Heart-shaped light sculptures in Fatbursparken.

Early morning in Spånga, with sunrise, cranes and bus station.

A whole new residential area is coming into existence on both sides of the railway tracks.

Stockholm is putting up generous amounts of Christmas lights in the city as well, not just in Spånga.

The Christmas lights at Spånga Torg are up. We’ve gotten new lights this year – there used to be spirals of lights around a few of the trees, but they were purple, and only wound around the largest branches. Now it’s like they’ve wound the strings around every single twig. Looks very impressive, and brightens things up very nicely. It must have been a tricky job.

A quarter past four, and it’s twilight already.

On the plus side, Christmas/Advent/winter lights are starting to appear in the city.

I took a detour during my lunchtime walk to a nearby neighbourhood that has the prettiest autumn colours. Sörgårdsvägen is lined with large maples on both sides, and their colours are at their peak.

All three photos are taken from different points at the same crossing.

The neighbours’ house is still a half-finished eyesore. They started clearing the ground in April and the house already looked pretty house-shaped in June. Since then they’ve finished the facade but then not made any visible progress for some while. I’m getting tired of having to see heaps of building materials and construction waste every single day.

I’m also not very happy with the house itself. It’s boxy and bulky, clearly focusing on optimising for volume given the maximum permissible size, and makes no real effort to fit in. And did it really have to be black, to make the house look even larger and dominant? I wonder how that could seem like a good idea to anyone.

If I get no other exercise in, I do my daily half-hour of brisk walking. I almost always follow the same route, with some nice steepish hills here and there, and a decent-sized park at the far end that I take a big loop through.

The part that goes along streets is not very exciting. I’m not interested in other people’s houses and gardens. I usually read while walking and treat it as pure exercise. But the park is strikingly nice to look at, in almost any season and any weather. Swedish parks are – unlike English ones – generally devoid of flowers or anything else requiring more maintenance than the occasional mowing. They’re all just grass and trees and large bushes. But the large open space and the mostly uninterrupted greenery still feels very good.

Tomorrow is election day, but advance voting stations have been open for something like two weeks already. I’ve been planning to get it done early, but kept putting it off. Now it’s done.

I am not a Swedish citizen so I only get to vote in the local elections. The county/kommun elections at least feel somewhat relevant. The regional elections on the other hand seem mostly pointless. The only services provided at the regional level is healthcare and public transport, and every single party promises more accessible healthcare and shorter queues, by magic, no hard trade-offs.

Adrian came with me to see how it all works. Their current focus area in social studies is democracy and elections and government and all that, so he wanted to see it live.

Ingrid voted herself in the School Elections, where middle and high school students across the country get to vote almost for real. Their votes are counted and the results published after the main elections, so as not to affect them. In the next election in four years’ time, she’ll be doing it for real.

On the national level there are all sorts of weird parties trying to make their voices heard. Some seem sensible but niche; some are unworldly idealists; some are lunatics (like the Swedish Communist Party); some are simply there for the joke. There is a party calling themselves Ond Kycklingpartiet, “the Evil Chicken party”.

The café next to the advance voting station was urging us to “celebrate democracy with a praline”. This was cheeky enough to work, so Adrian and I bought fancy pralines for ourselves.