Autumn Street Market

Our traditional Autumn Street Market (last weekend in September) is back to "full size" this year - after having been very much reduced during the corona years. I.e. the main square as well as nearby streets full of market stalls, and with crowds of visitors. In spite of the weather being windy and with a bit of light rain now and then, I went for a walk downtown to have a look... And I was not the only one!

Toy blowing soap bubbles outside shop

I visited two of my favourite returning market stalls:

One selling socks...

... and one selling cheap postcards ...

If you buy at least 10 cards, they're just 1:00 SEK a piece. They've kept that price in that market stall as long as I can remember. Alas, the same can't be said for the cost of stamps... In 1986 (when I moved to this town), postage within Sweden was 2:10. (Had to look that up just now.) In 2023, domestic postage is 15:00 - and double that for abroad. Which means one can buy 30 cards at the market for the cost of just one overseas stamp! (Current exchange rate: 30 SEK = 2,25 GBP - 2,60 EURO - 2,75 USD)  

Because of the quickly rising cost of postage in later years, I don't send as many postcards now as I used to. But they had some new Christmas motifs, and as I still enjoy the tradition of sending Christmas cards, I could not resist buying a bunch of those... :-)

Linking to Weekend Street/Reflections

Autumn in Slow Progress

 

Rock covered in ivy, at the railway station/travel center. - 24 Sept.

Rowan berries - 25 Sept.

 

 The River perfectly still, like a mirror - 26 Sept.
 

Changing colours: Same tree 24.9 & 27.9

 

It's been quite warm again for the time of year this week.
(Around 20°C today.)

Landslide

  

(Photos off my TV screen)

I don't know how rar and wide the news of this event has spread over the world (if at all), but around 1½ hour after midnight on 23 September, a massive landslide occurred in southwest Sweden, causing severe damage to the motorway [E6] between Sweden's second largest city Gothenburg, and Norway's capital Oslo. Seeing images from it on TV, it seems miraculous to me that (from what I've heard) no one was killed. (Had it happened in the daytime, with more traffic, it could have been a lot worse.)

According to the news agency Reuters (23 Sept): 

A large chunk of a motorway in southwest Sweden collapsed overnight, causing three people to be taken to hospital with light injuries, police said on Saturday.

The landslide damaged the motorway between Sweden's second-biggest city Gothenburg and Norway's capital Oslo, near the small town of Stenungsund, around 50 km north of Gothenburg on Sweden's west coast.

"The hardest hit parts of the landslide area measure around 150 x 100 meters. In total, however, the landslide has affected an area of around 700 x 200 meters," the Gothenburg Rescue Services said in a statement.

The slide affected around ten vehicles, a wooded area, a business area with a gas station and a fast food restaurant, the rescue services said.

"A number of people have been helped out of vehicles in the slide area with the help of fire personnel and a helicopter."

Several cars and one truck had fallen into holes and cracks caused by the landslide, Swedish news agency TT reported.

A rescue services spokesperson told public broadcaster SVT all people in the vehicles had been helped out.

Police said on their website they had launched a probe into whether work at a nearby construction site may have caused the slide. ---

I think I probably react a bit "extra" looking at these scenes on my TV screen, because this happened quite close to where my brother and I were driving only about 1½ month ago (and in very rainy weather), on our holiday road trip to the west coast... 

(Repairs to this road will no doubt take a long time and will be causing traffic problems for quite a while onward.)

May vs. September

There are some "crab apple" trees growing along the street where I live. I think the one in the photo above (from May) is the same one as in the photo below, snapped on the one sunny day this week (Thursday):

 

Below is another crab apple tree in the neighbourhood; those photos taken after a rainstorm at the beginning of the month, which made a lot of the fruit fall to the ground all at once:

 

“Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples,
don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious.”
― Bill Meyer

Bleeding Heart Yard (Book Review)

  

Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths (2023)
(Read on Kindle)

This book can without problem be read as a standalone crime novel (and seems to be marketed as such) but it is actually also the third in a series involving detective Harbinder Kaur (Sikh, lesbian and single).

Harbinder has recently moved to London and is now a Detective Inspector. (In the previous two books she was a Detective Sergeant). A man is found dead at a school reunion which was also attended by one of Harbinder's members of staff, Cassie. It looks like the man died of a drug overdose, but a murder investigation has to be carried out, and as he was a controversal MP, various motives must be considered. As Cassie and the victim used to belong to the same group at school, she is suspended from taking part in this case - but of course in her own mind keeps thinking about it anyway.

The perspective from which the story is told varies from chapter to chapter between Harbinder, Cassie and another of Cassie's old schoolmates. From the very first sentence in the book, the reader learns that Cassie is struggling with the question "Is it possible to forget that you've committed a murder?" As things progress, it also becomes clear that the murder at the school reunion may be connected to another death in the past, which involved the group of friends that Cassie used to hang out with. That time it was a young male fellow student who died falling off a Tube platform. It was not classified as a murder, but was put down to the guy being high on drugs. But Cassie and her group of friends knew that it probably was murder - because they had planned it...

I'm not 100% convinced that the changing perspectives is the best way to tell the story; but at the same time it does challenge the reader to consider the scenario from different angles - including how well we really do remember events (and our own thoughts about them) from the past. Is it really the actual events that we recall, many years later - or our own "stories"?

In spite of more than one character in this book being convinced that they know the truth, the story still mangages to take some unexpected twists and turns along the way before all is revealed at the end. 

- - - 

ELLY GRIFFITHS is also the author of the Ruth Galloway series which has been my favourite crime series over a number of years (I think I've probably reviewed most of the titles on this blog).

Leaves Are Falling...

 

 

After a rather mild and sunny start to September, it's now getting more autumn-like. Today we've been having very "moody" weather with torrential showers and strong gusts of wind one minute, and sunshine and blue skies the next. I managed to fit in two short walks between showers, though - one before lunch (with trekking poles), and one after (without).  But I kept close to home, just walking around the old cemetery and nearby streets, as it was hard to predict how fast the weather might change. 

On my second round I came across this Red Admiral butterfly, trying to dry its wings in a sunny spot between showers. With all the rain we had in July-August, I have seen very few butterflies on the whole this summer.

Skywatch Friday

 

Friday sunset from my balcony

Linking to Skywatch Friday

Elsewhere and in Another Time

Oops, I see that somehow a week has flown by again without me posting anything new here. The rather summery temperatures have continued - but changing now, and it seems to be getting a bit more autumn-like again. I've been out on my daily walks, but just along the same old paths as usual; and for the most part I've let the camera rest. 

The thing is, in my head I've spent a lot of this week Elsewhere and in Another Time - which is not all that easy to illustrate by photos from the Here and Now...

Just now, I let Bing Image Creator have a go at it, though. My first instruction was simply 'Time Travelling 1920s' - which, for some reason, only rendered pictures of Men. I added the word 'Woman' for another search; and then created this collage using images from both:

Time Travelling 1920s - Images by Bing Image Creator

I also tried the phrase I used above - "Elsewhere and in Another Time". Besides mystic images, that also seems to have inspired Bing to invent a whole new language...

 

The "real story" is not quite as mysterious as all that; but it involves recently having been contacted by A Stranger, who some time ago happened to come across two of my ancestors in his own research for a book. And then he found me via my family history blog... 

 

And it is a little bit delicate, as he's writing about people (including my two ancestors) who ended their lives in a certain mental hospital. His book project is about trying to bring some of those tragic fates out of anonymity. Besides a draft of his chapter about my relatives, he also offered to send me scanned copies of their hospital records that he'd been able to access from visiting a physical archive (most of the hospital records so old now that they're no longer confidential). As I've been digging into that part of family history a bit myself, none of it was shocking news to me; and I don't mind him writing about it. But I've not had access to the full hospital records before, so I said 'yes please' to that... And I'm now spending some time comparing those to my own private family documents, to see what I can perhaps add. So that's where my mind has been a lot during the past week!  

Return of Summer; and the Big Dig

With a very confusing kind of summer behind us (hot and very dry May-June, cool and very rainy July-August), I suppose it shouldn't really come as a surprise that summer now seems to be starting over. If not for the hints of autumn colours in nature, today felt more like a return to spring/early summer: sunny and 21-22°C (~70F).

Passing the Travel Centre on my walk today, I bought an ice cream and sat down for a while in this little park nearby to eat it.

 

The horse chestnut trees downtown by the river are definitely turning to autumn colour.

Ten minutes walk from home for me (towards the city centre) they've just started digging to build a new supermarket (German Lidl). (This space was a parking lot before. When they're done, the new store will be on the ground floor, with parking on top.) Not sure it will change my shopping habits all that much (ordering most of my food online with home delivery every fortnight from a local Swedish supermarket). But we've been lacking a big supermarket in the city centre for ever so long now, so no doubt they'll attract a lot of customers. (And probably even me from time to time, as I often walk by that spot anyway.)

There's quite a lot of digging for other purposes going on in the neighbourhood as well - making it a bit tricky at the moment to guess which way into town may be the best to walk, from one day to another. In this street, they seem to be widening one of the pavements to probably also serve as a bike lane. (What - if anything - will happen to the other pavement remains to be seen.)

Goodbye August, Hello September

Decorations on the old chest in my living room
were changed to 'autumn colours' last weekend.

The last week of August seems to have "swooshed" by. For one thing, I woke up on Tuesday morning finding myself 68 years old, while when I went to bed the night before I was still 67. Really quite enough to make one a bit confused about the Passing of Time... ;-) 

I did not "celebrate" as in having a party; but  various greetings kept dropping in anyway - by mail, email and Facebook etc, + four long(ish) phone calls spread over the day. 

In between, in the early afternoon, I also went for a walk into town for a couple of minor errands + had an ice cream in the park. It was a "nice enough" day, although not quite as sunny as in the photos below ...

 

... which were taken a week earlier, when I was in town for a haircut.

Decided (in cooperation with my hairdresser) to have an attempt at a fringe (bangs) again. Not all that much hair to play with these days, though, so we'll see how it goes! 

The day before my birthday, I tidied up a bit on my balcony, after all the rain lately.

My strawberry plants have kept producing some berries in spite of all the rain during July and August. And even the single cherry tomato plant has given me a dozen or so fruits.

Photo from mid August