My reading glasses broke yesterday evening, without provocation. It’s a good thing that it only happened in the evening, because life is hard without them. I made do without glasses for the first hour in the office today and headed out to Liljeholmsgallerian as soon as the shops opened, to get myself a pair of new ones.

I still can’t be bothered to spend the time or money to go to an optometrist for a proper assessment. Just trying on a few different pairs of reading glasses at a pharmacy and buying the ones that feel best is totally good enough.

Apparently my eyesight is getting weaker. I’m now at +1.5; the previous ones were +1.0. Suddenly close-up things are almost shockingly sharp. Downside: while I wear the new glasses, everything at a distance gets even fuzzier than before, so I can choose between getting almost dizzy while walking, or pushing the glasses up and down all the time. I guess I’ll get used to it, like I did with the previous pair.

It is, not surprisingly, rather difficult to focus on the rear screen on the camera without the glasses. I can’t see whether the photo is in focus or not. Which is why it isn’t.

It’s harvest season for Swedish fruit and many vegetables. Apples, pears, more apples. Tomatoes, spinach, leeks, string beans.

The Coop supermarket in central Spånga is pretty bad at seasonal vegetables, beyond fruit, but even they have had some Swedish stuff. The “new” Large Coop has more, so I’ve been making the trek there whenever I want to buy fruit and veg.

Tomatoes don’t get sold by variety, it’s just “Swedish vine tomatoes”. The pears are Clara Friis. I’ve already forgotten the name of the one apple variety, but the other one is Discovery, which is one of my favourites.

Lars Wallin Atelier – 35 Years of Fashion Stories at Artipelag.

Lars Wallin is a Swedish fashion designer who mostly designs unique dresses for celebrities, royalty, and presenters of shows such as Eurovision. Artipelag exhibits dresses that Lars Wallin has created for various people and now asked to borrow from the owners for this show.

There was an introductory section with sketches and toiles, and some background info about Lars Wallin and his approach to design.

The rest of the exhibition rooms were dedicated to showcasing the dresses.

It all looked very shiny, but that was about it. I had been hoping for more. Insight into his creative process, for example, or how the dresses had been designed or made. Now it was just “dress made for this and this for the Cannes film festival” or “dress worn by this and this at the Melodifestivalen final 1994”. After a few signs like that, I just stopped reading them.

The dresses were also, frankly, kind of boring. I’m sure that the wearer felt glamorous, and Lars Wallin probably had fun designing them, but there was nothing interesting about them. Nothing that made me think “oh that’s clever” or “wow, I hadn’t realized you could do that”. No, it was just “wow, that’s a lot of sequins” and “well, that sure is very red” and even more “that looks expensive”.

This last photo of the red section is out of focus but it gets to be here anyway because it really illustrates my thoughts so well. When he makes a red dress, he makes it the reddest red, and that’s it. The next dress is equally red. There is no nuance, no subtlety. Just a lot of sameness.

This is the last weekend of an exhibition at Artipelag that I wanted to see.

Last time I was there, I took the car. Today I was carless because I’d – somewhat carelessly – promised to lend the car to someone else, not giving much thought to how I’d take myself to Artipelag. Surely there are buses or something.

There are indeed buses, but getting there by public transport turned out to require a train and then three separate buses, for a total travel time of around two hours. Or… I could cycle there, and it would only take twenty minutes longer. There and back would be a full day’s worth of cycling, so why not make a day of it. Could I spend the day in a better way? Indeed I could not.

The first bit was just getting from Spånga to central Stockholm, which was just like biking to work. After that I cycled along paths that I’ve never passed before, through parts of the city that I’ve never seen up close. A nice bit of sight-seeing, which I rarely do in Stockholm.

Some of those stretches through central(ish) Stockholm were rather crowded with Saturday morning joggers and dog-walkers, and it was a relief to leave them behind. The cycle paths through Nacka and Sickla were even more stressful with roadworks and blockages everywhere – so confusing in places that I struggled to even find the cycle path, and a car driver, conversely, ended up on a cycle path by mistake.

Once I got through that, there was a long and easy stretch of good cycle paths along Värmdöleden, a main road or small highway. Large and long enough to give me a good, steady road to follow, with no map-reading necessary, but still local enough to be free of heavy traffic, at least on a Saturday.

The further I cycled, the more rural the road got. Near Gustavsberg the cycle path left the main road and got onto smaller tracks and roads.

In Gustavsberg I ran across a flea market. I browsed around without much hope of finding anything, mostly to take a break. Most flea markets are full of cheap clothes and boring glass and ceramics. Here, though, I found a whole market stand full of cast iron pots and pans! I’ve become more and more fond of cast iron cookware recently and added more to my cupboard. They’re expensive, so I’ve been on the lookout for good used ones. I found a good-quality small pan here, exactly what I needed.

For the last bit after Gustavsberg, I was cycling on forest paths and small local tracks.

With all the water breaks and map-reading, it took me closer to three hours to reach Artipelag, and I was quite ready for lunch by that time. Artipelag has both a restaurant and a café. The latter served excellent lunch at very reasonable prices. And cake! It felt a little bit like I was cheating on Spånga Konditori by eating fancy cake elsewhere.

I’ll have to make a separate post about the exhibition because this is long enough already.

Afterwards I took a short walk around the grounds to see bits of the outdoor sculpture exhibition. Mostly not very exciting… but I loved the Solar Egg. It was originally commissioned for Kiruna in conjunction with the town being moved, and apparently has a sauna inside. Here the sauna doesn’t seem to be open or functioning, so the egg is just a sculpture.

It’s a roughly egg-shaped irregular polyhedron, six metres tall, and it’s strikingly beautiful. More golden than gold, sunnier than the sun itself. Against a grey sky, it was like a revelation from another world. Stainless steel mirrors with titanium gold colour coating, according to the makers.

I didn’t stay around for too long, since I still had another 40 km of biking before I’d be home. After two thirds of the way, when I was in reach of the commuter train network, I briefly considered getting on a train with my bike. But the bit that was left was no more than my daily commute home, and that’s nothing, so I just kept going.

Saw Alexander Ekman’s Midsommarnattsdröm (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) at the Royal Opera for the third time. In part for lack of alternatives, but also because I enjoyed it the last two times.

I’ve wondered every time about the fake hay that the dancers throw around. It’s like… better hay than real hay. It’s got stalks of a good, even length; the right amount of bend and give; a nice swish and fluff. Probably also less scratchy, more durable, less dusty and less allergy-inducing than the real thing.

This time I walked up to the scene in the interval and checked the “hay”. Even up close it very much looked like hay, even though it obviously wasn’t. Very thin paper, similar to paper string, thin and durable.

It’s time for Nysse’s annual vaccinations. The car trip to the clinic and back, in a cage, bothers him infinitely more than getting the actual shot.

I sawed off a large dead branch on the apple tree, that had been hanging on only with external support. Then another one. And a third one. And a few smaller ones.

The branch above, all hollow, is not one of those; it is actually green and growing still.

The tree is very old and not doing so well.

Both button bands are done, including button holes, and attached to the cardigan. Buttons are also all in place. This is, I think, the tidiest, most polished, best-finished thing I’ve ever knitted.

Making a batch of sourdough bread and discovering, again, to no surprise, that my “room temperature” is not the same as cookbooks’ “room temperature”. I ended up turning on the oven before I really needed it and then positioning the bowl with the dough right where some of the hot air leaked out at the edges of the oven door.

It’s not even September yet, and I’ve already had to turn the heating on and bring out my slippers. (Just for a day or two.)