects – chemistry, physics, even ethics which they do as part of social studies – where stuyding means learning concepts and understanding how they relate to each other, and test questions can then be answered to a great extent by logical thinking. She’s not so fond of subjects where she just has to learn a bunch of random facts, like French spelling, or when the topic in social studies was the Jewish religion.

Cinnamon bun day is one of those made-up holidays introduced by some marketing firm or industry body that I find rather ridiculous. But whatever, home made cinnamon buns are delicious!

Ingrid has gone from cooking dinner once a week to cooking dinner two or three times every week, plus occasionally baking. She’s passed that threshold beyond which cooking feels easy rather than scary. She can feel confident about picking up a new recipe and following it, or even just making something up without a recipe.

I leave early and have breakfast at work when I get there. Eric and the kids eat breakfast at home. And they all like to read while eating their breakfast.

I’ve been knitting and crocheting most evenings recently, and both Ingrid and Adrian have been inspired to try out crocheting. Ingrid has undertaken to crochet a pouffe for her room.

Overwatch, I believe.

Ingrid tells me that playing (computer) games together is the main way for her and her friends to spend time together. Each one in their own home, but nevertheless together through voice chat.

There’s a whole group of them and someone is nearly always online, so Ingrid is struggling with her FOMO and isn’t entirely happy with her screen time limits. (I’m very glad there are built-in controls for this in Windows so I don’t have to be the bad guy every night.) “Some of them are only online before dinner, and some of them are only online after dinner, so if I want to talk to them all, I need to play before and after dinner” – not quite making the connection there.

One of my birthday presents this year was a ticket to see Bortbytingen (“The changeling”) at Dramaten with Ingrid.

The play was based on a short story by Selma Lagerlöf, who is one of my favourite non-sci-fi writers, and one of a very few Swedish writers I like.

A human child was taken by trolls and a troll child left in its place. The troll has grown up with humans, hated and despised by all of them. The mother, too, hates and despises it and longs for her own baby, soft and pink and beautiful, but still feels some responsibility for the ugly thing and cannot bring herself to stop taking care of it, much less kill it. It’s breaking her and her husband and their marriage.

The troll meanwhile is as unhappy as its “parents”. How much should it suppress its nature to fit in? How much of an effort should it make to drink the nauseating milk and eat the disgusting bread? Would it be better to leave the “mother” he loves and see if he fits in better with the trolls in the dark, scary forest?

I loved all parts of this play. The story, the small venue, the minimalist stage design, the simple acting, the folk songs woven into it. I’ve often found Swedish theatre performances overly dramatic and been disappointed in the quality of the acting. This play was truly a pleasant surprise.

Notes for the future:
Written by Sara Bergmark Elfgren, directed by Tobias Theorell. Actors I liked: Maia Hansson Bergqvist, Maria Salomaa.

I have spent much of today helping Ingrid sort through all her old stuff. She enjoys buying things, but then generally discovers that owning them is not that much fun because she doesn’t end up using them as much as she thought. She’s also a bit of a nostalgia hoarder – instead of giving away old toys and such, she just stores them. Now that she is moving into a new room, she needs to find a place for all those things. And she is discovering that actually she can part with quite a lot of them.

A few favourites stay in her room or go into a storage box in the basement. Some things can be sold. But a fair amount of it is basically junk.

Old crafts projects are the hardest ones. There are so many, and most were made with a lot of work and care. But how many can we possibly keep?