Month: August 2024

The distant muffled noise from a football stadium has quietened. I listen to Corelli, of whom I know nothing, enjoying the leafy calm of my Berlin suburb. Ancient memories of my arrival in Sweden in 1973 revive. Sunny autumn Lund where we didn’t lock the door, walking in the park with our two cats, who followed us better than I thought possible until the trees proved too tempting. Rescue by a bolder soul. Little money but life was soft with half of our three-digit rent covered by housing benefit. Wondering how much longer privately-owned grocery shops (ICA) would survive and the shame of occasionally patronising them. Life in a cradle-to-grave folk hem with over forty years of social democrat domination, confident administrators of Swedish society unlike the UK’s defensive safety valve labour folk.

And riding my British Raleigh moped across Sweden from west coast to east, to my relatives in Kivik. Too far, too boring, too fast, ending inevitably with the accelerator cable loose in my hand, the moped in a hedgerow to be picked up by some long-suffering driver quaintance and taken to a bemused repair shop where Raleigh was not of the known world. No helmet as I was immortal then. A thin shard of soon to end youth before I became a father and the world was differently young.

And a half century on, liberated, euphoric, aquiver with visions of the possible but also apprehensive. I am very content but it would be fine to have more familiar things around me to support me on my journey to embrace the new. My Indian bedspread, my pictures of Dorset, the monks washing place at Sherborne Abbey, where I cut my hair during my passage to adolescence, the nineteenth-century flamingo vase, once owned by my grandparents, both dead before the end of the nineteenth, my Pevsner collection, and more eccentric acquisitions, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Logic, faded from its bright blue but still unmarked and unread, never understood but with me too long for a parting.

And tomorrow, IKEA’s rabbits come to erect my bookshelves, banal Billies with doors to protect my frail frame from dust. Fated to remain empty until my next trip to Sweden to retrieve more of my treasures and to reduce the unreasonable acreage of my Shurgardens.

 Five in the morning after a real night, the soft white in-between time of the high Nordic summer being long gone. My last  Uppland dawn would be an exaggeration but a summer of changes is now coming to a climax (“climax” jars but it’s old, originally from the Greek word for ladder).

My old flat in Gamla Uppsala, close by the ancient graves, is clean and empty except for a surprisingly heavy microwave oven, which my less absent-minded neighbours assure me is mine. Today’s task is to move it to my new flat, further east in the city, even smaller than my old flat, half the size.

A few luxurious moments in bed planning the day before becoming fully awake and aware of the treacherous landscape of perilously perched possessions separating me from morning coffee.

Not long ago, Gandhian simplicity with my bed, my table and a few clothes and now I have to struggle to keep in mind that this chaos is not chronic, that I can master all these objects ganging up on me.

At some mist-shrouded future time, well-organised self-storage units, the pressure on space relieved by my other flat in Berlin. But I’m still far from knowing that my biography of St Jerome, patron saint of translators, is in box B14 just by the door. Instead, a task for the future, an estimated eighty boxes of books to be sifted.

I’ve enjoyed living in Uppsala, both the city and the surrounding landscape, with its relatively dense population of places, each with their own peculiarities and stories, reminding me of homeland Dorset. It’s pleased me more than desolate miles of pine forest with interesting nature but less culture. But I’ve wanted to be in too many other places as well – Germany, the UK, France and India among others, to become socially rooted here. I shall continue with my Uppland projects – I want to know more about the mediaeval  wall painter Albertus Pictor who was active in these parts and about Uppland’s physical geography, geology etc but as one project among many. And the delights of big city life, a language and culture to be learnt, the exciting contours of the new, will take energy and space.