It’s been sunny and above zero for days and days now, and the ice and snow are quickly melting away. Except on the streets that have a forest just to the south, blocking the sun. In those places the asphalt is barely even visible in small patches, and most of the ground is still covered in a thick, dirty, slippery crust. I feel kind of sorry for the people who live on those streets.

The Venus flytrap that had started to grow a flower stalk literally a month ago is finally actually flowering, with pretty, delicate, white blossoms.

No wonder it took the plant a month to produce the stalk – it’s quite disproportionately long. I’m not sure it would even be able to support its own weight without the help of the windowpane.

My black cardigan is more or less finished. I steam blocked it today, and later also added a collar and a button band. The only thing missing is the buttonhole band, which I cannot make without buttons, because I don’t know how many or how large the buttonholes will need to be. But I can’t wait to start using the cardigan because it is so incredibly soft and comfy, so I’ll just pretend for a short while that it’s meant to be worn unbuttoned.

It’s time to bring out the camera bracelet again, to remind me to take photos. I’ve forgotten more often than I like, and then cheated by taking two photos the next day.

We spent most of the day in the car, driving home from Branäs. The first couple of hours were pretty unpleasant. The roads didn’t even seem to be in a bad state – they were just bumpy. Nysse was complaining all the time, and Adrian got carsick. I can’t remember the roads to the other ski resorts being this bad. Maybe it’s just my selective memory, though.

We took a longer break in Karlskoga. While Eric & the kids bought lunch at Max, I took Nysse for a walk. Both of us are more used and attuned to each other, so the experience was smoother than our early attempts. He knows to not try and jump or pounce; I’ve learned that I need to keep constant tension on the leash so that he is reminded of its existence, and also so that it doesn’t touch his back, which he seems to find annoying. It’s still not like a pleasant walk with a dog – Nysse doesn’t so much walk as skulk through the scruffiest bushes and shrubs, and try to drag me into other people’s gardens.

I completely forgot to take photos during the day, though.

We discovered the wonders of singles queues at ski lifts last year. This year we pretty much went all in for the singles queues and effectively cut our queueing time in half, by my estimate. Often we didn’t even end up riding the lift alone – there were many groups of three and four people in the main queue on the six-seater lift, which left two or even three seats free for the single queue. Win-win!

Our second time-saving, ski-experience-enhancing trick is to eat a slightly later lunch. At around twelve o’clock, all the families with young kids flood the restaurants and leave the slopes empty. Sometimes the slopes were so empty at midday that we could glide right into the single queue, double pole our way through it without even slowing down, and swoosh straight into a lift seat. Down and up and down again without a single stop.

Branäs is a smallish resort with a lot of family-friendly blue slopes. It didn’t take long for a few favourites to emerge, mostly based on the availability of chair lifts. Button lifts are cute but take forever to actually get anywhere. And you’re on your own all the way – can’t talk to anyone else. Chair lifts on the other hand turn skiing into much more of a social activity.

The slopes down in Mattesdalen with its four-seater chair lift were quite long and had some really nice stretches, but also a horrible icy patch in the middle where three slopes met. Every time we got there it was really crowded, with people struggling to get past the ice and the churned-up drifts of snow on top.

When we tired of skiing over there, we spent hours simply going up and down a single slope on the other side. The slope itself was mostly in the sun, in good shape, neither icy nor uneven, and the six-seater lift there seemed brand new and got us up the mountain smoothly and comfortably. After a while we knew the individual features of that piste by heart – keep to the left here at the top, stay away from that icy patch next to the lift queue, watch out for skiers coming in from the side over here.


Adrian worked on braking less and getting his turns more parallel. Later in the afternoon he tried out the bumpier ground just off the piste, under the lift. Ingrid challenged herself by dramatic hockey stops, aiming to throw as much snow in the air as possible (or on Adrian’s skis when he’d already stopped before her).

Branäs is situated at a low elevation. Where the peak in, say, Åre or Idre is above the treeline, offering dramatic views of windswept snow and ice, in Branäs you’re never far from civilization. There are trees all the way up to the top of the mountain, and houses everywhere between and around slopes. Very convenient, but I did miss the wide mountainous vistas, and the peace and quiet of skiing through a slope surrounded by nothing but forest.

Eating waffles at the bottom of Mattesdalen in Branäs.

Branäs is a smallish ski resort that we honestly mostly chose because all the other places were fully booked by the time we decided that, yes, we do dare go on a ski trip this year. But it seemed to suit us well: relatively close to Stockholm, with pet-friendly accommodation available, and with plenty of relatively gentle slopes.

(Yes, we brought Nysse with us. He didn’t enjoy the long drive much, but we’re also pretty sure that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being alone for five days either, with some stranger stopping by only to feed and water him and empty the litter box. Now that we’re here, he’s all happy again.)

Mostly Branäs is as expected. Plenty of blue slopes. Small-scale, with lots of button lifts and just two chairlifts.

The restaurants have been truly disappointing, though. They all use app-based ordering, which is practical I guess, but whenever I use these things I feel like I’m doing the staff’s work for them. And our lunches today were just barely on the right side of edible. The pizzas were thick and doughy and barely had any sauce. The “creamy mushroom pasta” I ordered barely had enough sauce to almost coat all of the overcooked pasta, and contained a total of 2 smallish mushrooms (each chopped into quarters). Even school cafeteria lunches are better than that.

We took a waffle break in the afternoon to rest our legs and top up our blood sugar. Here as well the overall impression was cheap and impersonal. Order in the app, get your cardboard plate with a waffle from an overworked staff member, eat it in a room with the blandest possible interior, clean it up yourself.

(Only Ingrid and Adrian are in the picture because Eric took a bad fall and had to cut his snowboarding short for the day.)

We’re in Branäs for a few days of skiing. Arrived in the afternoon, unloaded the car, got our equipment and tried out the slopes closest to us. Branäs has a lot of slopes with artificial lighting which stay open until 19:00, which we like!

We bought a new kitchen table. Here it is, set for an inaugural dinner, with a bonus (malus) cat photobombing it.

The old one Eric and I bought at Habitat in London just after moving there, so that would have been in 2001. Getting twenty years of use from a table isn’t bad.

But it really was on its last legs now. The veneer strips on the edges were falling off, the varnish on the top was completely worn through in places. Most importantly, it was wobbly and squeaky as hell because all the joins were loose, no matter how much we tightened the screws. We’ve had way too many incidents with drinks sloshing over from glasses when someone accidentally pushes against the table. And using it for kneading dough or energetic whisking or even cutting crusty bread has been quite frustrating.

We chose the new table with those learnings fresh in mind. No veneer, and no varnished finish. Solid oak throughout, with an oiled finish that we can just sand down again and reapply oil to when needed. And the thickest, most solid construction we could find! I hope this one will last us more than two decades.